When Kids are Caught in Your Conflict
The Fears and the Facts
Many parents who experience divorce view it as a personal failure. “We couldn’t make it work!” That attitude carries with it emotional risks for the parent. Changes to self-esteem and personal identity can lead to lasting psychological scars that impact readiness to trust again, to risk being emotionally vulnerable, or to adopt a skeptical view that happiness and fulfillment remain possible.
These fears and doubts can impact children even more deeply. There is the potential that children bear a disproportionate burden when experiencing a divorce which was not their choice and over which they held no control The younger the child, the less able they are to distinguish what is and is not their responsibility. For younger children (under 10), what happens around them is experienced as an extension of them. In other words, if something happens around me it must be because of something I did or didn’t do. Therefore, for many children, the divorce is emotionally perceived as a personal failing. For this reason alone, the importance of cultivating an effective, respectful, and even loving co-parenting relationship between the divorcing parents cannot be overstated.
Despite these jarring realities, it is also true that when an effective co-parenting relationship is established, children show high rates of successful adaptation to the new realities of life within several years of the divorce. Also, studies suggest that 75-80% of adults who experienced reasonably well-handled parental divorce when they were children go on to demonstrate high levels of emotional resilience and mental flexibility as adults. There are times that “what doesn’t break us can make us stronger.”
Knowing and Managing the Risks
Just because life after experiencing parental divorce can work out for those children as they grown up does not mean the risks of divorce should be treated casually or cavalierly. The truth is that good post-divorce adjustment should not be left to chance. This is especially true for children.
Let’s look at the risks to children experiencing divorce in six different domains of life.
Physical: Chronic stress can have lasting effects on the body. When arguments (or worse) are witnessed by children, their bodies absorb a sense of danger. They feel a lack of safety, predictability, and control. In response, their self-defense and survival systems can get kicked into hyperdrive. This internalized distress can show up as changes in bowel and bladder control, insomnia and nightmares, headaches, digestive distress, and mysterious aches and bodily pains. Weight gain or weight loss can show up, too. When a cognitive understanding of what is happening is lacking (which is especially true for children under seven years of age), their physical bodies sometimes “do the talking” for them as the physical changes described above begin to emerge.
Emotional: Children function like walking, breathing emotional antennae. They “receive” the emotional signals that are being broadcast by parents engulfed in their personal divorce struggles, sometimes distracted from and even oblivious to the emotional needs of the children. Children are also emotional omnivores. They consume whatever emotional diet they get fed when their parents become overly absorbed in the details of their divorce process. This fact alone makes achieving cooperation with your parent when you are embroiled in conflict, and even more important during a divorce, so important to work toward. If you haven’t been able to achieve resolution with each other to sustain your relationship, it is critical that you do whatever you can to assure that your children are positioned to have a fighting change at a lasting relationship when they grow up. The best way to stack the deck in their favor is to model for them how parents are able to respectfully handle conflict or divorce.
Distress Tolerance: Decades of scientific research have highlighted the importance of the “rupture and repair” cycle. Rupture occurs when a stressor disrupts the connection you have with your child(ren). That is largely unavoidable and may even be necessary to handle daily demands. “I am sorry I was late to the school play.” “I know we said we’d go out to dinner tonight, but something has come up.” Essentially, a rupture involves any occurrence to which the child(ren) respond(s) with, “…but you promised!” The research shows that the long term significance of ruptures is fairly low when the focus on the repair part of the cycle is high. In other words, kids who witness and personally experience that their parent(s) recognize when they disappoint or break a promise, but focus on repairing the rupture, on sincerely apologizing, and on actually improving the trust, reliability, and predictability of the parents’ future behavior, ultimately grow in their resilience skills, These children learn that while life can be tough or harsh, there is always room to regain their feet, look forward, and maintain an attitude of positive expectancy.
Psychological/Social: Children, especially younger children, have a hard time experiencing themselves as separate and autonomous from their parents’ lives. Therefore, what happens to the parents also happens to the children. More important, what happens to the parents is interpreted by the children as occurring because of something the child(ren) did or did not do. This “personalization” of cause of distress, conflict, and divorce can result in the emergence of anxiety spectrum difficulties (e.g. social anxiety, panic disorder, generalized anxieties) and mood disturbances (e.g., depression, agitation, acting out behavior). Children can develop problems in how they relate to their friends, too, which can range from becoming more clingy or withdrawing and isolating. Since children are less verbally developed than adults, their behavior does the talking for them. By “behavior,” I mean not only how they act, but the action undertaken by their bodies. This includes insomnia, headaches, digestive problems, or the exacerbation of other, pre-existing problems, like a worsening of asthmatic reactivity. The bottom line is that from the child’s perspective, your conflict is also their conflict. Attending to signs of developing problems, as I’ve outlined here, helps them get the help they need and deserve in a timely manner.
Financial Instability: Parental conflict is often accompanied by financial instability or insecurity. Parental conflict may even emerge because of a change in the parents’ financial circumstances (e.g., a job loss, transfer, layoff). In our culture, financial instability, depending upon the degree (i.e., there is a major difference between insecurity about having enough dollars to assure adequate food safety vs. missing out on the planned family vacation). Still, regardless of the prior level of financial stability and security, a drop in that security, which still disproportionately impacts women who are also primary caregivers, communicates to the child that not only are parents’ relationships insecure, but the the “world” at large is also insecure. This insecurity can be a major reason for the emergence of childhood anxieties, as described earlier.
Academic Performance: Children spend as much of their time at school as many adults spend at work. Schools are not just where children learn their 3 R’s (reading, “riting,” and “rithmetic), school the also a major arena where social connections are formed, where long-term friendships develop, and where conflict resolution skills are cultivated. When children’s parents are enmeshed in ongoing relationship conflicts, the mental and emotional energy they need to perform well in school gets redirected toward managing their home environment. That means, that their academic performance and school-based social performance can both suffer.
Building Resilient Children
What to do?
There is considerable evidence that the six areas covered above can and do impact children in families where parents are embroiled in conflict and/or heading toward divorce. While ending a relationship may not only be healthy for a couple, it may actually be necessary in some cases. To manage the risks children face, remember that they didn’t choose the conflict nor a divorce. It is imposed on them. To lessen the various risks they face requires that the parents “step up and step in” to face the dual responsibilities of addressing the need to resolve their relationship conflicts as fairly and equitably as possible, while committing to focusing on the “repair” phase of the cycle when the inevitability to the “rupture” phase rears its head.
The result of attending to these dual dimensions of a relationship in conflict is the raising of resilient children. When these six dimensions of successful management of risks to children are attended to consistently and sensitively, the research shows that more than 75% of children return to healthy levels of emotional resilience within two years of the finalization of the divorce process. The unanswered question is whether your child(ren) will be in that 75%? In many respects, the choice is yours.