Helping Children with Divorce

You know your family and your situation best, so take your cues from your daughter. The odds are very good that she would describe your household as a tense and unhappy place to be, so you may want to focus on the fact some of the "bad or scary" things will stop and the "good things" will stay.

Be honest and clear w/o giving her more info than she needs to know. Don't treat it as a "trauma" b/c then she's going to think she's being "traumatized". When I was working with families, I would talk with very young children about the fact that there are all kinds of families and we would draw a family "web". I would have the children draw a picture of each family member on a notecard (one for each person) and then lay them on the table. Using yarn or string, tell the "story" of your family connecting the people.

"Mommy and Daddy met in college. We liked spending time together and wanted to spend all of our time together, so we got married (tape yarn connecting the two of you). Then, we decided to have children and you were born! We both love you very much (piece of yarn b/w her and each of you- separate pieces so she's "connected to both"). Then we loved being parents so much we had your little brother (more yarn). But Mommy and Daddy had a hard time using nice words with eachother and are nicer to eachother when we don't spend all of our time together, so we decided that Daddy should live ______ and that we shouldn't be married anymore (take away the yarn b/w you two). But look, just because we aren't married anymore doesn't mean that we aren't a family anymore. We're just a different kind of family".

It sounds silly, but it is a very tangible and visual way to reassure young children that their parents are still connected to them and to eachother as parents. Answer her questions as they come up, but don't dwell on the topic either.

If she really isn't dealing well with the situation, get her a therapist!

I divorced after 20+ years together when my daughter was 4 1/2. I felt like you do, that what she was seeing in the marriage was not what I wanted her to believe marriage or a relationship was about. Luckily for all of us, we adults were able to handle the changes pretty well, and that helped her. Me leaving also shocked her father into getting mental health counseling and taking other actions to become a better father.

You can't control how your husband deals with this divorce, of course, but you can help your children by being as emotionally stable around them as possible. By answering their questions as calmly as possible. By telling them as much as they can handle at their ages, in a simple straight-forward way. By listening to them. By expecting that there will be some difficult moments and they may act out as children do when their routines change.

Children are also quite resilient, and may surprise you how they are able to move to a new "reality" while you may still be dealing with the divorce.

From experience with family going thru divorce, it is always best to work it out as much as you can if you find out the person is not abusive or cheating. Even in the cheating, it depends on the couple.

In your statement saying it is not OK now, believe me, it is not going to be any better when you divorce either. The children have the hardest time because to them it is their parent no matter how bad they are, but to you, it is just a bad mate. You only have one parent, but you can have many mates.

It is not easy for them to cope and I hope someone else can give you better tips how they survived.

you need to keep her informed of what is happening. Sit her down and let her know there are going to be some big changes, one of you will be moving, things will be upsetting but it will be better for everyone, explain to her that things are going to change and any time she has questions or gets upset that BOTH of you are there to help her.