Abstract:

Each year, thousands of children and teens in all countries experience divorce or separation of their parents. The process of separation is challenging life transition for children and teens. During a divorce, they often feel a variety of conflicting emotions. Anger, sadness, worry, confusion, guilt, embarrassment, loneliness and nervousness - these are all common emotions that these children or teens experience when their parents' divorce or separate. Besides, they have sleeping problems, decreased self-esteem as well as difficulty in school work and other activities. As a result, all mentioned trouble can be manifested as withdrawn or aggressive behaviour. The pupils, who have experienced the problems explained above as a result of their parents' divorce or separation, mostly cannot adopt social life among peers at school because of either their low self-esteem or aggressive behaviours. In order to develop a methodology for working with these students to positively increase their self-esteem and learning motivation and to improve their social skills through extracurricular activities, a survey was conducted on the problems faced by children experiencing parental divorce as part of the Nordplus project “Methods of working with children to overcome parental divorce”. This article analyses the results of a survey conducted in four countries: Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and Sweden. The results of the study show a comparative analysis in the following aspects: self-awareness, stress and emotions control, adaptation to school life / learning, social skills - speaking in front of the class, communication with other students / teachers, future perspectives, etc.

Keywords:

Adaptation, extracurricular activities, self-awareness, social skills, stress control.