Adults and children both feel the effects of divorce but helping your children cope is crucial!

Children from divorced families are more likely to have academic problems. They are more likely to be aggressive and get in trouble with school authorities or the police. These children are more likely to have low self-esteem and feel depressed. Children who grow up in divorced families often have more difficulties getting along with siblings, peers, and their parents.
Also, in adolescence, they are more likely to engage in delinquent activities, and to experiment with illegal drugs. In adolescence and young adulthood, they are more likely to have some difficulty forming intimate relationships and establishing independence from their families.
As parents making a transition is extremely important in helping to dissolve possible problems. As parents making sure not to play the “blame game” and putting your children in the middle of any arguments is also very important.
Your children look to you to help make sense of the world around them.
There are in excess of fifteen million children in the U.S. who have experienced first hand the dissolution of their family by the process of divorce. Divorce unfortunately brings out the worst in people and parenting skills seldom improve.
Even when parents are able to see beyond their own emotional, physical and economic chaos they make mistakes that will impact the relationship with their children for years to come. In their attempts to reassure their children parents lie and obfuscate.
In their attempts to look good in their children's eyes they resort to buying their love, or demeaning the other parent. In their anxiety to spend enough time with their children they curtail the opportunities for them to form meaningful new relationships. In their need to move on with their own lives they may leave behind their children's.
During the process of divorce children suffer multiple losses. Not only do they lose the nuclear family we hold up to them as the ideal, but each loses the parents they knew, as both parents change to accommodate their new life situation. Some children are forced to suffer not only changing relationships with their parents, but abandonment-a loss greater than bereavement, as it carries with it the hope of reconciliation and the fear of not being worthy-enough for that reconciliation to happen.
Some lose their childhood and become burdened with the physical and economic responsibilities of helping support a single parent. Some lose their peers, as they become the “buddy,” or the “rock” on which their parents' fragile egos rest.
Many children lose their self-esteem as they struggle with their belief they were at fault and their consequent obligation to put everything right again. Their schemes, based on a false premise, seldom succeed, adding to their sense of failure.
No good parent intentionally put's their child in harms way, however often times, parents put themselves in front of their children. Sometimes to the point of ignoring the children so as not to deal with what ever pain it is they may be feeling. This is the problem. Children have a self centered innocence and automatically assume that something they did caused the problems.
Children are often uprooted from everything it is that they know and love. Children most often loose the close relationships with their parents, regardless of who it is they live with the biggest portion of the time. Many children loose confidence in their parents and feel that if their parents could separate, it's possible that their parents will want to leave them as well.
Logically, as an adult, we know this isn't the case, however children do not. It is very important to encourage your children to express their feelings. No matter how painful these feelings are for you as a parent, they are 100 times more painful for a child. Allow your child to talk about the situation and encourage this. Do NOT shut your children out.
When your children ask you questions; answer honestly and do not lie. Do not substitute gifts for time and love and attention. Your children will remember that and be harmed but this. Encourage your child to have private, conversations and time with the other parent. Let them know that you trust your ex-spouse and never shield your child from the other.
Don't use your child as a messenger. Your child is just that, a child. Perhaps when the time comes and your child chooses to be a letter carrier this is null and void, but until then it's not fair.
Do NOT ask your child to keep secrets from the other parent. This is putting an unneeded stress on your child and again, this is not fair and not a way to show trust.
Support relationships to both extended families. Your child loves each family equally and it is not fair to encourage one more than the other. This can also cause a rift with you and your child.
Do not expose your children to short term relationships that you may have (i.e. one night stands)
Most importantly, do not divorce your children.
(Source: examiner.com