Divorcio parental y ansiedad infantil: Una revisión bibliográfica.

Abstract

Parental divorce modifies the family’s daily life and may be associated with symptoms of anxiety in children and adolescents, although the response does not follow a single pattern. Therefore, this narrative literature review analyzed the interaction between marital dissolution, relational changes, and symptoms of childhood anxiety through a corpus of 34 academic publications indexed in PubMed, ScienceDirect and Consensus, cross-verified via Crossref and DOI, published between 2015 and 2025. These findings reveal small-to- moderate-sized intergroup differences, strongly modulated by age, methodological design, socioeconomic variables, and the post-separation environment. Furthermore, although some literature reports increased internalizing symptoms and distress, these variations tend to diminish in significance when controlling for the effectiveness of coparenting, attachment security, and the availability of resources at home. Therefore, clinical risk is not attributed solely to the legal event of divorce, but rather to exposure to stressors such as chronic interparental conflict, triangulation, loyalty conflicts, and material instability, while parental cooperation, predictable routines, and adaptive coping serve as key protective factors, requiring an assessment focused on the specific family process and on the child’s direct perspective.