There are around 1.2 million divorces in the United States every year (Rainbows, 2017). As the witnesses and victims of divorce, children should receive special attention and care during a divorce. According to the Our Family Wizard homepage, there are over 50 non-profit organizations around the country dealing with divorce and custody services (Our Family Wizard, 2017). Helps in counseling and parenting are also categorized into legal, financial, religious aspects. This reflects both the rising need of the public for such services and the difficulty for newly divorced people to select the most appropriate services. In Columbia, Maryland, the National Family Resiliency Center addresses the more personalized needs for different families, and offers therapies and consultations that are specifically tailored for individual families (NFRC, 2017). This takes into consideration of the varying conditions and types of different divorced families, that may not be effectively addressed with a unified group program. Although in terms of cost and providing generic training, group programs do have an advantage, the family specific therapy can further increase the effectiveness due to its flexibility. Based on a Q&A session, the basic information of the family in need will be recorded and analyzed, to come up with custom-made plans and personal suggestions. In Illinois, the Rainbows program enables parents to send their children to nearby community centers, where activities are organized to help them cope with the divorce. Different from the NFRC program, the Rainbows target children alone, instead of all family members. This would effectively reduce the cost and administrative burdens of the organization.

According to Divorce Care, an organization based in Franklin and Wake counties, North Carolina, dedicated to providing counseling sessions for divorced people, divorce is commonly perceived by the mainstream as a painful, stressful and confusing phase of life (Divorce Care, 2017). People who are going through a divorce may be influenced in profound ways that would cause more serious and lasting mental health issues. This makes it necessary for intervention, or at least company. Divorce Care provides its members counseling sessions with the experts in the field. During the short meeting, a video is played to the group of participants, to help guide them through this difficult period of life. It turns out that a support group with a specific focus can be very effective in diverting the attention of the participants into things more constructive to their future lives. What people need the most from these counseling activities may not be expert opinions, but simply some company from people who are suffering from the same experience as they are. A mental preparation from Divorce Care for the potential participants is also found in prominent positions on their webpage. This preparation deals with the nervousness and doubt in people’s mind on whether they should participate or not. The benefits of the meeting are introduced, including the acquiring of helpful information to recover from a divorce, the opportunity to talk to real listeners, and the sense of belonging to a larger crowd. Moreover, Divorce Care also provides the children from these divorced families a playground and safe environment to play in, with games, music, and activities organized for them. Although this is not the main focus of the counseling, it does add to the incentive for divorced parents to participate.

The “Healing” section on the Divorce Care webpage (2017) discusses the process of recover from a divorce more specifically. Several important aspects of healing are addressed, including a support team, daily encouragement, foundation for healing session, personal study, and a bookstore. The major purpose of a support team and daily email encouragement is to reestablish connection with the society. Main married people become rather “institutionalized” to married life, and a sudden change through divorce may completely drive them out of their comfort zone. Therefore, support and prevention against negative feelings are important. The most effective way to do so is by reestablishing previous social connections, and new ones, to fill in the blank created by the divorce. Diversion of attention is another effective measure of divorce intervention. This is done by personal study and reorientation of focus on other aspects of life. While different people may have different ways to relax the mind from pressure, the reading and exercises provided by Divorce Care may be an effect approach for some. Other diversions include the shift of attention on the career, adopting a pet, more investment on the children, etc. Most of the divorced adults should be perfectly capable for finding the most suitable distractions on their own. The highly personalized nature of effective distractions may diminish the need for external intervention, but Divorce Care does provide the right directions by outlining the healing process.

A list of seminar topics is provided by Divorce Care, which gives people a change to look into what a real counseling session may feel like. The seminar begins with the question of “What is happening to me (Divorce Care, 2017)?” This helps the participants to identify the nature of this obstacle in their lives. The next steps require the participants to directly face their anger, depression, and loneliness. This may be a step to mitigate the fact that many people choose to be in denial of the reality as a form of self-protection. Their inability to feel the pain would only drive them further into depression and isolation. Therefore, they need to summon the courage to confront the negative emotions before overcoming them. The next part comes back to the realistic difficulties caused by the divorce, including the financial struggles, caring for the children and the possibility of new relationships. Financial stability and the ability to make the children feel secure (if there are any children) are the fundamental steps before moving on. The fact that participants are sitting alongside a group of people struggling over the same issues may be a reinforcement for their confidence in solving the problems. The discussion of the most prioritized issues in life serves as a reminder for their responsibilities both for themselves and for their kids. This responsibility becomes the major source of motivation for them to recover and reconstruct their lives. Finally, the seminar closes with emotional topics about forgiveness, reconciliation and moving on. Websites with information about step family and legal support can also be provided as useful resources for parents (NSRC, 2017). It is observed that religion may play an active part in this part, where the discussion is integrated with teachings from the Bible to increase its effectiveness. This pattern of group seminar provides insight for both organizations and individuals who are concerned with divorce intervention.

Divorce counseling for adults and for kids are entirely different. It is only until recent years that the psychological effects of divorce on children are examined. There are emerging organizations that specialize on helping children to get through their parents’ divorce. Divorce Care for Kids (DC4K) is one of them, based in North Carolina as well under the Church Initiative. Different from adults, children are more sensitive to divorce in their family, but they are also less communicative about the issue than the adults. The voice of children during a divorce is usually deprived by the adults, who claim that they are too young to even be a part of the discussion. However, they have overlooked the fact that long-term negative emotions and antagonism in the family influence the children even more than the adults. According to the DC4K website, typical emotions demonstrated by children before, during, and after their parents’ divorce may include being “angry, hurt and confused (DC4K, 2017).” Both short-term and long-term support is then needed for children to properly cope with the divorce. Otherwise, a single event of divorce may turn into a traumatizing incident for children and influence their entire lives in a negative way. DC4K thus provides the opportunity for children from divorced families to gather weekly and get the negative emotions out of their system. Interestingly, the facilities of DC4K is specifically designed for children, while there is a “Parent Zone” to provide parenting advices for single parents as well. Compared with Divorce Care, this shift of focus may increase the diverse needs of different types of families with children. While some parents feel more devastated over the divorce, children tend to be hurt much more in other cases. A selection is then necessary for parents to determine the type of counseling organizations to visit.

Before parents enrolled their children into the DC4K programs, an assessment is required to make sure the children truly need help. Unlike Divorce Care, DC4K does not claims to work directly on children and restore positivity in them. Instead, they promise only to establish a better connection and communication path between parents and children. Different from the adulating counseling analyzed above, the style of child counseling is mostly light-hearted and fun, filled with “games, crafts, role playing, discussion times, journaling, and activity books (DC4K, 2017).” These activities aim to create a safe and worry-free environment, where children are able to lower down their defense, make new friends, and connect with their parents. A “DC4K family” is what they call the counseling groups. The concept of DC4K leaders is also applied. This differs from the experts and psychologists used in adult counseling. Instead, the DC4K leader may not be professional counselors, but people who have a profound understanding of the children’s mind activities. For example, one of the DC4K leaders is from a divorced family himself. This experience enables him to better comprehend and connect with the children, and help them open up during the seminars. Through activities including viewing, expressing, listening, playing, connecting, reading, eating, laughing, journaling, singing and sketching, a wider variety of activities are provided for children compared to adults. Although understanding the divorce is an important theme linking all the activities together, this theme is presented in the least depressing way possible.

The specific content of the discussion session is probably the essence of divorce counseling for children. Similarly, a series of questions are proposed by the host. The introductory question is: “What is happening to my family.” This identification again better helps the children to understand the true nature and source of their pain, anger and fear caused by the divorce. It is interesting to see religion play a more dominant role in children counseling, as the discussion related to God occurs much more frequently. Both “God loves children in all kinds of families” and “Growing up and closer to God” are argument and reasoning based on the belief in God. The seminar then deals with the elimination of negative feelings, this is done in three ways. The first way to get rid of negative emotions for children is through self-encouragement and adjustment. Switching from anger and sadness to peace may be a very complicated problem, and it is doubtful whether children nowadays are religious enough to fully accept the God argument. Other more practical methods include more communication with the parents and developing new relationships and finding new company. It is common for a sense of guilt to be generated in the children during their parents’ divorce, and the final way to eliminate negative emotions is by simply installing positive thinking and emotions into them, including the belief that “I am not alone”, “It’s not my fault” and “loving my parents (DC4K, 2017).”

The previous organizations both have an emphasis on religion and belief in God, which can be a major limitation for a more culturally diverse community. For non-religious people, there are also websites that provide self-help programs and instructions to help their children through a divorce. On the website for Kids Health, a nationwide online educational program for parent, a section is designed for such purposes specifically. A comprehensive list of articles offers divorced parents step-by-step advice to help minimize the negative impact of divorce on their children (Kids Health, 2017). From breaking the news to the kids, to the adjustment to a new situation of living, this website seems to be a more practical solution to parents who prefer to solve the problem on their own. Indeed, the behaviors of adults is the most influential factor for children. Although being divorced, parents are able to minimize the negative influence on their children to be nearly zero if they handle the problems maturely. The close bond and continuous communication with the children is the key, and parents must also prevent bringing their own feelings into the issues of childcare and visitation. There are organizations in the state of Georgia who have addressed the psychological needs of children for both of the parents after the divorcing, by offering child access and visitations services within and across counties (Department of Human Services, 2017). This different but more practical approach may prove to be just as effective as counseling.

Research has found that around one-third of the children from divorced families are likely to suffer from difficulties in coping. In response, higher education institutions have made continuous effort in exploring the theoretical background of education programs for parents to help their children cope with a divorce. The Prevention Research Center of Arizona State University has collaborated with organizations all over the state of Arizona to provide support for divorce counseling for children and parents (ASU Now, 2017). With over six million dollars of grant from the National Institute of Health, long-term care and monitoring of the behaviors of the children are made possible. Specific emphases have been put on issues of behavior problems, mental health, academic performance, and substance abuse. Parents are taught to build healthy and supportive relationships after a divorce, and install positive energy in their children, through effective listening skills and positive discipline methods. Significant improvements have been observed in the conditions of the children. These improvements include improved academic performance, higher self-esteem and confidence, less substance abuse and teenage sex (ASU Now, 2017). With a program of a total length of only 20 hours, such achievements are remarkable. This also verifies the idea that “parenting is teachable,” through short, intensive, and carefully designed educational programs. The successful preceding models were then duplicated with the New Beginnings Program and promoted to multiple counties in Arizona. This program has even been integration with the family relations court in Arizona. The reinforcement from court officials adds to the credibility of the program and effectively motivate the parents to join the program. These collaborations will make the educational program more influential in the future, with the potential to develop into a nationwide initiative.

When there is a lack of collaboration between different levels, parents are more likely to exert negative influence on their children over divorce. During the painful and stressful nature of divorce, parents may disclose inappropriate negative information to their children. According to a research conducted by Penn State University and University of California, parents must learn to cope with the negative effects of a divorce on themselves before they can help their children (Afifi, McManus, & Baker, 2007). Although it is easy to create guidelines and require parents to act “maturely” during a divorce, especially in front of their children, it is actually difficult in practice not to demonstrate negative emotions towards the former spouse. Although these information and emotions may not be suitable for children, it is highly likely for kids to be exposed to and influenced by them. It is also possible for parents to disclose the information inappropriately to their kids with the intention of assurance, inform, and even educate. It is thus important to establish awareness in the parents to seek professional advice before doing so. Hostile conflicts, parenting quality, and parent-child relationship are identified as the three most important factors affecting children’s wellbeing during a divorce (Pedro-Carroll, 2011). There are numerous risks in parent-child interactions during a divorce, including conflict, chaos at home, and lack of monitoring. Education programs are thus necessary for parents to learn to deliver reassuring messages to their children, and minimize the source of instability and insecurity for them.

Education on child divorce counseling should target not only divorced parents, but also professional working in the field. Frequent conferences on the international scale have been organized by the CODIP program from the state of New York. Each year, child psychologists, counselors, professionals working in schools, communities, and service organizations from the US, Canada, New Zealand and Australia are brought together to discuss improvements on the implementation of CODIP goals (Children’s Institute, 2016). After decades of effort on creating awareness among professional, this program has won numerous international awards. A manual is printed every year, with specific measures of minimizing emotional and behavioral problems of children going through a divorce. Similar to the New Beginnings Program, the CODIP is also supported with academic research and official endorsement, but operates on a much larger scale. Programs targeting the educators and professional also include the website of Pedro-Carroll (2010). Eight suggestions are provided for teachers to help their students to cope with divorce. The advantage of this initiative is that a minimum amount of resources is needed. But the effectiveness is relatively high, since teachers have already a deep understanding of their pupils. Special attention and support from the teachers thus effectively prevent children from extreme behaviors and negative emotions.