Dealing with divorce

Can a child really handle a divorce? Most sources say no and it could possibly have some similar outcomes as children of single parent households. Well if you were in my family you would understand the process of the divorce was much harder than the actual day the divorce was final. Given that I'm the oldest of four this presents itself with some statistics. When my parents divorced I was in middle school and the rest of my siblings were in the middle or just starting elementary school. Now given that I was older I had the majority of my time was spent with both my parents being available. Now here come the stats. 2 out of my moms children, including me, graduated from high- school. The other two did not but are either seeking or obtained a GED. Out of the first two to finish high school only one, me, has graduated from a 4-yr university. So this long and harsh divorced created limitations for my younger siblings, not having two parents readily available and not having the discipline of two parents greatly affected how we each were raised. This is seems a parallel to a single parent home. Well my mom was doing much of the raising, or at least she thought she was. There were numerous times in which I was left in charge of my three younger siblings for months on end. Does this mean that I failed my siblings because I couldn't get them to the level that I have been able to achieve thus far in my life? Such weight on the shoulders of the oldest child. Being responsible or not, I don't think that it is a child's responsibility to make sure that th raise their siblings right. That is a lot of unnecessary pressure that no one needs but millions of older siblings endure because they understand that the grass may be greener on the other side, or in better words, that grass exist on the other side.

Another point to divorce is that kids blame themselves for the break up. I totally understand this but that's not the case for my family. Domestic violence was the cause for this divorce. My parents were better apart than they are together and I think that the violence that my siblings an I watched growing up as children for two generations, our grandparents and our parents, was just something that we saw as normal. This so called normal view skewed when one finds that that's not how things should be.

With the divorce rate rising we will start to see the day in which the children of divorced parents and children of single parent homes will become interchangeable. This Mother does not approve of putting all adult responsibilities on a child or does not approve of thinking children understand the entire adult world. Parents should be honest with their children and don't let their children take the heat for whats going wrong in the adults life.