Tips for how to talk to your children about divorce
When choosing to move forward with divorce, parents tend to be anxious about the impact on children.
You want your children to be happy, safe, and with a stable home life. Understandably, you have concerns that a divorce may be disruptive and damaging to your children. But equipped with a few strategies and a healthy dose of care, compassion, and patience, divorce doesn’t have to occur as traumatic for children.
Children will respond in a spectrum of ways that may not be apparent or expected. The best you can do for your children is be open and responsive to what they’re feeling and expressing and exhibit patience, love and understanding for whatever it is that they present. This is true of course at any time during their life, but more so during a time of change.
Despite knowing that being a couple is no longer the right path forward, you will continue to be parents together. So in that spirit, we recommend you work with one another to create a connected and honest conversation when telling your children about the divorce. Come together as a family to have the conversation and support the children in processing and understanding this decision.
We also understand, and have seen firsthand, how challenging that can be for parents, when also experiencing their own upset, grief, and confusion. It’s important to remember that there isn’t an award for “Perfect Parenting”, so as in all things, do the best you can, with the resources and abilities you have in the moment.
It is often useful to leverage the assistance of a professional child therapist during the divorce period. This person can help you strategize the most age-appropriate communication to your particular child, and can also be a neutral ear to listen to and help process your child’s concerns. Sometimes, this professional can help elicit a child’s desires, and can communicate these to you and your co-parent.
Children, even up through adolescence, don’t possess the full ability to process adult emotional experiences. You can create closeness and stability with them during this shared experience by being a willing and listening ear for them, providing the consistency and care you always have.
Additionally, we encourage you and your partner to have a clear path and process for custody and arrangements for the children. It is ideal that you hold these conversations in a space that is child free so that you can have the time and freedom to work through all the options.
In our Conscious Divorce Mediation process we guide you through conversations and considerations to amicably create a co-parenting agreement. Equipped with our carefully prepared outline and a facilitated conversation in mediation, our clients find that working together to create their Parenting Plan helps them move confidently into their next chapter as a functional co-parenting team, with an enforceable legal document that is certain to be approved by a Colorado court.
Change can be hard for us all, regardless of age. But being compassionate, loving, and gentle, first with ourselves, and then with our children, is the most effective way through a divorce transition.
Photo by Alvin Mahmudov on Unsplash