Divorce Attorney

Children And Divorce

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Divorce is a difficult and painful phase in anyone's life. For adults, there is a range of emotional, financial and personal implications involved, which accompany the proceedings be it for permanent or mutual separation. None of these feelings are easy to bear. Most people take a considerable amount of time to recover completely from this particular ordeal. For children, the implications are greater.

How children cope with divorced parents

There are some children who cope relatively well with their parent's divorce and move onto leading happy and fruitful lives. But most children are sensitive to divorce and not immune to the bitterness that infuses more worry and trauma into the situation. There are other children who are not that lucky and may experience trauma for a long time. Modifications in a child's time with parents, living habits, education, and lifestyle may bring about extreme responses usually in the form of either anger or fear. However, when the child is unable to express these feelings properly, the child feels extremely powerless and therefore freezes in the process. This is a common reaction associated with traumatic stress. The child's experience of the event determines the child's reaction. This may differ from emotion to emotion to cope with the several changes that the change called divorce brings about in the child's sense of security with the existing family structure.

How parents can help the children

The parents' attitude plays a very important role because it is their own personal feelings that are mirrored by the child. The child's trauma depends to a great extent on the way the parents go through the divorce. A bitter and nasty divorce can expose the child to unnecessary pain. Trauma as a condition may continue for the time of the divorce proceedings or for several years post separation and would probably tend to occur more on holidays and festivals when the child would miss having a family around.

How you can help

To decrease possibilities of traumatic stress triggered by your divorce for your children, there are some steps that you may choose to follow. These include: Be honest about the potential for emotional trauma, specific to your children as individuals. Encourage open communication to help the children talk about their feelings and problems. In turn, this would help you understand the kind of help they require in order to get through the entire ordeal.

Children should be given choices through out daily activities whenever possible. This will give the children an increased sense of power over their lives.

Finding and using good support for yourself and your children is also a good idea. Divorce as a rule, brings a lot of pain and stress for everyone involved. For children, the same tension gets much more pronounced as they are less equipped to completely understand what the separations is all about. Some children suffer life long guilt, thinking that if they had behaved better, their parents wouldn't have divorced.

To teach children to accept the changes and thereby deal with the stress which is part of it, is not at all easy. But it is important to take out time and effort to do this because it will go a long way in minimizing your child's pain and confusion in suddenly losing a family. To accomplish this, you can invite an honest conversation with the children, help them express their feelings on the subject, justify their feelings by accepting that the emotions they are experiencing are natural, and also encourage them to get it all out. Your main responsibility is to offer the support that they require.

Healing doesn't come easily but it will happen with time. There are traumatic cases that lasted from a month to even a year. For some children, when routine is reestablished and the situation stabilized, the trauma will disappear almost immediately. The key point here is to focus on the child's emotions and reactions and act accordingly to help them heal faster and possibly even get something valuable out of it in terms of strength and coping abilities. There is a wise saying that there is no wound which time cannot heal. In divorce cases too, this works well but remember to do everything to soften the blow and make it easier for your children to place their faith and share their confidences with you. Together, you can heal one another.