Empowering Children Through Divorce: You are not alone
Thousands of children experience the challenges of parents separating and divorcing each year. How kids feel about this process often depends on age, personality, and the circumstances of the separation. While initial reactions may include shock, sadness, frustration, anger, or worry, children can also emerge from it with improved coping skills and resilience. Understanding that relationships change over time is a powerful perspective.
Whether you are a child seeking someone to talk to or a parent aiming to better understand your child's experience, explore the resources listed below to find support and guidance during this transitional period.
Websites Offering Support:
National Family Mediation
If your parents are splitting up you’ll want to know how it will affect you, and what you can do about it. Meeting with a family mediator is an option.
Books on this subject:
When my Parents Forgot to be Friends
Young children become confused and hurt when their parents constantly argue, then decide to divorce. This sensitively written book assures boys and girls that children are in no way responsible for their parents’ inability to get along together. It lets kids know that although one parent chooses to move away from the home, both parents continue to love their little boy or girl. Both Mom and Dad will continue to spend happy times with them. Even very young children have concerns and anxieties, and Let’s Talk About It! books are written and illustrated especially for them.
What in the World Do You Do When Your Parents Divorce?
is a simple question-and-answer format to help children cope with divorce by explaining answers to questions such as what is divorce?, why parents divorce?, how to adjust to new living arrangements?, how to handle feelings? The authors aim is to help children realise that divorce isn’t their fault, emotions are okay, and families can survive such difficult changes.
Weekends with Dad – What to Expect When Your Parents Divorce
When your parents divorce, it can feel like the world turns upside down. What do you do? Whether you live mostly at your mom’s or dad’s, this story can help you through the tough times.
Mom’s House, Dad’s House for Kids: Feeling at Home in One Home or Two
is a guide for kids on how to stay strong and succeed in life when parents separate, divorce, or get married again. Kids will learn how to:
– Deal with parents living apart, schedules, and dueling house rules
– Settle comfortably in one home or two
– Stay out of the “miserable middle” when parents fight
– Manage stress, guilt, change, fear, and other feelings
– Stay connected with parents, relatives, and the “right” friends
– Appreciate the gifts (and deal with the gripes) of their new version of family
– Feel better FAST!
Kids can’t get their parents back together, but they can help themselves get stronger and go on to succeed in life. This book shows them how.
It’s Not the End of the World
Karen’s parents have always argued, and lately they’ve been getting worse. But when her father announces that they’re going to get divorced, it seems as if Karen’s whole world will fall apart. Her brother, Jeff, blames their mum. Her kid sister, Amy, asks impossible questions and is scared that everyone she loves is going to leave. Karen just wants her parents to get back together. Gradually, she learns that this isn’t going to happen – and realizes that divorce is not the end of the world.
Cool
is about a boy called Robbie, who is in a coma after being hit by a car that was about to run over Lucky, his dog. The book is written as if we are inside his head and can hear what he is able to hear and his thoughts about his family. This includes learning why his parents are separated. Nobody is able to wake him up until Dad breaks all hospital rules and brings Lucky in.
