I wrote most of this piece back in October. I know from speaking to separated parents that the situation I dealt with in September, when some of my children suddenly rejected me, is as common as it is heartbreaking. My hope is to share how it felt and how I addressed it. I made efforts not to ascribe any intent to the actions of my co-parent. But of course, describing things is not devoid of perspective. If you keep reading this post, you accept that this is a one-sided account of a complex and painful situation that is now resolved. In this piece, I use the term “co-parent” instead of “my ex” because the dynamics leading to the events I’m describing also exist inside intact families. They are more insidious and they run below a surface of parental unity. Separated parents who have been through similar circumstances can usually point to the same dynamics inside their marriage, pre-separation.
Last September I listened to a podcast by Dr Becky Kennedy on the theme of “divorce doesn’t ruin children.” Over the course of the episode, she reassured parents that indeed, having two homes with different rules was not an insurmountable obstacle to children’s emotional adjustment. Which is totally accurate. What is detrimental to children is parental conflict, whether it happens during divorce or during marriage. In other words, not getting along with your children’s other parent – whether you are still married or not – is the biggest threat to your children’s emotional well-being.
As hard to believe as it seems, the painful feelings that arise in the context of a family breakdown – sadness, anger, embarrassment, shame, confusion, fear — do not in and of themselves ruin our children’s mental health. What does affect our children’s mental health is their inadequate or non-existent coping mechanisms to process this upheaval. Feeling angry, confused and scared is not a poor outcome. Trying to protect our children from feeling angry, confused or scared is what leads to poor outcomes.
A friend recently wrote a piece about the loss of divorce in which she noted: “For children, divorce in low conflict marriage correlates with poor outcomes” which begs the question: why would couples with low conflict divorce? What it more likely means is that divorce in marriages where conflict is hidden, repressed or ignored correlates with poor outcomes. A « low conflict » marriage — like mine — points to an inability to deal with conflict and model conflict resolution. When these « low conflict » marriages end, children are suddenly thrust into a world of emotions that they are wholly incapable of dealing with; whereas children living in situations of open conflict have found coping mechanisms (good or bad) while their parents were still together.
Every divorce is a variation on the theme of “two parents, not getting along” . Whether you have 1 or 9 children, whether you are quietly seething or throwing plates at each other, separation happens when the stakes of staying together are higher than the stakes of separating. I chuckle when people – especially in religious circles – call divorce “the easy way out.” There is nothing easy about divorce. I have found it harder than marriage. You still have to deal with your ex-spouse every day – as you do during marriage – but without a sense of common purpose. After almost 3 years, the jury is still out for me as to whether separation was worth the heartache and devastation it unleashed on my family. Things are different for sure. But are they better? It depends how you look at it.
The more children you have, the longer you are married, the higher the stakes are. The higher the stakes, the more conflict builds up. In other words, divorce is a conflict. Even people who partner-up without any cultural or religious notion of permanence will separate when they reach a tipping point where they simply don’t get along well enough to stay together. Separation exists on a continuum of conflict. And children cannot avoid internalizing part of this conflict.
This quote from Dr. Brad Reedy sums it up well (he qualifies it by saying that this dynamic plays out whether it happens within marriage or after separation):
“Every child has some degree of identification with each parent. So when we just heap derision on a co-parent – even if they have been toxic or mentally ill – there’s a part of the child that identifies with that parent. So in the same small way, we are attacking them.
Remember this: children with a toxic or abusive parent don’t always grow up hating their parent. They grow up hating themselves.”
Last summer, the children and I came back from France on August 17. The following 6 days brought 4 consecutive major changes in the children’s lives, including but not limited to my loss of employment on August 25. Through this upheaval, one child announced that they would be going to live with their dad. I did not support this decision and I did not handle it well. I completely unraveled in front of my child and they not only left, they cut contact with me. This started a chain reaction of children asking to go live with their dad and acting out their anger and fear in ways that were increasingly destructive and difficult to manage for me.
In a separation, the desire to be close to one parent is often acted out in parallel with a rejection of the other. It’s a matter of physical space: you can’t be in two places at once. The best practice is to stay the course, stick to the schedule, and not take it personally. Validate the feeling and hold the boundary. But it’s hard, and some days you do take it personally.
My job loss was a major upset for the children. It was completely unexpected and handled poorly by my employer, which made it harder than it had to be. My position was eliminated in a restructuring but I was treated with the harshness of a dismissal for cause, told that my server access would end promptly at the end of the dismissal call, and not to contact my boss (who wasn’t present on the call) or my colleagues. It knocked the wind right out of me. I understood the restructuring part but I couldn’t understand why they had to treat me like a criminal. The children felt responsible. They knew that working from home had been difficult for me. Their school schedule was impossible to manage against a normal workday and the traditionally low pay of councillors’ assistants made it impossible to get childcare on a single income. As employers lost their appetite for pandemic-related flexibility — coined as “empathy fatigue” — the demands of my family became more jarring and my value as a member of the team became questionable. When I lost my job, the children became afraid for their livelihood, for the roof over their heads, and they felt like it was their fault. Asking to go live with their dad at that time felt safer. It spared them the guilt and fear they felt when they were around me.
And that was just the stuff going on at my house! The children were going through equal but different upheaval at their dad’s house.
The rejection of my house and what it represented became increasingly violent and destructive. In the wake of my job loss and my own fear of the future, it was very difficult to support the children through their own loss. I thought that if the children were given an opportunity to stay with their dad for a few days things would settle and return to normal. They would feel a sense of agency in the middle of a situation that they had very little control over and I would get a chance to rest and digest.
I didn’t realize the impact that letting two children go live with their dad — even temporarily — would have on the family dynamics. To the siblings, their togetherness is their stability. Breaking up the siblings destabilized the entire family.
In matters of separation and divorce, the answer to “when are children old enough to decide where they want to live?” is anything but straightforward. Like everything else – crossing the street, having a phone, driving – you can bet that children think they are old enough long before they actually are. And just like owning a phone, driving or crossing the street, these liberties are much harder to remove than they are to hold back.
In the context of divorce, children – I am using the word “children” to describe anyone under age 25 – are facing so many curve balls that they long for a sense of control and will demand a level of agency that they are not old enough to handle, with consequences that they are not mature enough to appreciate. Giving them control, even with the best intentions, is like letting them drive your car: they might get away with it for a bit, but it doesn’t make it safe. And if they get injured, everyone will look at you wondering “what were you thinking?” Your explanation that they insisted and you felt bad, or that they seemed to know what was best for them, will draw little sympathy, including from your injured child. Parentification, or being thrust in a parental role during childhood, is a form of abuse.
I didn’t realize that the rejection of my house was a rejection of pain, fear, and sorrow. It was a rejection of the unfairness of my job loss. It was a rejection of a random and inequitable world. As I wrote above, the feelings themselves were not the problem: the problem was my inability or unwillingness to let them feel them through. When all these intense and scary emotions came upon my children, my job as a parent was to validate their feelings and guide them through the rough patch. Instead, I gave them the steering wheel.
Paraphrasing Dr. Becky Kennedy, when your plane hits turbulence what do you need the pilot to do? Give the commands to the panicked passengers or keep them? The message I sent my children through this difficult time was: “Your feelings are so scary that I can’t even stay in charge!” Giving them agency at this time was the worst possible move and it turned a difficult situation into a horrible one. Instead of settling down after a few days, the children refused to come back to my house. As their refusal to see me increased in intensity, my co-parent’s willingness to force them to return waned and eventually disappeared. The children were now fully driving the plane, or, as a friend put it: “the monkeys were in charge of the circus.” Our acquiescence to their desire to run away from their fear and sadness confirmed that these feelings were indeed a threat to their well-being, and that we were unable to keep them safe. I had forgotten that emotional safety is not the absence of negative feelings but their loving and thoughtful attendance.
You can listen to the turbulence analogy in this episode of Glennon Doyle’s “We can do hard things” podcast. It comes toward the end of the podcast but the whole thing is worth listening to:
You know the parable about the blind men and the elephant? Thinking back about this time, I can see things from my co-parent’s perspective. I can understand his concerns about our children’s well-being, given the violence of their reaction. Working backward from witnessing their rejection of me, the conclusion that where there’s smoke there’s fire is a logical if uninformed one. But from my perspective – from my side of the elephant – my children’s sudden and violent rejection was completely out of proportion with the situation. I could see clearly that as time went on, the more control they were given, the more they unraveled. My co-parent only saw the unraveling and assumed that something must have been going on at my house. Unlike my co-parent, I knew that nothing was happening at my house to justify their reaction. But how do you communicate « nothing is happening » to an ex-spouse? We are biased toward thinking that our ex-spouse is difficult to live with. The jump from « difficult » to « impossible » is a really tiny step.
I wrote above that divorce happened on a continuum of “two people not getting along”. How we feel about our co-parent can be a huge blind spot in our ability to make decisions for the best interest of the children. This blind spot, if left unchecked, can be used by our children to gain control over a situation they are not emotionally mature enough to handle. I’m not faulting my co-parent for not liking me: we separated for a reason. But I am wise to the fact that as separated parents, it’s very easy to let those feelings inform our decision-making as it concerns the children. This was an important lesson for me.
Since then, I started consulting with a social worker who works as a parenting coordinator and specializes in co-parenting issues. She helps me work through my co-parenting questions and dilemmas so that I don’t inadvertently figure them out in front of the children. I can thank being on the receiving end of this for seeking help: I don’t think I would have otherwise.
Three months later, things are ok. Oddly, my unemployment allowed me to focus solely on repairing my family situation as I looked for a new job. When I realized that giving the children agency was destabilizing and alienating them further – making things worse instead of better – I acted immediately. I asked that our parenting and custody agreement be followed until a parenting coordinator could weigh-in on the best approach to take. I was open to the possibility that my loss of employment and sadness were harmful to the children but I wasn’t open to letting my co-parent determine if that was the case. My co-parent wasn’t interested in working with a parenting coordinator but common sense (or good advice) prevailed and he agreed to respect our parenting schedule.
The transition between households remained a challenge for the children. The children still didn’t want to come back to my house, my co-parent was unwilling to drive them in a crisis, and I didn’t have a car. Over the last two years, I had noticed a significant difference between transitions where both parents were present and transitions where only one parent was present (for instance, when one parent dropped off the kids at school in the morning and the other one picked them up in the afternoon). One of our transition points had always been Saturday mornings and it was rarely a smooth transition. There was something about the physicality of going from one parent to the other that was deeply upsetting, as if they were reliving the separation all over again. In the context of the recent estrangement, the transitions with both parents present gave the children an opportunity to drive a wedge between us even further. About to lose their control over the situation, they were making desperate attempts to cling to the power they had been mistakenly granted. I suggested that the transition between households (twice a week) correspond strictly with school drop offs and pickups. Piggy-backing on a routine transition had an immediate calming effect on the children. It also had the effect of limiting contact between my co-parent and I, which was beneficial to the children as we were going through a period of escalating conflict.
There was definitely a period of decompression when the children were forced to return to the shared parenting schedule. On the first day, one of my children had a violent meltdown for 2 hours during which he hit me so much, he bruised me. After he calmed down, he continued telling me how much he hated me for a few days. When he left to go back to his dad’s two days later, he waved at me saying “Bye, I hate you, I’m never coming back to your house!” and I answered “I love you, see you in 2 days”. It took about a week until he stopped telling me how much he hated me and a month until he started telling me “I love you no matter what.” To this day, he still says “I love you no matter what” instead of “I love you” and I wonder what the “what” means to him.
I will never know what went on in their little hearts and minds in that brief period where I became their enemy. I did learn some valuable lessons about handling contact refusal that I will share with you as a conclusion:
Don’t let things fester. Like a broken bone, you don’t want a broken relationship to set on its own. As the rejected parent, time is not your friend.
Seek help for your family. Trial and error has no place where human lives and primary relationships are at stake. There is a wealth of experience and best practices when it comes to parenting through separation. Some of them are counter-intuitive and the time you spend figuring it out has an impact on your children’s well-being. Seek out expertise early and often. Make sure that the expertise is specific to separation, co/step-parenting, and developmental psychology. Let your lawyer handle the legal issues but do not ask your lawyer for relationship advice.
Seek help for yourself. You need to process your grief and loss outside of your family. Find support in any way you can to avoid leaking on your children. People who are in close contact with your children – grandparents, step-parents, partners, extended family – need to do the same.
Seek help for your children. You are not equipped to help your children sort out their issues with the separation or with your co-parent. You have a dog in this fight and your wounded ego wants to be vindicated. Agreeing with your children when they vent about your co-parent is as damaging as venting to your children about your co-parent. You don’t have to defend your co-parent, but resist the urge to be “supportive” by jumping into the muck with them. This is particularly easy to do with, and particularly damaging to, teenagers.
Stay in charge. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to being a separated family. In fact, one of the many ways the family court system is damaging to children is that it seeks to apply the same legal remedy to every situation. But however you decide to address challenges in your family, make sure that adults are the final decision-makers. Separation and divorce affect children deeply but it doesn’t make them miraculously wise beyond their years. Premature wisdom is a coping mechanism at best and a trauma response at worst. They still need you to be in charge of the adult stuff so they can carry on the business of being children. Children feel the need to take over when they do not trust the adults in their lives to make adult decisions.
We are children until age 25.