Essential Guide to Children and Separation (eBook)

Introduction

More than one in four children will experience parental divorce by age sixteen (Joseph Rowntree Foundation – www.jrf.org.uk). As I write, our legal and political leaders are discussing a review of the divorce laws in Britain, conscious that many children are hurting but disagreeing about the best way to help make the divorce process easier. In truth even the most amicable divorce is painful, and the most long drawn-out and contested can be damaging for all involved. And very much involved but largely powerless are the children of the marriage.

This book is about how to help or support children whose parents are divorcing. If you are looking for a book to help yourself or friends who are divorcing, then I can only tell you what helped me, and that is written in my first book, Missing Being Mrs.1 If you want help with the legal side of divorce, go to www.sfla.co.uk, which puts it all very simply. If you are a parent, grandparent, friend, teacher, youth worker or pastor of children whose parents are separated, and you’re concerned for what the children want and how you could help them, then this book’s for you.

Every child reacts differently to their parents separating, but the good news is that statistics show that the majority of children grow up to be happy, well-adjusted adults. Adjustment to the new situation is never easy, but there are things we can do and things we can avoid doing that will help them along the way. This book uses real-life experiences from parents and children who have been through that adjustment, in the hope that they can educate you, the reader, in how best to care for them and others like them.

I have based every chapter in this book around the real story of a child I know whose parents are living separately. Four of those children are my own and I lived their stories with them. Other friends and acquaintances have been kind enough to share their stories with me. Many names and some other identifying features have been changed to protect their privacy, but the stories are real. (For reasons of anonymity, I have identified many of the children as, for example, girl aged fourteen – G14; boy aged eleven – B11.) In addition I have over twenty years of experience of what children and young people say and think about divorce through my job as an RE and Ethics teacher; I have found the issues that are biggest for them are not always the ones adults think they are going to be. I was lucky enough to be able to do a survey on divorce with over 400 of the children at my school aged between eleven and eighteen. Their thoughtful responses gave me many insights, and I have quoted from them throughout the book. This book is the result of all our experiences, and I hope among its pages you find something to assist you in helping children adjust to their parents’ separation. Let’s start with Alex’s story.

Alex’s story

Of all the people I interviewed for this book, Alex was the only one who was quite happy for me to use his real name. I was his tutor for five years, and in all that time he never had any major problems that I was aware of. He was a normal, well-adjusted, happy and helpful member of the tutor group who surprised me, at tutor interviews, by chatting about the fact that his parents lived in different places. He was not at all worried by it. Alex is eighteen now, and more than aware that his friends are finding their parents’ divorces difficult, so I was very interested in what had made the situation easy for him.

Timing

Alex remembers when he and his parents all lived together, but they divorced when he was four. So when I knew him, he had already had a long time to get used to the new arrangements. However, he says he can’t remember any real upset at the time. This may be because of his age, although anyone with a four-year-old knows how upset a child of that age can be even when you are leaving them at nursery.

Cooperation

Alex puts the ease of the divorce down to the fact that his mum and dad talked it all through first and planned what they were going to do before they went to the lawyers. The legal necessities therefore came and went as smoothly as possible: there were no court cases and no interviews or difficult decisions that he was involved in or aware of. The actual divorce wasn’t an issue for him and has left no bad feelings.

Seeing both parents

When I asked, “Who did you live with?” Alex answered, without any hesitation, “Both.” He has no sense from his childhood of losing contact with either of his parents, or either set of grandparents. Undoubtedly, the fact that his parents both lived in the same village made this easier. To begin with the family all lived with Alex’s maternal grandparents, and when his dad moved out, he went less than a mile away to live with his own mother. Alex remembers his mum getting him up and having breakfast with him, walking him down the road and dropping him off at his dad’s before she went to work. His father then took him to school, which was on the way to his work, picked him up after school and had tea with him. After tea, Dad took him back to his mum’s, where he spent the rest of the evening and where he slept. At weekends he spent Friday night and Saturday with his father and Saturday night and Sunday with his mother. Holidays were split between the two. In the long summer holidays every year, he had two weeks with his mum, two weeks with his dad, and the remaining week when both parents were back at work was spent with his grandparents. Indeed, they were lucky to have grandparents on hand for babysitting if either parent went out or away for the weekend.

Amazing, isn’t it? When Alex and I looked at the arrangement his family had had, we reckoned he actually did see each parent 50 per cent of the time. (There is a recommendation by the American courts that you need at least 30 per cent access to your child to form a good relationship with them.) Although his “official” home was at his mother’s, Alex remembers his childhood as being spent equally with both parents. He has a very good relationship with his father, and happy memories of summers spent camping all round the British Isles with him.

There was a standard arrangement for the big festivals as well. On Christmas Eve, Alex went with his mother to the Christmas Christingle service at the village church, where he sat with his mum, his dad, his grandparents, and all the wider family. On Christmas Day, he woke up at his mum’s and had Christmas lunch there, going over to his dad’s at about three o’clock and having the evening and Boxing Day with Dad. New Year’s Eve was with one parent and New Year’s Day with the other, alternating each year.

Finances

Finances were worked out between his parents, with Alex’s father paying an agreed amount a week to his mum for Alex’s living expenses, out of which she put a percentage (a third) into Alex’s bank account for his own use, and which he now spends on clothes and outings, etc. He knows what money he has coming in and what he has to spend, so has grown up with a sense of autonomy in his financial affairs. I sensed there was a minimum of having to play off Mum against Dad to get what he wanted, presumably because the matter had already been agreed and everyone stood by the arrangement. Alex’s parents are not particularly well off, and he has always known that he would have to finance any college or university fees. He is looking forward to studying Marine Biology at a local university on a student loan supplemented with holiday jobs (he’s an excellent chef!).

Problems

The only sense of any problem in Alex’s life was when his mum decided to remarry. Four years after his parents had divorced, his mother met and married her new husband and they moved away from the village Alex had grown up in. He was about eight at the time and says he remembers “tension”. The problem as he remembers it was that he thought the new man was going to try to take his dad’s place, and for a while he didn’t want to speak to him or relate to him. However, over time, he says, he realized that he wasn’t being separated from his father. They didn’t move far away and the only difference from their previous arrangement was that Mum now drove him three miles to Dad, who then dropped him off at school instead of walking him down the road. Once he realized that the new man was not trying to take the place of his dad but, as he put it, “was just there”, he says he was fine. He now talks quite happily about the good relationship he has with his stepdad.

Security

There was the minimum possible change for Alex in all of this, and a great deal of security. For a long time he remained in the home he had always known and yet saw both his parents every day. He carried on going to the same school with a similar routine to the one he had had before, and he maintained good contact with all his grandparents and both sides of the wider family. In fact, he had a more secure childhood than many of his friends.

As I was talking to Alex, I felt relieved that it was really possible for a child to have so few adverse results from divorce. Alex is, and always has been, a happy and well-adjusted young man. I found myself thinking, “Why wasn’t my divorce like that?” This book is an exploration of the things that parents, grandparents, teachers and...