It can feel like a child’s world has been ripped apart when their parents decide that they want to separate, regardless of whether it’s amicable or fraught with tension. How seriously affected the child is can depend on a number of factors, ranging from the age of the child and how much they understand, to what support they receive from their parents and other people they are close to, including childcare practitioners.
Just under half of the 114,720 couples that divorced in the UK in 2013 had at least one child under the age of 16, according to the Office for National Statistics. More than 20 per cent of these children were aged under five years. However, many more children will have experienced the breakdown of their family unit but not be included in these figures because their parents were unmarried. As the statistics only partly show, family breakdown is a very real issue that, as an early years practitioner, you will doubtless be confronted with.
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