Family Change and Children’s Anxieties

Family forms are changing, and diversity in family life is increasing. The idea of marriage as a permanent institution which allows children to look forward to spending their childhood within the same household has also changed; divorce becoming a reality in the lives of one in 20 children before they are four years old and one in four children under 16. Divorce has also therefore become an anxiety within the minds of many children whose parents are together, the wider experience of family life learnt through school and among friends creating ideas about the realities divorce entails and provoking anxieties about what might happen to their own family lives. In this book we hope to address some of the realities experienced by children as the family move through changes and transitions following the parental decision to divorce, anxieties about what will happen to them, to their brothers or sisters, to their mothers or fathers or pets in both the short term and the long term; anxieties about home, possible changes of school and sports teams and of friends, the changing fabric of everyday life.