I’m Getting Divorced. How Will My Break Up Affect My Children at Different Ages?
Q: How can parental divorce shape children’s lives?
A: Here are four tendencies, not certainties, to consider. First, divorce can cause insecurity about the permanence of parental love. Second, divorce can emotionally destabilize and intensify a child’s growth. Third, divorce can encourage a more determined push toward independence. And fourth, divorce can raise issues about commitment when the child is approaching significant romantic relationships of his or her own.
THE VERY YOUNG CHILD (up to about age 6):
To see love lost between parents can raise a series of scary questions. If my parents can lose love for each other, can they also lose love for me? If one parent has moved out, am I in danger of losing the other? Since anger at each other caused the divorce, if I get angry at them (or they get angry at me) will they divorce me? If I can’t count on their love being forever, then what can I count on? No wonder very young children often express more insecurity in the wake of divorce, sometimes seeming to regress, having more difficulty separating from the primary parent, clinging to that parent out of fear of further loss. Often a child will establish security rituals around departure and reunion points with the primary parent to help reduce fears when leaving each other (“Will you return?”) and when coming back together (“Are we still all right?”). The parent needs to respect these rituals for what they usually are– attempts to assert individual control when family change feels chaotic. Respecting these rituals may mean, for example, reassuring the urgent child precisely four times that he or she will be picked up after school. As adjustment to the new family circumstance takes place, the need for support these transition rituals provide will subside. In the mean time, parents can also strive to make the family schedule as predictable as possible, establishing household and visitation routines on which the child can rely.
THE PREADOLESCENT CHILD (around ages 6 to 9):
Stress from parental divorce can be so overwhelming that less focus and energy is available for meeting the demands of school. Thus it is not uncommon to see young children during the first year after parental divorce perform less well academically because their emotional energy is diverted into grieving parental and family loss and into worry over what other changes are yet to come. In many elementary schools, counselors conduct support groups for children of divorce to help them work through this painful transition, to give students help in coming to terms of understanding and emotional acceptance of the unwanted family change that has occurred. The sooner a measure of understanding and acceptance has been gained, the sooner the child able to fully reengage with the instructional demands of school.
THE EARLY ADOLESCENT (around ages 9 to13):Divorce can add additional offense to normal adolescent grievance over lack of personal freedom from having to live on parental terms. Normal grievance complains: “What right do you have to tell me what I can or cannot do. You’re not the boss of the world!” Rebelling out of childhood, the early adolescent resents parental authority in a way the old compliant child did not. Coincide divorce with early adolescent growth, and now additional offense is given. Additional grievance complains: “It’s not fair, this divorce is all about making you happy and me unhappy!” The frequent outcome is a more resentful, easily angered, more rebellious early adolescent who feels more justified in his or her opposition. “Since you don’t care how I feel, I don’t care how you feel!” While needing to patrol how this anger is expressed so that it is kept within respectful and non- abusive limits, divorced parents do need to be willing to listen to the early adolescent’s grievances, whether they are directly about the divorce or indirectly about life in general. Better for the early adolescent to talk anger out than act it out in disruptive or destructive ways, at school for example, where educational costs can be paid.
THE MID-ADOLESCENT CHILD (around ages 13 to 16):
Freedom to be out in the world with peers, preoccupation with personal wants, and obtaining immediate gratification are all prime motivations during this very social, very self-centered, and very impatient period of growth. Parental divorce often increases the strength of all these motivations. Divorce can cause a young person at this age to feel entitled to more independence in consequence of parents separating the marriage for their own individual well-being, and to push for that self-determination earlier and harder than he or she otherwise might. If they can do what they want in spite of what I want, then I can do what I want in spite of what they want. If they are free to make new lives, then I am too. With family of origin broken apart, family of peers becomes more important than ever as some reliance on parents has been lost. I count on my friends more than my parents. Signs of increased self-determination can include less inclination to communicate with the resident parent (for personal privacy), more inclination to spend time with friends (for significant companionship), and increased conflict with the parent (for social freedom.) Parenting a mid-adolescent through parental divorce can be demanding work. As soon as father and mother can emotionally reconcile their divorce so that they can continue to work together as parents, being to consult with and support each other, the better for all concerned.
TRIAL INDEPENDENCE(Ages 18 to 23):
In this stage, problems are characterized by: Lower self-esteem from feeling developmentally incompetent — not being able to adequately support all the demands and keep all the commitments (personal, credit, academic, employment, legal, for example) of adult responsibility at an adult age. Increased anxiety from not having a clear sense of direction in life, not knowing how to start making a path for oneself. High distraction from cohort of peers who are slipping and sliding, breaking commitments, and confused about direction too, partying more to deny problems or escape responsibility, as the stage of highest substance use begins, hard drugs beginning to enter the picture. In trial independence the parenting challenge is to communicate full faith in the child’s capacity for more independent functioning and to provide helpful advice when asked, without expressing anger, frustration, or disappointment, without rescuing or criticizing, when the child runs into trouble coping with reality on his or her own. Let go managerial control while communicating confidence and offer mentoring support. The hard half of parenting, the half known as adolescence, comes last, as parents and teenager struggle to keep their relationship together while separation is growing them apart. To keep their perspective when their child enters adolescence, there are three principles for parents to keep firmly in mind to maintain a steady course when the teenager becomes more unpredictable and troublesome to live with.
Adolescence is not a punishable offense. It is a process of growth toward individuality and independence. You don’t blame the child for the process (his becoming more argumentative, for example), but you do hold the child accountable for how he chooses to manage the process (no insulting or demeaning language allowed in the course of increased disagreements). Adolescence wears the magic out of parenting. Increasing conflicts of interest make the child less captivating to be around. Enchanted by the two-year-old, you are more disenchanted with the child10 years later. Your 12-year-old is no longer “cute and sweet and cuddly,” and that’s as it should be.
And you are not idolized as you were. Once upon an earlier time, you could do no wrong in your child’s eyes, and now you can rarely do right. And this is as it should be, because adolescent abrasion over endless differences needs to wear down the dependence between you and your child until independence seems the logical next step into young adulthood. After all, if you were both as enchanted with each other at the end of adolescence as you were at the beginning, neither would want to let the other go.
Teenagers are naturally offensive. This is not meant to be an insult. It simply describes the antagonistic responsibility of adolescents. A healthy teenager pushes for all the freedom she can get, as soon as she can get it, and healthy parents restrain that push for the sake of safety and responsibility. This is the necessary conflict of interests that unfolds throughout the course of adolescence. Teenagers continually feel obliged to fight for more freedom than their parents are willing to allow. The most important sense to keep about you while your child is journeying through the perils and problems of adolescence is not your sense of danger, insult, or outrage, but your sense of humor (laughing at the parenting predicaments but never at the adolescent.) While fear, fatigue, and anger intensify parental upset over what is happening, making problems more emotional, serious, and urgent; humor lightens and calms responsiveness and helps create a healthy acceptance upon which constructive parental decisions can best be made.
