What works for children

Your child’s world has turned upside down. You are trying to deal with the ending of your marriage. How can you help your children to adjust to their new family situation and move forward feeling secure and loved? We look into what works best for children.

Take responsibility for the separation

Children will very often feel that they are somehow responsible for their parents separating. It is very important that you tell your child that they are not responsible.

They will also fantasise that they will be able to reunite their parents. You must be clear that the separation is permanent. This may cause some tears in the short term but will help your children adjust more quickly.

Listen to your child’s experience

Although you yourself will be trying to deal with the emotional chaos of your separation, you have to put this to one side in order to help your children. Here are a few tips:

• talk to your children about how they are feeling - if they are too young to express their feelings in words, try getting them to draw them
• acknowledge their upset rather than trying to gloss over it
• give them time to work things through and don’t expect this to happen quickly
• make sure you are not requiring your children to look after your emotional needs
• Emotional support

Establish good routines

Try to ensure that you do not change all of your child’s familiar routines. Keeping your child at the same school and established visits to grandparents, for instance, will help your child to feel secure.

Where you need to introduce new routines, do this quickly and remember that the key to successful routines is consistency and reliability. If you say you will collect your child at 1.00pm on Saturday afternoon make sure that you are there at the right time and in a fit state.

• Types of contact  

Accept your child has another parent

It isn’t important what you think of your child’s mum. To your child she is simply mum. This means that you must:

• allow your child to talk about her
• speak respectfully about her in your child’s presence
• accept her role in your child’s life
• ensure that you exchange important information about your child with her
• Communicating with your child's mother

Provide a comfortable environment for your child

Whatever care and contact arrangements you make you must provide your child with a way of making the most of it. If your child is going to stay with you, it is important that you have somewhere that is as safe and comfortable as possible. Talk to your child’s mum about how you will achieve this.

If you will only see your child for a few hours each week, try to find somewhere that is warm and friendly and a place where you can give your child the attention they will want and deserve.

• Your housing

The four big ones for your child to do well (according to the research)

Conflict between the parents

Do everything you can to keep this to a minimum. Children whose separated parents continue to slog it out tend to do very badly indeed.

Financial support

Children whose separated parents continue to provide well for them tend to survive the break-up well.

The quality of the mother-child relationship

When you support your child’s mother to be happy and effective as a mother, you’re really looking after your child.

The quality of the father-child relationship

While, clearly, you’ll want to spend as much time as possible with your child, it’s the quality of the interaction between you that’s most important. Focus on being a warm, listening, caring dad who sets consistent boundaries in the time you have together – however much (or little) this is. 

Author

Nick Woodall from the Centre for Separated Families works with all affected by separation, promoting policies that recognise men’s ongoing parenting input after a split. With two teenage children and a step daughter, he's been a separated parent for 13 years. In 2007 he wrote Putting Children First with wife and colleague, Karen.

He has also written on parenting and gender, applying an ethic of care to post separation parenting choices and barriers to men’s parenting post separation, and he works as a freelance writer and editor.

Buy a copy of Nick and Karen Woodall's Putting Children First: a handbook for separated parents

Your thoughts

What have you found to work well for your children? What issues did you have to steer them and yourself through. What advice would you give other dads separating from their children's mum? Use our comments system below to share your thoughts and advice.