Divorce Informative Speech

Purpose: I want my audience to understand the effects of divorce on children.

Thesis: Children with divorced parents suffer more problems than children with married parents.

Organizational pattern: Informative

I. Introduction

A. Attention Getter: Who are the actual innocent victims of divorce?

Which involved party suffers the most and has little to no say about their own family life?

B. Relevancy: More than one million children each year experienced divorce in the United States, and the amount of children affected by divorce is expected to grow substantially.

C. Credibility: I myself am a child of divorce. My mother has been married three times and divorce twice. So by now you could say I’m the expert. On the other hand I am a married mother

Preview: Children are the casualties of divorce, who suffer long-lasting side effects emotionally, socioeconomically and physically.

Transition: First, let’s talk about the emotional side effects.

II. Body

A. Divorce is traumatic to children. With less family around to teach them the correct way to deal with their feelings leading to anxiety, depression and antisocial behavior. Several studies show that children with divorced parents suffer from psychological disorders during and post-divorce.

1. One such study by Dr. Lisa Strohscheins, “Parental Divorce and Child Mental Health Trajectories” published in the 2005, Journal of Marriage and Family, says the results confirm that, even before marital breakup, children whose parents later divorce exhibit higher levels of anxiety, depression and antisocial behavior than children whose parents remain married.

2. The results of an earlier research study, in the Journal of Law and Human Behavior had very a similar conclusion: Dr. Deborah Luepnitz states the most common problem among all age groups was aggression - from tantrums to delinquent behavior in 1978.

Transition: Besides aggression, another issue the children of divorce face is

C. When counseling recovering addicts, the most common issue that needs to be addressed is the breakdown of their family unit. Children that have a hard time coping with the divorce of their parents’ frequently turn to illicit drug use to avoid dealing with the heartbreak.

1. As discussed by Severin Haug in the BMC Public Health’s "Predictors of Onset of Cannabis and Other Drug Use in Male Young Adults: Results from a Longitudinal Study," 2015.

The finding that parental divorce at an early age predicted the onset of cannabis use is in line with prior results showing that children who are exposed to family problems, including family disruption and conflict, are more likely to use drugs such as cannabis in both adolescence and young adulthood.

2. Another longitudinal study by Sandler, Tein and West “Coping, Stress, and the Psychological Symptoms of Children of Divorce: A Cross-sectional and Longitudinal Study” in 1994, discusses maladjustment saying “The measure of externalizing coping used by Kurdek and Sinclair, included items such as use of drugs and alcohol, which are themselves indices of