Everyone knows that children take in everything, particularly when their parents go through a divorce. They are compassionate and quickly notice the gradual shifts in their parents’ sentiments, distress, and fears about the home’s potential division.
It is with utmost importance that your and your divorcing spouse provide the necessary support your children need in the best way possible during your divorce. It’s also important to know you should not inform your children of any information regarding the divorce process, including courtroom appearances and other proceedings.
Don’t tell your kids all of the hard details; they don’t need to know. The reality is that the formal phase of divorce or legal separation can be challenging and very traumatic for young minds. Most children cannot comprehend problematic issues between couples or issues over disputed money or property.
How you treat and protect your children dramatically determines how they will fare after the divorce process is complete. If a parent remains with the children and plans to allow former spouse visitation weekly or bi-monthly, they must adhere to the parental style in their child’s best interests.
As Colorado Springs Divorce Lawyers, we help ease this journey’s pain every day for our clients. We support any parent’s valuable input to allow children to better cope and adjust to their new reality after a divorce is complete.
Children often know that those little jabs divorcing spouses throw around in the divorce or breakup are hurtful. These insults do not just bounce off the walls – children notice and recall them. Don’t let your children hear such cruelty; they will soon have enough pain and suffering to endure. These tiny acts of verbal cruelty compared to what they understood or felt they knew about mom and dad are difficult for them to comprehend.
Your children will likely realize now that their parents are no longer together as a couple. But specific insults or other needless animosities lead children to have more confusion and anxiety.
You don’t want your children to feel their parents will never be civil to each other again. This uncertainty causes a degree of confusion for children that can scar them for years to come.
Too many kids see parents doing all of the stuff they have worked so hard to teach their kids not to do through divorce or separation:
Don’t lash out at strangers.
Don’t be mean, and don’t throw relationships away.
Don’t say anything if you don’t have something nice to say about someone.
If the very adults who have taught these teachings break them today, children will doubt what is real and what is wrong.
HOW TO HELP KIDS COPE WITH DIVORCE
Be frank with your children at the outset of the process. Tell them that although your parents’ partnership shifts, how much each parent loves them will never change. Kids need to hear this early and often throughout the divorce process.
Warn them again that it will be challenging over the next six months or a year, making it difficult for everyone. When parents acknowledge to the children that they can tell the other parent unfriendly stuff or get irritated for the wrong purpose, and maybe even scream and yell, they can understand better, so it won’t be entirely unexpected or shocking.
But don’t go overboard. Colorado courts firmly view parents who bring their children through the divorce loop by offering them too many details or by using offensive language around them. Saying things like “Perhaps if your dad didn’t hire a father’s rights attorney and paid child support on time, I wouldn’t have to take your dad to court!” can be extremely harmful to a developing child’s psyche. A bit of prevention here will be worth the cure.
It would be best if you treated children like adults in some cases. But the balance is fragile. Things that they see today and unresolved issues generally arise somewhere – in bad grades, in education, with peers, or much worse. A great resource to help kids handle a grueling divorce is found here.
The truth is that children are complicated, but most children can go through the divorce or separating process.
One of our most critical tasks is not only to find solutions to support parents and their children to endure a divorce journey. As Colorado Springs divorce lawyers, we want to help parents and their children develop and to be as successful as possible in their new lives.
Your kids will have many questions but don’t drag them through the gritty details. And don’t repeatedly knock your former spouse by saying how the other person has made so many commitments and kept so few. Only remember that kids will take much longer to cope with the anxieties and depression that comes with a family breakup if kids hear this repeated negativity.
