Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie announced this week that they’re divorcing. Six children are now looking at them wondering why — and are likely to be fearful, at least, about what will become of them. The Hollywood spotlight doesn’t insulate a kid from being a kid.

Related: Brangelina Breakup: A Fractured Fairytale

Children are always the collateral damage — the unintentional victims — of divorce. While some divorces are unavoidable and even needed, many are the result of either one party or both parties unwilling to put in more work — or lured out of the union by another person or an “I-need-to-find-myself” mentality in a society increasingly without the moral anchoring of faith or strong values.

“Even 30 years after my parents’ divorce, I find the holidays difficult and often go into an emotional slump,” said one man.

“In my experience, if a man leaves [a marriage] for a shameful reason such as an affair — as my husband did — he shuts himself off from the kids,” said one divorced mother of two in eastern Massachusetts. “So not only do the kids not have the physical presence of their father, he drops off their emotional map. My little boy wondered if he’d done something wrong, if he could have been better somehow, to make his dad stay. It was simply and utterly heartbreaking.”

Years ago, modern thought presented this theory: If parents are unhappy, the kids are unhappy, too. In other words, divorce would actually help children. The theory was convenient for parents with wanderlust — it offered a guilt-free escape.

[lz_bulleted_list title=”Children of Divorce” source=”http://www.faithandthefamily.com”]Suffer academically, and have high levels of behavioral problems|Are less likely to graduate high school|Are substantially more likely to be incarcerated for committing a crime as a juvenile|Are almost five times as likely to live in poverty than children with married parents|Are much more likely, if they’re teens, to engage in drug and alcohol use, as well as sexual intercourse|Experience illness more often, recover from it more slowly|Are more likely to suffer abuse|Suffer more symptoms of psychological distress[/lz_bulleted_list]

An enormous amount of research has been done on divorce and children. It all points to the same inconvenient fact: Kids suffer when parents split.

As licensed counselor and therapist Steven Earll said on the Faith and the Family website:

“Children (and adult children) have the attitude that their parents should be able to work through and solve any issue. Parents, who have given the children life, are perceived by the children as very competent people with supernatural abilities to meet the needs of the children … No problem should be too great for their parents to handle. For a child, divorce shatters this basic safety and belief concerning the parents’ abilities to care for them and to make decisions that truly consider their well-being.”

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In the Catholic faith, pre-cana classes are mandatory. These classes help prepare an engaged couple for life beyond the wedding — when work, commitment, and old-fashioned grit are needed to see things through.

“Children have the attitude that their parents should be able to solve any issue,” said one expert.

“My husband and I led pre-cana classes for one year and it was stunning to us to see how focused on the wedding the couples were, and not on their whole lives together,” a wife and mother in the Boston area told LifeZette. “Many couples had not really considered the role that finances, children, or sudden illness might play in their lives. But they knew what flavor wedding cake they wanted.”

The effects of divorce are felt throughout a child’s life.

“My parents divorced and now even 30 years later I find the holidays difficult and I often go into an emotional slump,” one Reisterstown, Maryland, husband and father — whose parents divorced when he was 10 — told LifeZette.

Related: Divorce with the Kids in Mind

“I almost wish I hadn’t had the idyllic years before they divorced, filled with laughter and hugs and pictures around the Christmas tree. To take that away after a child has had it is almost cruel. I have vowed that I will do the work it takes — whatever that means — to make my own marriage strong,” he said.