Helping the children

Through the eyes of your child

Children see things differently to adults. It is important to understand what they are going through. They will experience hurt, sadness and loss. They may also be angry. Limiting the damage of divorce to them should be your aim.

Research shows that a child’s initial responses to marriage breakdown are likely to include:

• feelings of shock, bewilderment and loneliness when they hear the news that parents are separating;
• for most children, a preference for their parents’ marriage to continue, although most have at times considered the marriage to have been unhappy (however, five to six years after a divorce, only a small number of children think that their parents were wrong to have divorced);
• an inability to understand why their parents have split up;
• sadness and anxiety about possibly losing touch with a parent no longer living with them;
  uncertainty about whether the separation is temporary or permanent, which adds to their bewilderment and threatens their feeling of security;
• fantasies about their parents getting back together, even after long periods after separation (particularly younger children); and
  uncertainty about the future (however little parents know, children know even less).
• Children and parents give strikingly different pictures of their feelings, and of their understanding for the reasons behind separation. All children will feel upset, even if they do not say so, and even if they do not show it.