Telling Your Children

Understandably, people going through separation and divorce are often quite concerned about the timing and manner of telling their children. Fortunately, if you are in mediation or collaborative law, you are already speaking to each other in a respectful and constructive tone (or at least trying to!), and working on difficult issues together. And the same difficult but necessary skills that you will need to develop and draw on in mediation and collaborative law are to be used in this painful task: reflecting, communicating and listening. 

Before you speak to your children, you need to do some serious reflecting. Have you and your spouse developed a parenting plan so that you and your children know where they will be living, and with whom they will be staying each night? Is this plan developed with the best interests of your children in mind? If so, when would be the least disruptive time to talk to your children? Do you know what each of you is going to say? Are you presenting a unified message (this is the parenting plan; we both love you and will continue to love you; we both think highly of each other as your parents, even though we will no longer be living as each other's spouses)? 

Exactly how each of you convey this unified message, however, may be different, because you are different people. One of you may be more matter-of-fact; the other may be more emotional; and it's important to tolerate this, because if each of you can allow yourself to be who you are, your kids will feel entitled to do the same. And this - despite how difficult it may be - is most important of all: Each of your children must be allowed to feel whatever it is that he or she feels. You can have some impact on how they receive this information, in the thoughtfulness and care you put into your words, but beyond that, you do not have control over your children's feelings. One may show outrage; another may be very sad; another may show great indifference; another, relief. And of course each child may exhibit all of these and many other emotions at different times. Tolerating your children's emotions, and the guilt that you likely will feel, perhaps acutely, is the essence of good parenting. 

Just as it's so hard to put ourselves in our spouse's shoes, the distance from our own childhoods (both in terms of years and, perhaps, repression) means that empathy requires work. Reflect for a moment - what was I like when I was that age? How would I have wanted this information communicated to me? How would I have wanted my emotions to be responded to? What exactly were those traits, words, actions, of teachers, parents, or other positive role models, that I can still remember so vividly today?