I was 11 when my parents separated. A “bad age”, people sometimes say, in that sagacious tone, when the topic comes up. It rarely does any more, because to have divorced parents is unexceptional these days.
A “broken home” (file this term in the glossary along with “bad age” and “child of divorce”) leaves an indelible mark on a person, we are told. Yet alongside the many false assumptions peddled about the impact of absent or single parents on childhood, there are also pieces of research about divorce that are worthy of our attention. The latest, from the Institute of Education, suggests that parental separation is more likely to harm the mental health of children if they are aged at least seven when the split occurs. It looked at 6,245 children and young people in the UK and found that minors aged between seven and 14 at the time of the split exhibited a 16% rise in emotional problems such as anxiety and depressive symptoms and an 8% increase in conduct disorders.
In other words, there is something in the notion of a “bad age” for a child to experience a parental split. The reason being, perhaps, that after the age of seven you have a growing sense of your own identity, are less oblivious to relationship dynamics, and are more likely to remember the hurt and pain you feel and witness. And mental health problems in childhood, especially if left untreated, can continue to manifest in adulthood.
On some level, this is difficult to admit. A part of me feels that it’s somehow babyish to lay your mental health problems at the door of your parents’ divorce: “I am this way because my parents separated 20 years ago.” Perhaps I’ve internalised the snowflake narrative, the emphasis on “resilience”. You just get on with it, don’t you? Each person has his or her sadnesses to bear.
And yet if I’m honest – completely honest in a way that feels exposing – I would say that parental separation can tear a child’s world asunder. It shatters all your illusions about what should be a place of safety and stability: your home, your family. The core of everything, when you’re a child. And beyond. It shapes your view of relationships, your approach to trust. It exposes your parents as human beings. You see more of them than you might wish to see, weeping and raging and threatening and struggling to cope. They are less emotionally available than perhaps they could be. Grown-up realities are thrust upon you in ways that are confusing and disruptive. The people who are meant to ensure that your childhood is blissfully innocent are confronting the collapse of a marriage and however classily they try and do it, some shrapnel damage will occur. The child or children will suffer.
It would be strange if these scars disappeared in adulthood. Family is fundamental. It sets you up for life. Divorce is one of the spectres that children dread, a bogeyman, a babadook under the bed, clutching a written demand from the child support agency, a new stepmother or father on its arm.
I say this not to make all the divorced parents feel bad. I have survived depression and anxiety in adolescence and adulthood, though both have at times have been severe, and life events unrelated to my parents’ separation played a major part in those episodes. My parents divorced two decades ago, and have been separated for more of my life than they were together. I have a good relationship with both of them. They are supportive and loving, and I feel very lucky. I know people whose parents remained unhappily together, whose childhood homes were infested with a leaden, unspoken misery, whose parents were openly unfaithful. These people have also battled mental health issues. Staying together for the kids can be just as harmful, if not more so.
Knowing, however, the impact of parental separation on child and adolescent mental health better equips professionals to help children deal with it, and arguably makes it less likely that they will require so much mental health treatment from the NHS in adulthood. Some 37% of the more than 338,000 under-18s referred to NHS child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) in England in 2017 were denied any help at all. Leave children floundering and they will flounder as adults. Divorce is lonely for all involved, especially children. Having counselling, or at least a grown-up to talk to can change everything. To expect you to soldier on and be brave seems to be a curious misunderstanding of child behaviour, and yet that is what was expected of most people I have met in adulthood whose parents split up when they were old enough to remember it vividly. We owe children better than that. Divorce may be unexceptional in today’s society, but childhood depression should be, bad age or not.
• Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett is a Guardian columnist and author
