Broken Homes and Child Development/Behavior: Reflection

      When researching my topic on how broken homes affect child development/behavior, I realized how many layers the conversation can have. At first, the broken home I thought of was like my own: divorced parents. But then I started peeling away the layers, like what about a single parent, or a child with no parents? Although I might not use the argument of a child without any parents, I think it’s helpful to understand. When researching, I found it important to have a wide stretch of knowledge over a lot of different sections because you never know what might come in handy later. You might be able to compare or contrast different sections, regardless if you are going to use it in your research paper or not. I think that this helps with further understanding of a topic. Not only are there different types of broken homes, but there are different ways that the children can be affected. Mentally and socially are just some of the issues, but it goes deeper with that including education.

     Currently, I’m gathering information and starting to think about how I am going to lay out my essay. I’ve been thinking of explaining things that a child needs in order to develop properly, or even a “normal” behavior that a child is supposed to have, which aren’t very easy subjects to touch on. Yes, there are certain guidelines that parents go by when making sure their children are hitting milestones, but there have been a lot of scepticism of whether or not it’s a bad thing that these children are not hitting their milestones at the right time. As for behavior, that’s a touchy subject.What’s the difference between behavior and personality? Can your behavior become your personality? Then in the end, there are always people saying things like “it’s a phase” and “everyone’s different”. This is going to require further understanding.

     I realized when doing research that there may be articles out there that won’t necessarily be of any help, even if it has to do with your topic. For example, I read an article about Freud’s theories of the different sexual stages that children go through within developing. It’s interesting and necessary to understand to get another person’s point of view, but one of the major points that he made that wrapped everything together had to do with the sex of the parents: one being a male, and one being a female. This got me thinking about same sex marriages and them raising children, which I’m all for. But I thought that this might be a whole other research paper within itself. I decided that using his theory would bring up the topic of a same sex couple raising a child,and it wouldn’t strengthen my paper because a child having two parents is not classified as a broken home. It might also weaken it by me getting off the main issue of my topic, which is not about same sex couples raising children. There are still many things that I need to look into because I’ve only scratched the surface of this topic. I need to start fine tuning all the little details, like the behavior part, to start bringing everything together.

(If you’re curious: The Freud article I talked about)

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