This is the question we came up a couple of weeks ago when we met with a lady is moving toward divorce and she’s very concerned about the timing of informing her children that this is taking place. So she has children that are of different ages one is a teen, one is a little bit younger, and she also has a little one. And so she wants to make sure that the timing is right in the sense that she wants to do it early enough that they are not caught by surprised but not too early. Where it’s going to inflict more pain, cause more anxiety than is necessary.
Is There a Correct Way To Approach This Situation?
And we believe that first of all, in many cases it makes sense to bring on board a quality psychologist to work with the children through this process. And so some of you might be saying well my kids are not crazy, my kids don’t have any issues, they are not going to need that. But especially when it’s a higher conflict situation or you think that it’s something that your child might struggle with which is very common. It’s not easy for children to go through this and so we think it’s best to err on the side of caution bring on a mental health professional who’s going to just talk to the kids.
And it’s something that you can present to the children as mommy and daddy is going to do it too, it helps to talk to other people about this, they have good suggestions about how we think about it and deal with it.
We often suggest counselling for our clients too. So that’s number one is think about whether it makes sense to put some counselling in place to help the child thorough the process.
Connected to that when you are thinking about the timing and when exactly you should tell the children. We would say you want to balance between letting them know soon enough that a divorce is happening so that they aren’t either major change happening that are not explain to them. Or that they hear it from someone else. And so you want to be the first person to sit down with your children to tell them this, and so you do not want to wait until there are major shifts going on, that are going to cause some anxiety, or that they are going to hear it from another person.
But you also want to wait until there is at least a pretty strong probability that it’s going to happen. So you don’t want to inflict unnecessary suffering and cause them anxiety if you are just thinking about it. You are on the fence but you aren’t sure it’s going to happen.
Conclusion
We think the best way to think about this is, when there is probability that it’s going to happen and there are events coming up that would lead the child to suspect that something’s going on because there are major changes or the child might hear it from another individual. And so at that point you need to tell the child and preferably you have some counselling in place and an experienced reliable professional who can help the child through it.
