How do kids deal with the shidduch stigma of their parents’ divorce? How do they build healthy marriages when they didn’t grow up with a positive example? Parents and children share their firsthand experiences

Gila Jacobson* will never forget the time she was sitting in the backseat of a car listening to her newlywed cousins discuss directions to a store. It was in the early 1970s and Gila was then an impressionable teenager. “My cousin told her husband to make a left turn instead of a right one. When they realized it was a mistake, he took it so calmly — there was no blow up. I couldn’t believe my ears. In my family, that would have sparked an explosion,” says Gila, now a grandmother.

Growing up with parents who were in a volatile marriage left Gila with deep emotional scars. Yet a few years after their divorce, she managed to put the pain behind her and enter a marriage of her own, a relationship that has withstood the test of time and still remains strong.

How did she do it? For divorced parents and their children, that is the million-dollar question.

The Emotional Impact

The mere thought of marriage can trigger doubts and worries in the mind of a child of divorce: Will I have the same kind of miserable home that I was raised in? Can I succeed where my parents failed?

“I grew up in a house with a lot of shalom — until things soured suddenly. I was very nervous because I didn’t want the same mistakes that had been made by my parents to happen to me,” says Yehudis Rosen,* whose parents divorced when she was a teenager.

These fears are, sadly, well-founded. A recent study conducted by Paul R. Amato and Danelle D. DeBoer reveals that children of divorce in America today are far more likely to get divorced than children whose parents stayed married, even if they experienced discord at home. One contributing factor might be the negative family interactions these children witnessed, which can have a deep psychological impact.

“Coming from a broken home, which was actually breaking long before the divorce happened, I always felt a sense of insecurity in relationships. I was very afraid of conflict since I associated it with relationships ending,” says Penina Segal,* whose parents divorced shortly before she left for seminary. “The strife I grew up with is a constant background in my functioning today — all my challenges are rooted in that,” she says.

“For me, it was an issue of trust — trusting that my spouse wouldn’t reject me,” says Yehudis. “It took me a long time to feel like I was a good enough person that someone would want to marry me.”

“Was my future spouse going to consider my needs or not?” Penina also wondered. “If my needs were not being met, how would I go about pursuing them without raising conflict or being rejected?”

Issues with trust seem to be common: Family experts have found that when children observe parents fighting and no longer working as a team, they lose their trust in lasting relationships.