A Phenomenological Understanding of Children’s Lived Experience of Parental Separation: A Qualitative Study

Abstract

This study aimed to explore the lived experiences of children who had experienced parental separation and to understand how they constructed meaning around this experience within their personal, familial, and sociocultural lifeworld. This qualitative study was conducted using an interpretative phenomenological analysis approach. The participants were eight adolescents, including five girls and three boys aged 12 to 18 years, who had experienced parental divorce during childhood or adolescence. Participants were selected through purposive and homogeneous sampling. Data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured, and dialogic interviews lasting between 40 and 90 minutes. All interviews were audio-recorded with informed consent, transcribed verbatim, and analyzed according to the six-step model proposed by Smith, Flowers, and Larkin. To enhance trustworthiness, the study applied contextual sensitivity, researcher reflexivity, an audit trail, interpretive rigor, and the use of rich participant quotations. The interpretive analysis led to the emergence of four main themes: “the collapsed world: the breakdown of ontological security,” “the retreat of language: difficulties in expressing and narrating the experience,” “the divided self: identity disorientation between two worlds,” and “growth after rupture: reconstructing meaning and repairing the self-narrative.” The findings indicated that parental separation was not experienced merely as a family event or a traumatic incident, but as an existential and meaning-making process that disrupted adolescents’ sense of security, trust, belonging, narrative capacity, and identity coherence. The findings suggest that children of divorce require interventions that move beyond symptom management and focus on narrative reconstruction, meaning-making, identity repair, and the creation of safe listening spaces within family, school, and therapeutic contexts.