What Children Lose When Parents Divorce
Maryna Svitasheva Ph.D., RP
This issue is only
one of many related to the ‘divorce’ topic. I would like to share my thoughts
and impressions acquired while working with children and adults whose families
have experienced a divorce.
Adults divorce when
they are unhappy together. When a couple relationships do not work anymore, at
least, for one of two, or it may be for both. Children and adults are involved
in family relationships differently, which is why separation and divorce carry a different meaning for children than for their parents.
It is impossible to
encompass the entire spectrum of separation and divorce scenarios. At times
adult men and women disassemble their marriages in the hope of better lives,
better partners, or freedom. In other and more frequent cases people look to
escape unfortunate circumstances and pursue the goal of stopping domestic
violence, infidelity, disrespect, manipulations, or dishonesty. A great discussion
revolves around the question ‘which is better – a complete but dysfunctional
family with no happiness? or separating to stop arguments, shouting and
somebody’s tears? This article will focus on the option when parents decide not
to be spouses but try equally to participate in their children’s lives. It is
common for parents to try to convince kids that divorce is not as catastrophic
as it appears. Parents say that the child ‘will still have both loving Mommy
and Daddy’. An additional ‘benefit’ in the picture is presented as ‘you will
have two homes’. It is so tempting to believe that ‘two homes are better than
one’!
However, the magnitude of the change caused by the parents’ divorce for kids is much bigger
than mentioned in passing above. Below I describe several aspects of divorce as
specifically faced by kids.
First of all, our
basic human need to belong to a group becomes frustrated. For the child, the
family is the first referent group to which she/he belongs. When the family malfunctions,
the child faces a conflict of different needs: (i) on the one hand, to belong
to the group, and (ii) to feel protected and supported or to grow up in the
optimum developmental environment on the other hand. So, for the child, the
parents’ divorce means that their first life experience of belonging to the
group gets interrupted. Since we are talking about one of the basic frustrated
needs, it is good to understand that the child is unable neither to comment on
this frustration nor to explain her/his vision of what is happening. In therapy,
it might be important to work on other inter-personal connections in other
groups that the child may belong to aside from the family. Also, since the
child’s experience of participating in close and significant relationships has
been compromised, the therapeutic relationship may gain additional important
meaning for the child.
The second point
in our discussion is related to changes that often happen to the parents. I
call them ‘emotional changes’. Parents who look to spend time together with the
children without the ex-spouse quite often present themselves as emotionally
different when compared to their self-presentation at the time when the family
existed as a whole unite. The child suddenly witnesses a parent as lost,
excessively insisting, ingratiating, depressed, extremely anxious, or tearful.
This emotional change is as important for the child as the fact of the divorce
in itself. Therefore, children encounter an ‘unknown parent’. As a result, the
whole composition of feelings the child experiences daily also changes due to
the mentioned shift in the parents’ feelings.
Emotional changes
in children are largely caused by emotional changes in their parents. Therefore,
we can see that children cry, fight, develop manipulative strategies, or
excessive attachment to one of the parents.
For therapy, it is important to understand that some part of the child’s
emotions are induced, and work with the parent’s tension might be as important
as psychotherapy for the child.
The final point
is ‘the time together versus parenting’. This is much less evident than the two
previous thoughts. Children learn non-stop, even when we don’t teach them.
Their nature is to learn and to be parented. They learn things by just
observing or watching the examples that other people demonstrate. Also, parents
teach their kids many things intentionally and unintentionally: to use a spoon,
not to leave toys under the feet, to be ready to go when it’s time, to obey, to
share or not to share their stuff, to follow the hygiene rules, etc. While the
family lives together, all these things are part of the natural family routine.
When the family falls apart this natural stream of teaching and guiding
discontinues. After separation and divorce, the parents need to accommodate
themselves to the changes happening to them. They need to create a new mode of
life, process their feelings, arrange their new residence, and of course –
rearrange their time.
This last point becomes a real trap for many
divorced parents who look for the time spent with their kids. Either believing
that competing against each other is
right, or for other reasons, the parents start focusing on entertainment, and the
time with children becomes over-organized and structured. The parents try to
make sure that their kids ‘have fun’, however, providing ‘fun’ is not the goal
of parenting. In fact, it is just not parenting. As I mentioned, this issue is
not obvious for adults involved in the situation discussed. Most typically, the
parents and their children are not aware of this side of the whole scenario.
When parents struggle to arrange more hours per week to spend with their kids,
they often substitute a real topic for a secondary concern. They worry about
‘how much time will I spend with my children? How often will I see them?’
instead of planning ‘how can I prevent my parenting from diminishing? How can I
continue or even improve my parenting job?’ Our observations force us to think
that in many cases due to the divorce the parent function reduces.
We talk about
‘former families’, but there are no former parents or former children. It is
the reason to look for the optimum configuration of the parent-child interactions.
Divorce is a
dramatic event since it stops the existence of a family or the hope of it
continuing to have it function. We return to our initial questions of ‘what do
children lose when parents divorce?’ Even in the ‘best cases’ when the parents
try to be equally involved in the kids’ lives one way or another, children lose
the substantive nature of their parents from what they were before the divorce.
There is only one exception: instead of counting hours, entertaining, plotting
revenge against an ex-spouse, trying to prove how good they are or any other
nonsenses, parents must continue raising, guiding their children, and promoting
their development to the best of their abilities. If done effectively, the best
parents will mitigate the children’s losses despite the divorce.
