Effects of divorce and separation on academic performance of vulnerable children in Nigeria: Social work as a panacea

Abstract

Divorce and separation are two major factors that charatcerised modern households and have changed the face of developing societies and are associated with inequalities in vulnerable children’s academic performance, the intervention of social work as a relevant discipline in a modern and intricate state like Nigeria with an emerging economy cannot be overemphasised. The exploratory study selected only 100 students because of the nature of the study in six purposively selected secondary schools in Ile-Ife to elicit information on the subject matter based on their experience, multi-stage random sampling technique was used to select the respondents. The quantitative data collected via structured questionnaire was analysed using SPSS. Data was presented in frequency table, percentage, charts and hypotheses were test using Chi-Square. In respect to findings, the socio-demographic characteristics of the vulnerable children showed that 55.0% were between the age range of 14-17 years, 60.0% were male. It was also revealed that 40.0% confirmed that their parents’ divorce of separated between < 1 – 3 years ago, all the vulnerable children wants their parents back together as soon as possible because it is not easy for my mum to care for us, because I don’t like the type of life I am living as a result of my parents’ divorce, our education is seriously suffering, we are no longer concentrating in our studies and to stop the social stigma I am subjected to as a result of my parent’s divorce among others. Almost 70.0% of the vulnerable children said divorce/separation is capable of having effects on their academic performance while 45.0% of them said divorce/separation of parents is having serious effects of their academic life. The paper concluded that with the above statistics and facts between divorce/separation and educational performance of vulnerable children in Nigeria, there is urgent need for government at all tiers and Ministry of education and other educational bodies in the country to make come up with a policy on the availability and relevancy of social worker in all existing educational institutions from primary school to higher institutions to handle this phenomenon at early stage before its multiplier negative effects begins to rear its ugly heads.

Keywords: Vulnerable children, academic performance, divorce, separation and parents