Keeping your children from becoming victims of divorce

You’ve heard the phrase before: Children are the real victims of divorce. Does it have to be this, though? One woman relates her experience with divorce and how it affected her children.

She said that her husband and she stayed together for quite some time for “the sake of the kids.” She said that she begged her now-ex-spouse to try harder, go to therapy and just stay with it longer — all for the sake of the kids. He did that. Neither of them, she said, was really staying for their marriage. As a result, the two stayed in the marriage for much longer than they should have.

At first, the father of the children had them every other weekend. He attended Open House with the woman when their first child entered kindergarten. When asked to share important information with the teacher, the two parents went into great detail about how she was a sensitive child and was sometimes close to tears. They told the teacher that this was because she was a child of divorce. She said it didn’t matter that she was that way from a younger age or that she was like her father when he was a child.

When the child entered the first grade, the same thing happened. They told the teacher that because their daughter was a child of divorce, she was sometimes shy and timid. They didn’t say that it was because she was like her mom or that she was one of the youngest kids in her class.

The woman said she would often hear others saying, “The poor girls. Are they doing alright? It must be so hard on them.” She also heard, “Your poor girls. It’s always the kids who are the victims.”

Two years later, the woman said that the co-parenting between her ex-husband and she has evolved. They now split custody 50/50. She also said that the teachers are told that the children live in two different households, but that doesn’t give them an excuse to not complete assignments, as well as other things.

Children are affected by divorce — of that there is no doubt. However, how the divorce is handled is important. An experienced attorney can help you learn how to divorce in a way that is least likely to cause children to be looked upon as “victims of divorce.”

Source: Huffington Post, “My Children Are Not Victims Of Divorce,” Aubrey Keefer, July 18, 2016