| Abstract [eng] |
Every year in the whole world, as well as Lithuania, lots of married couples separate and lots of teenagers are left to live with only one of their parents. Marriage that is full of intensive conflicts ends up in divorce and that disturbs normal flow of family relationship – kids are experiencing same difficult emotions, exactly same ones like their parents. Conflicts between parents can negatively affect psychological well-being of the teenager as well as make an impact on their day to day behaviour and ruin their emotional safety net. Conflicts between parents could continue after the divorce as well, however there are no qualitative researches that would analyse experiences of teenagers in these kind of situations in Lithuania. The goal of this research is to find out how safe teenagers feel once their parents get divorced but still are in conflicts. 8 teenagers participated in this research – 7 female and 1 male (15-17 years old). They all lived through their parents divorce a year or two ago and still are a part of their ongoing conflicts. None of them has siblings. In this research every teenager had half structured interview that took 30-50mins to complete. All data collected during interviews were analysed using qualitative thematic analysis method by V. Braun and V. Clarke (2006). Six topics were dominating in all interviews: being right in the middle of the conflict, uncontrollable or hardly controllable feelings, consequences of the divorce, relationships with close family, feeling different than everyone else, need for help. During the research teenagers opened up about intensive experiences and fragility. It would be meaningful to keep on analysing teenagers’ feel of safety during parents conflicts after divorce and potentially start providing psychological help to them. |
