Most young children of divorce wake up one day to find that one parent has left the home. This naturally leads to fear that the other parent might be gone one day as well. While it’s the relationship with your spouse that is the cause of your divorce, your actions will have a serious effect on your children. Jointly planning the way you tell your children about what is happening is one of the most important things you can do to help your children successfully navigate this critical turning point in their lives.
It is difficult for us to offer blanket advice about talking with children, because children change so much as they progress along the developmental ladder. One book we think deals with this subject in an excellent way is What About the Kids?: Raising Your Children Before, During, and After Divorce by Judith S. Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee. The book stands out because it details what is important to children at each developmental stage. Children will feel that the divorce threatens their way of life, which it very well might, and the more you can understand how they interpret the world, the better you will be at reassuring them that things will be all right.
The timing of telling your children is critical. You definitely want to avoid waiting until just before, or even after, one of you has left the home. Children need time to prepare. The amount of time required for this preparation varies depending on the child’s age. Wallerstein recommends telling children younger than five just a day or two before you separate, school-age children a few days to a week ahead, and adolescents at least two weeks before. If your spouse leaves suddenly, you obviously won’t have an opportunity to prepare the children. In this case, Wallerstein advises that you “apologize to your children and admit candidly that you just learned of it, that you want to keep them informed, and that had you known in advance, you would have told them.”
While waiting until your marriage has already broken up to tell children can be harmful, you can create other problems if you tell them things are definite before they really are. Your children will want you to reunite. If you tell them you are divorcing and then you get back together and then you split up again, they will have difficulty sorting things out.
Children of divorce report that the memory of the day their parents announced their divorce stays with them for many years. Wallerstein recommends you plan two “family meetings” to discuss the divorce. The first meeting is a chance to tell them what you are doing without going into excessive detail. The second meeting gives you a chance to add the things you may have realized you left out of the first discussion. The second meeting also allows you to ask your kids what they remember from the first conversation. You may get a surprising response, particularly from younger kids, because they may have heard what they wanted to hear or expanded on what they heard. You will want to gently remind them of the discussion and reinforce things to help them grasp what is happening. The second meeting makes things concrete. This is when you should add the details of the children’s schedule, including when they will see each parent and how anything affecting their lives will change.
When you talk to your children, remember to tell them that you and your spouse loved each other when you got married and never expected to divorce. Having this understanding will help protect their self-esteem and let them know that they came from a loving family. If it’s true, remind them of how you wanted them and the joy you both felt when they were born. Then you can begin to tell them what has happened to cause you, your spouse, or both of you to feel that divorce is necessary. Of course, you will need to tailor your talk to the developmental needs of the children.
Wallerstein warns against the “real estate approach,” in which you say simply that you will live here and your spouse will live elsewhere but give no explanation. Children need some explanation. She says that the simple statement that you are “different people” is insufficient. If one parent feels the need for more involvement than a spouse who is happiest working long hours can offer, you can tell the children that you have different ideas about how you want to live and that neither of you would be happy if you had to change. If one parent has a substance abuse problem, let the children know (if you can do so truthfully) that he or she tried to resolve it but couldn’t, and that staying together would not allow for the happy household you want for them.
The problem in your marriage may be difficult to explain in terms children will understand and in a way that is not blameful. Wallerstein advises to:
Be gentle. Telling the truth does not mean that you should deprecate or scapegoat each other. Because you and your spouse cannot make your marriage work, and things between you can only get worse, say you’ve decided to divorce for everyone’s sake. You don’t want your children to grow up with the wrong view of what marriage is. You don’t want to live a lie or mislead them into thinking that your failing marriage is the best that marriage provides. It isn’t.
In the magazine Families in Transition, child psychologist Matt Mendell provides the following guidelines for minimizing the harmful impact of telling your children about divorce:
- Children should not be told until the decision is definite.
- Telling is not a one-time thing: all important messages need to be repeated.
- Ideally, parents should tell the children together.
- Telling should be done without blaming or criticizing either parent. (Think of this as your first big step in the ongoing task of supportive coparenting.)
- Tell the facts, but without unnecessary or age-inappropriate detail.
- Let the children know that this is something that you’ve thought about a lot, talked about, and planned (and talked to a therapist or a minister about…). Children need to know that this was not an impulsive or capricious decision, and that it is final.
- Tell them, repeatedly, that Mommy will always be their mommy or Daddy will always be their daddy, and that both of you will always love them.
- Tell them that the decision to get a divorce was entirely because of problems between you and your spouse and had nothing at all to do with them. That is, make very clear to them that they did not do anything to cause the divorce. (This is an especially big issue with young children who, because of their age-appropriate self-centeredness, often assume they must have done something to bring about these events.)
- Emphasize to them that they will continue to see both parents, even though it will be in two different homes now.
- Empathize with their feelings. Provide opportunities for them to talk about their feelings, repeatedly—with each parent and with a therapist, counselor, or minister. Acknowledge to them that it is entirely natural and understandable that they feel angry, sad, scared, confused, and whatever other feelings they may have.
Pay particular attention to the advice to make it clear that the divorce is not your children’s fault. They may decide that any recent discipline issue you have had with them has led to the divorce. They might attempt to correct their behavior in hopes of making the divorce go away. Make it very clear that children do not cause divorce and that what causes divorce has to do with parents.
We suggest you review these guidelines together and, if possible, practice what you will say together. Your goal isn’t to create an act that fails to represent how upset you are about the divorce. On the contrary, you want your children to understand the gravity of the situation. If you work together on what you say, you will help to ensure the communication is as clear as possible.
