divorce stresses & messes & ways to watch out so you don't damage your kid
observations and advice
from a shink's point of view
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"My child's other parent is a complete raging ass! And I want to tell everyone everywhere what a jerk he can be!"
You picked out your ex. Live with your choices and don't make them worse. Your child will feel 50% you and 50% his or her other partner. Your child is a part of his or her other parent. You cannot erase or divorce that. If you "vent" about your child's other parent, keep in mind that your child may feel an internal pressure to be very much like his or her parents -- both of them. Anything you say about your ex will become a part of your child's self image. Be careful. Be forgiving. You picked the parent out and made a child. Don't hurt the child because you are angry that his or her other parent didn't meet your expectations.
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"My child comes back from visits very undisciplined and angry. I think he must run wild at his father's and hates coming home to where there are rules."
First off, this is normal. It doesn't mean there is no discipline at the other parent's house. It is a hard time for a child when he or she returns from a visit. It is a time of reflecting on the divorce and the issues related; it is a time when the child reflects on what didn't happen the way that was hoped. It is a tough time and most kids act out for awhile after coming back to the primary home from the other parent's house.
If your child IS running wild at dad's, that's dad's responsibility and decision. This is a difficulty for parents even when together. When divorced you have to let the other parent set rules. It is unfortunate when your house seems to be the rule house and dad's is Disneyworld. Nevertheless, what you can't change you have to live with.
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"I hate it when my child's mother puts my son in between -- it makes life very stressful for him. I keep telling him to tell her not to do that, to tell her it hurts."
Don't do this to kids. You see it when your ex does it but you can't do anything about that. You CAN do something about the frequency that you put your kid in the stress of being a middleman between parents.
Don't question your child about the other parent or the other parent's activities. Don't question your child about what the other parent tells you about your child. Be nice when talking about your child's other parent.
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"My kids treat me very badly "
Kids will dump their upset on the safe people around them. Sometimes they won't even care if the people they dump on are safe. That is normal. It is normal for adults to have the urge to do that, too.
Don't take it personally when a child is taking his or her upset on you. This is just the way things naturally happen. When very upset or frustrated or with lots of complicated stuff on the mind, it seems like it is helpful to pick a fight with someone -- then everything is simple and about the fight.
Your child acting disrespectful or angry gives you the opportunity to teach your child that he or she should be careful about how he or she dumps anger or upset on others. It also gives you the opportunity to show that you may have things on your mind but you don't have so much on your mind that you can't take the time to set and enforce limits on your child's behaviors.
Allowing your child to think it is okay to be emotionally ugly and/or physically assaultive or destructive is not kind, appropriate, good parenting or mentally healthy for you or your child. It does not help a child to neglect them or make them feel like you are so overloaded with your own stress that you cannot parent. This actually increases the degree of anger, anxiety and upset in your child. Neglecting an already traumatized child is not good parenting.
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"I give everything to my children -- I save nothing for me."
Do not give everything to your children without taking care of yourself. When you take an airplane somewhere, before leaving the stewardess tells you that if cabin pressure drops an oxygen mask will come from the ceiling. She tells you that if you are with a child you should put your mask on first. Get this straight. She tells you that you must put your mask on before putting the mask on your child. Understand why this is important. Understand it and accept it. This is very important to your child(ren). VERY. You put the mask on yourself FIRST. Understand that this is a metaphor with great, important meaning to the welfare of your children.
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"My wife is a bitch and tells my child lots of crap."
Life is complicated and frustrating under the best of circumstances. For the most part, the best thing to do in this kind of situation is to just tell your child that he or she probably misunderstood when told that dad stole all the savings or slept with all the ladies at work or anything else that comes from your ex-partner's rage. The fact is the child might misunderstand. The other fact is that the child may be reporting accurately -- which you can make worse by confronting it but in most cases that is the only effect you can have (make it worse or leave it as is). Still another fact is that your child may be interested for one reason or another in getting more anger into the situation -- which is almost certainly going to be a bad idea.
In any case this kind of thing has to be tolerated. It is part of the normal course of events. If it doesn't happen or doesn't happen a lot, you are lucky.
Sometimes less is more. It is not important to confront everything that happens in a divorce. Try not to reward negative behavior, expecially negative behavior that is intended to foster more negative behavior. Two wrongs...
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"I can't seem to make my child understand that he has to help me with this."
First of all, your child doesn't have to help you with problems. Children get to be children because they can't be adults and can't handle adult things. Second, you cannot expect a child to understand things from an adult perspective. When you were a child, nobody could have explained how things would seem when you became an adult. You had to wait to be an adult to understand from an adult perspective. Often the best you can expect is that you tell your child, "I want you to do this." And if the child demands an explanation and doesn't understand it, you tell him or her that you will explain it when he or she is an adult.
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"My kid won't tell me what is bothering him."
Even adults don't often know what is bothering them when obviously something is bothering them. With kids, even more often. It takes a lot of clever, insightful self knowlege to know what goes on in one's own mind. Usually a parent is going to be able to make a better guess at what is bothering a child than the child is. This doesn't mean that it is useless to ask, it is just futile to insist that the child should know.
Another thing that could be going on is that when a child is upset about things with one parent, he or she realizes pretty quickly that if he or she says anything to the other parent, it causes a lot of problems -- it causes a lot of yelling and accusing and a lot of it ends up spilling back on the child ("Hey, damnit, if you have a problem with me, you talk to me -- you don't go telling your mom!")
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"I hate that my child takes her crap out on me. Why not dump some of it on my husband sometimes?"
Kids struggling with a lot of emotions have difficulty figuring out how to handle emotions. A lot of adults do. The most natural thing to do is to take out your unhappiness on mom. This is just the way we're made and may have something to do with mom having spent most of our first months of life assuring us that she will handle all problems and hurts.
Another reason why a child may take out their upset on one parent and not another is because in divorce a child gets a traumatic shock that his family could one day suddenly break up -- that one person might just end attachments. When one parent gets a lot of crap and the other doesn't, it may mean that the one getting the crap is trusted to be stable and forgiving while the other is seen as being possibly fragile and flaky. Especially when one parent suddenly moves out and says he or she doesn't want to be part of the family any more, a kid can feel like he or she needs to be very, very careful with that parent. It doesn't help much but it should help a little to know that when a child dumps on you, he or she is telling you s/he
is comfortable with you -- it's a vote of confidence in the stability of your parent-child relationship.
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"I am crazy with worry that my child will be hurt by not having a father be part of her life. I can't stand being kept away from my child."
This statement came today as I was writing this article. A father who got so focused on the distant goal of where he wanted his family to be financially, didn't notice what was happening day to day with his wife -- especially how she was reacting to his insensitivity when he dealt with her. He thought he could take her committment to the marriage for granted and it would be okay to not pay much attention at home for a few years while he got everything in order financially -- working, working and working at work and being tired, distracted and grumpy at home. What a shock to find out his wife wanted him OUT and had given up on the idea of couples counseling or any other fix long ago.
Actually, it is true that one of the more negative effects of divorce is that most guys do abandon their children altogether after divorce -- dealing with the relationships in a divorce being more than they can handle (only one in six kids sees their dad more than one time a year after divorce was the last number I recal hearing).
However -- as I pointed out to the fearful dad today -- the only real danger of not being there for his daughter is if he decides to abandon her -- simply evaporate out of her life. The actual fact, though (I pointed out and he immediately confirmed) is that he thinks about his daughter now (he worries about her, thinks about what is happening in her life and how she is developing) MORE in any given day than he had been thinking about her in any given month before his wife told him he was out of the house.
The sad fact is that though divorce is bad for kids in many ways, it is often very good for their relationships with, and the involvement in their lives of, their parents. Both parents. (This is not the results of a study. This is my experience.)
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other articles that can maybe be of help
kids resources & hypnosis CDs
The Incredible Dumbness of Anger
Negativity Slumps: Being Down in the Dumps
Visitation Links & a Couple of Comments on Divorce
Finding a Psychotherapist, Counselor, "Shrink"
Dealing with Stress
Glitches and Hitches - Keeping Count of Mistakes
Guilt for Better or Worse
Hindsight, Mindsight - Nothing is 20-20
Kidly Issues - Helping Kids
Step-Fathering an Angry Step-Child
Anxiety, Practically Speaking
Angry Seven Year Old
Hypnosis Tapes and a Ten Year Old with Fears of Storms
Molested Child - Can Hypnosis Help?
What Can You Do When All You Can Do Is All You Can Do
Consistency, Consistency, Consistency
Parenting & Protecting Internet-Interested Kids
Parenting Strategies for Cyberspace Safety
Performance Anxiety & Test Anxiety & Kids
Contribution of article made possible by Dr. Glenn Johnson PhD
@ http://www.head-cleaners.com
More articles, Hypnosis CD's, Tapes, and MP3's are available through Dr. J's website
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