Buhay Estudyante: The Lives of Students from Broken Families Amidst the Pandemic

Education, Psychology, Filipino Psychology, Sociology

Family is the most basic unit of society, and the foundation of it is the parents, marriage, and offspring. Everyone longs for a place to call home and a healthy family both in mind and body relationship. Generally, people’s view of complete families has married parents with children. Even so, the case is not always like that. Broken families are not uncommon; rather, it is familiar and often encountered around us. This study’s primary goal is to assess the lived experiences of students from broken families amidst the pandemic, specifically, it sought the following objectives: (1) to describe the positive experiences of students from broken families, (2) to describe the challenges of the students from broken families experience and why do they consider those as challenges, (3) to describe the effects on academic performance of the students coming from broken families. The study utilized Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis (IPA) with the 10 participants ages of 15 to 24 years old from a broken family. Based on the study, the findings are the following: (1) Most of the students from broken families are greatly challenged by financial, emotional, mental, social, and behavioral problems that contribute to their poor academic performance. (2) Most of the students that have divorced (separated) parents are inattentive and limited. They rarely provide time, care, and financial support for student’s daily needs and academic fees. (3) Students from broken families cope with being independent and optimistic in their situation. (4) Students from broken families gain positive experiences despite the traumatic family background, especially personal growth and building stronger relationships.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.