JHASS
Silent Divorce: Why Do Chinese High-school Students Disguise Their Family Status?
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Abstract
In many East Asian families, parental divorce is not immediately disclosed to children. Instead, parents often maintain the appearance of family continuity for extended periods. While prior research focuses on the effects of divorce itself, adolescents frequently experience concealment, rather than separation, as the more consequential event. This study examines how the timing and manner of disclosure shape adolescents’ interpretations of family change. Drawing on in-depth interviews with eight Chinese high school students aged 15-18 and qualitative coding of approximately 120,000 words of transcripts, this study shows that concealment functions as a relational process rather than simple information withholding. Short-term concealment followed by acknowledgment is often interpreted as protective, whereas prolonged performance of harmony produces durable distrust that extends beyond the parent–child relationship. Cultural norms emphasizing family integrity motivate concealment, yet adolescents actively reinterpret these norms through boundary-setting and narrative reconstruction. With the above methodology, this study demonstrates that adolescents evaluate divorce through perceived accountability and recognition rather than disclosure timing alone. Divorce thus operates less as a discrete event than as an interpretive process mediated by secrecy and relational repair.
Keywords
Parental divorce; family secrecy; adolescents; trust; disclosure; collectivist culture; identity development
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How to cite this paper
Silent Divorce: Why Do Chinese High-school Students Disguise Their Family Status?
How to cite this paper: Yuxi Wang. (2026) Silent Divorce: Why Do Chinese High-school Students Disguise Their Family Status? Journal of Humanities, Arts and Social Science, 10(3), 249-259.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/jhass.2026.03.003
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