I’ve been sent an intriguing press release by the charity Kids in the Middle (KITM), which works to bring to the forefront the voices of children in the process of divorce and separation. It aims to highlight the fact that although there are extensive services available to support adults going through divorce, the approximately 100,000 children caught up in the trauma of family breakup have nowhere to turn that might help them adjust to their circumstances.
KITM has set up a website to provide information for children whose parents are headed for the courts – such as the possibility of hearing from other kids who have suffered the experience. There is also a chat forum and a helpline.
This strikes me as long overdue. Children are kept in the dark over divorce far too often, usually by parents afraid to share the truth about what is going on. But children sense the kind of distress that leads to family breakdown and will make sense of it in their own way, sometimes disastrously – most classically with “It’s all my fault”.
I have been through a divorce, and there are almost limitless ways in which it is agonising, but one of the worst effects is that it tempts you to dissemble to your children – “You’ll have another home instead of just one!”, or “You’ll get two sets of birthday and Christmas presents!”
When asked whether mummy and daddy still love each other, the overwhelming impulse is to affirm that they do – which gives the children false hope that they might get back together. The whole area is a minefield, planted with explosives labelled “good intentions”.
Separation is so painful it’s understandable that parents go into denial about it, and pass that denial on to their children. This is not healthy. Children can take a surprising amount of hard truth. What they can’t deal with so well are gaps in their knowledge – gaps they then fill in with their fantasies.
While divorce proceedings are set up ostensibly to minimise the impact on the kids – the central principle is arranged around the question, “what is best for the children?” – the parents themselves are often sorely lacking. When I got divorced, 15 years ago, my lawyer told me straight out that most parents were shockingly selfish after separation. Getting their pound of flesh, or “winning”, was too often the primary concern, rather then their children’s welfare. And the hostility that adults in the divorce process feed on distresses their offspring more than almost anything else.
Sometimes this inappropriate behaviour arises out of naivety, ignorance or wishful thinking. When my separation was taking place, I was infuriated that the law did not acknowledge a place for equal contact rights – say alternating weeks between parents. Only years later did I come to see that constantly switching homes is not usually the best solution and that a single primary carer – with generous access for the other party – is probably the best arrangement.
An even more bitter reality I’ve had to face is that the best carer is, in most cases, the mother, as the system presupposes. Why? Because in most cases they are overwhelmingly more present in the upbringing of their children than the father is. There are exceptions, and these should be given their due – but the default position of favouring the mother is probably the least unfair of a series of unfair options (divorce is unjust to everyone).
I welcome the KITM website. If children need protection from anyone in these circumstances, it’s from their parents, who are in the process of tearing up their lives. The site won’t save them – but it might help them to understand that they are not alone, and that they do not need to add guilt, shame and confusion to the pain they are going through.
Tim Lott’s new novel, The Last Summer of the Water Strider, is published by Scribner
