Doing Divorce—Children's Agency and Meaning Making When Experiencing Divorce

ABSTRACT This article aims to provide insight into how children experiencing divorce make sense of what happens in their lives. Divorce is explored as a way of living, embedded in the social and cultural conditions for upbringing and modern family life. To investigate the questions in accordance with our theoretical framework—cultural psychological understanding of development, meaning making and a variational mode of thinking—we conducted interviews with 13 children (6–12 years) inspired by a 'Life Mode Interview' approach. This interview takes a specific day as the point of departure, asking the child to give detailed descriptions of what has happened, both the ordinary and the exceptional, and to add reflections about what is told. In this way, we got contextualized descriptions of everyday life and changes in this everyday life, and thus empirical material about different aspects of the divorce. The presentation focuses on how the children received the news about the divorce and different ways of bringing the news forward to their schoolmates. Special attention is given to the importance of understanding the parents' divorce in a way that is communicable to others. Different meanings of ‘children's agency’ are discussed and made relevant for research on divorce and family life.