Stepping Back from Anger: Protecting Your Children During Divorce (Part 1)
The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers has published an excellent guide for parents going through divorce. It is called “Stepping Back from Anger: Protecting Your Children During Divorce.” To give it the widest possible audience it deserves, we will post it here in three parts.
Stepping Back from Anger: Protecting Your Children During Divorce: Part 1
Every year, more than 1 million American couples get divorced. For those men and women, it is often the most grueling, emotionally exhausting, and expensive experience they will ever have.
For their children, it can be even worse.
Imagine you are six, and suddenly the only people you have ever relied on for food, shelter, and love are at each other’s throats. In your young mind, you conclude that you are the cause of their anger, and that you might get lost in the shuffle. Before you know it, you think to yourself, there won’t be anybody left to scare off the closet monsters.
To make matters worse, you often find yourself alone in your anguish, as the two people you usually go to for solace - your parents - are too wrapped up in their own anger and grief to be of much help.
It is unsettling, to say the least.
As parents, it is not enough to assume that your children will bounce back once the legal machinations of divorce are through. Though many adults find their post-divorce lives are vastly better than their pre-divorce lives, for many children, this is not the case.
Divorce makes its mark on children both in the short-term and the long-term. Young children whose parents are divorcing often suffer from depression, sleep disorders, loss of self-esteem, poor academic performance, behavioral regression, and a host of other physical and emotional disorders.
Long after the divorce is final, children of divorce often have trouble entering into committed relationships of their own, fearing their relationships will end as their parents’ did.
In addition, a Princeton University study showed that children who live apart from one of their parents are more likely to drop out of school, become idle (neither be in school nor have a job), and have a child before reaching 20, than children who live with both parents. Other studies have made similar findings, concluding that the effects of divorce on children are pervasive and insidious. These sad facts make it imperative that divorcing parents put their children before their legal battles. This often means that two people who find it difficult to be in the same room without screaming at each other will have to calmly, deliberately, and most of all, lovingly, make joint decisions about their children’s well-being.
While it may mean suppressing their anger at a cheating or neglectful spouse, the winners, in the long run, are the children.
The stakes are obviously quite high.
