Parenting through divorce - how to show up for your child
Many of my clients worry about the effect divorce may have on their children.
So I asked Heather Rutherford of The Parenting Partnership for her advice on how you can maintain a secure relationship with your children, and enable them to thrive, both through your divorce, and beyond.
Heather says:
Parental separation and divorce can be devastating for children. We’re all only too aware that the experience of divorce can have a long-term negative impact on our children’s mental health and wellbeing and the responsibility for supporting, guiding, and helping them to adjust and make sense of it all is always challenging and at times extremely painful. We also need to remember that when handled with empathy, compassion, integrity and with our children’s needs at the forefront of all our choices and decisions, children of divorce can thrive.
All children need to feel safe and secure to flourish. They need and deserve a consistent predictable loving foundation with parents who are responsive, model their values and do their best to manage conflict. This consistent positive presence gives children the confidence, resilience, and self-belief they need to weather the inevitable bumps and hard knocks of life and still thrive. It’s vital that we focus on these needs when we’ve rocked their world and they experience the turbulence, change and uncertainty of their parents’ separation and divorce.
Dr Dan Siegel and Tina Payne Bryson, PhD explain in their book The Power of Showing Up that children who feel securely attached to their parents or caregivers, lead happier and more fulfilling lives. These vital attachments are formed when parents reliably show up and consistently, predictably, and compassionately do their best to respond to their children’s needs by providing what Siegel and Payne Bryson call the Four S’s: Safe, Seen, Soothed and Secure. Its this parental presence that helps children develop resilience, flexibility, empathy, kindness and trust.
What might ‘showing up’ and providing the Four S’s for your child before, during and long after your separation and divorce mean?
Safe
Children need to feel emotionally and physically safe with parents who protect them from harm, and who avoid being the source of fear or threat.
Showing up for them means:
Doing everything within your power to protect your children from conflict before during and after your divorce.
Reminding them that they are loved, that your divorce is not their fault and showing respect and integrity in all your interactions with your co-parent.
Welcoming all their emotions without judgement.
Giving your children a home, or two homes, that is a haven with predictability, consistency,
Clear boundaries, integrity and unconditional love.
Seen
Children need us to listen to them, do our best to understand and embrace their inner world.
Showing up for them means:
Taking the time to get curious about their experiences, their dreams, their passions, their hopes, worries and fears. Being open to how they choose to express themselves and meeting them where they are.
Continually asking yourself: what does your separation and all that changes or stays the same as a result, feel like to them?
Sensing the emotions behind their behaviour, acknowledging, and validating their feelings and being empathetic, curious, and interested.
Soothed
Children need to know that they are not alone in their distress.
Showing up for them means:
Calmly embracing and attuning to ALL their emotions, however difficult and uncomfortable that might feel to you or your child.
Helping your child develop coping strategies to calm themselves as they feel emotions building (such as breathing, reframing, or moving their body)
Remembering that it’s with parental co-regulation and ‘inter soothing’, that children learn to self-regulate and ‘inner sooth’ and build empathy, emotional self-reliance, and resilience.
Secure
When children of divorce feel safe, seen and soothed, when they can rely upon their parents to show up when they need them most and help them make to sense of the experience of divorce and family transition and change, they have a secure foundation from which they can go out and experience the world with flexibility, trust and resilience.
Showing up for them means:
Keeping your children’s needs at the centre of all your interactions, choices, and decisions.
Being present and taking every opportunity to connect with your child.
Meeting your children where they are, rather than where you are or where you think they are.
Putting your house in order and getting the help that you need so that you can give your 100% to calmly see and sooth your child.
Creating a healthy co-parenting relationship. This may mean putting your ego to one side in your relationship with your co- parent. You don’t have to be their best friend, but working towards a respectful, efficient, child-centred relationship and leaving your feelings towards your co parent on the sidelines is good modelling and always in your children’s best interest.
Finally, we want to parent with their future in mind. When your child looks back in 5, 10 or 20-years, how would you like them to describe their experience of your divorce? We want our children to feel relaxed and happy at their milestone events - their graduation, their wedding or their children’s christening – rather than anxious about how their parents will behave.
Divorce isn’t the end of a family, and it doesn’t need to be devastating for children.
When we are present and reliably, predictably, and compassionately show up and meet their needs to feel safe, seen and soothed, children can still thrive and our relationship with them can flourish. Consistently showing up for our children with sensitivity, awareness and compassion takes determination and hard work but it’s worth it.
You can reach Heather via her website - https://www.theparentingpartnership.com/ or via email at heather@theparentingpartnership.com