Survive Your Breakup

Posts Tagged ‘divorce and children’

Delivering the news of your impending divorce to the children is hard on all involved -  not just the parents, but the kids too. How you tell your children about the impending divorce will set the stage and the tone of all divorce related procedures to follow. So, when and how do you break the news to them in a way that will not cause them emotional harm?

Often when a couple goes through a divorce, their children experience emotional problems and difficulty adapting to the new world that they’re now in. And, surprisingly, usually the problem isn’t the divorce or separation itself. The problem can typically be traced back to how the separation was handled. So, for the moment, forget about free divorce papers online and concentrate on the kids. Above all else, the separation should be handled with the children’s interest firmly in mind. The children have to be prepared for the separation about to take place. It can’t be just sprung on them as a surprise or afterthought.

First of all, the decision should be made jointly by the married couple. Before you talk to your children, talk with your spouse and together decide when and how the kids should be told. If you have been seeing a marriage counselor, seek his or her advice on how best to break the news. As best you can, decide, beforehand, on how you will answer the obvious questions that are sure to arise.

However you decide to precede, when you finally sit the kids down and tell them about the separation, don’t dismiss them until you have answered every one of their questions that you can. Even, if everyone has to stay up late into the night. Even if, the next day, the kids have to miss school or you have to miss all or part of work – don’t leave them hanging with unanswered questions. Because if you do, their imagination will fill in the blanks for the questions that you didn’t answer. And a child’s imagination can conjure up all sorts of frightening and disturbing rationalities for why one of the parents is leaving. Is dad leaving because of me? Is mom leaving too? Will I ever see dad again? What did I do to cause this and what will happen to me?

A corollary to answering all of your children’s questions is to not tell them too much. Children have a limited amount of life experience and, depending on their age, their minds and emotions are not equipped to handle the more adult reasons why the two parents are separating. If an affair is the reason for the breakup, a young child doesn’t have to know that. A 3 year old kid has no concept of what an affair is. The same goes for something like emotional abuse which even some adults have a poor understanding of. This doesn’t mean that you ignore their questions. It means that you answer them to the best of your ability taking into account their limited maturity in being able to completely understand what is going on.

The most important thing in all of this is to make it 100% sure in their minds that no one is abandoning them. Make it clear that even the parent that is leaving is still going to be very much in their lives.

Keep in mind,  although it is in no way kid’s fault that the marriage is breaking up, they are the ones that are going to be left feeling rejected, angry, and confused when a parent leaves. It’s up to the parent to in some way replace the onetime marriage stability with an equally strong stable relationship during the separation. And the first act of constructing this new and stable relationship begins with how your tell them that the marriage is breaking up.

Unlike many lower forms of life, a human child is not born with a set of instincts that will enable him or her to survive. Like most mammals, a child’s survival depends on her attachment to her caregivers – which is usually her parents. This dependency has been hardwired into humans by nature for thousands of years. So it should come as no surprise that children form strong attachments to their mothers and fathers. It would be a surprise, and cause for concern, if they didn’t. This attachment, or bond, is a sign that the relationship between the child and her parents is healthy.

Good advice for men getting divorce as well as women is to realize that  as she begins to grow and as she comes into contact with more people, her bonds to her parents become a bit less. Simultaneously, however, she will begin to form attachments with others such as neighborhood kids and adults, babysitters, cousins and relatives, and so on. Typically, this will  happen at some point between the ages of 3 to 5. But if this bond becomes weakened too quickly or too traumatically, she may become forever distrustful of relationships and have relationship troubles for the rest of her life.

When a couple divorces, the mind of a young child is thrown into turmoil. In her mind, the sacred bond that she has depended on since birth, is about to be shattered. In her mind, even if unspoken, this divorce or desertion, is a betrayal of trust. If one of her parents, who she’s trusted and depended on since birth, is leaving her, how can she ever trust anyone who she may become attached to in the future to stay with her? This is a key reason why divorce is potentially so hard on kids.

But the sense of abandonment goes beyond this. One parent has abandoned her. What assurances does she have that the other parent won’t do the same. And this fear of being alone in the world is terrifying to a young child. In some kids this anxiety is so palpable that you’ll notice drastic behavior changes. Some kids will become clingy as if they’re afraid to let you out of their sight, lest you not return. Some will act out in bouts of rage or temper tantrums in a desire to be noticed. Other children may become emotionally withdrawn in an effort to save their feelings from further hurt.

For a child, learning that their parents are divorcing constitutes a harsh wake up call that the world is not what they thought it was. Their home is no longer a secure refuge from the rest of the world.

To prevent or at least allay some of the children’s fears, the way in which concerned parents handle the divorce is critical. Being able to cope with an experience such as divorce is not natural – it’s learned. Kids don’t have the life experiences that would enable them to cope with it. Heck, many adults don’t have the know how to cope with divorce. But the children need reassurance from both parents that they are not abandoning them and that they will stay in their lives. This, more than anything else, will help to reassure a child that the bonds that they formed were not for naught.

For the sake of the child’s future growth, it is extremely important that the parent and child attachment remain strong. Many researchers believe that the quality of the initial attachment of a baby to her parents is one of the most significant predictors of how that person will form relationships for the rest of her life.