Children and Divorce: What do Children Need?

If you are reading this, you want to know how to help children through difficult transitions they will face if their parents break up, or get divorced or unmarried. Collaborative practice is committed to supporting children and their parents through painful emotional challenges often experienced during a divorce or break up. We believe that children should be at the center but not in the middle of the issues their parents need to resolve. From research and our own experience, we have learned that the most devastating impacts of parental break-up on children occur when:

• conflict between parents remains at a high level during and after the divorce/break-up
• a parent goes away or becomes unavailable to a child, and the critical attachment between the parent and child is broken
• children become emotional caretakers of one or both parents

For the sake of children, a major goal of the Collaborative process is to ensure that traumatic outcomes with long-lasting negative impacts on children do not occur.

Collaborative practice provides children with advocacy, support and a voice in the process based on the idea that children deserve the best safe parenting they can get from both parents. To that end, neutral child specialists use a child-inclusive process to help parents create developmentally responsive parenting plans designed to meet the needs of children as they grow. Neutral child specialists also assist parents to create a “We Statement” to explain the break up, divorce or getting unmarried to their children in a safe, supportive and authentic way as the family begins this difficult journey.

We know there is a direct correlation between how well children cope during and after the break-up and how effectively parents are able to co-parent. Effective co-parenting requires the ability to communicate with clarity, respect and courtesy. To make clear, well-informed, child-centered mutual decisions in the Collaborative process, parents have a specific resource – the neutral coach – to help them develop co-parenting/relationship plans  and teach skills for effective co-parenting.

Collaborative professionals are child-centered in the following ways:

• Helping parents prepare for a successful transition from partner to co-parent. Children are resilient; resilience does not develop in a vacuum but when children get their needs met in healthy, positive relationships with primary caregivers. The crisis of a painful family transition will nick into resilience unless children get enough support from their environments. A respectful and courteous co-parenting relationship and a developmentally responsive parenting plan will decrease children’s anxiety, support their coping skills and scaffold their resilience.
• Supporting parents to create or maintain healthy patterns of communication with each other and with their children. It is painful for children to hear disrespectful and negative comments about one of their parents, especially if the comments are made by someone meaningful to the child, e.g. the other parent, an extended family member or a friend of the family. It is stressful for children to have to keep secrets or to be asked to report to one parent on what is happening at the other parent’s home. Children also suffer when their parents argue in their presence. We want to assist parents to develop skills for communication that will prevent children from experiencing these kinds of distressing interactions.
• Providing appropriate resources and referrals for parents and children struggling with common emotional consequences of a divorce or break up such as loneliness, anxiety or depression. Many parents need extra emotional support during a divorce or break up, but this should not be a child’s responsibility. Children need to rely on parents to meet emotional needs, not vice versa. A child is forced to grow up too quickly when he or she becomes the emotional confidante, companion or main support of a parent in distress.

Divorce and break up are not neutral events in children’s lives, and will usually challenge their coping skills. During the process of a divorce or break up, it is not uncommon for children to show signs of internal emotional distress, to regress, or to act out their confusion, stress and negative feelings. But with sufficient parental attunement to their needs, shared parental commitment to keep them out of the middle, and the continuation of safe, appropriate attachments to both parents, children can emerge from the crisis with resilience and hope for the future. This is the vision of possibility that guides Collaborative Practice.