Helping kids understand divorce -By Eunice Ahmed

Eunice Ahmed

“Mummy and daddy are getting a divorce.” To children, those words can mean a range of things, depending on their age. A baby or a toddler won’t understand them at all but may pick up on your somber tone and be confused or frightened by it. An older child may worry that she’ll wind up like a friend at school who sees her dad only rarely, or that she’ll have to move to a smaller house and share a bedroom with her little sister.

While it is just about impossible to put a positive spin on such a negative event, there’s a lot parents can do to ease the difficult transition from intact family to divided one. Target your initial broaching of the topic to your child’s age if you have kids of widely differing ages, you might consider talking to each of them separately. And then prepare to have your child come back with more questions as the years pass and they will come to understand the situation more fully.

While you may think that infants are too young to be affected by divorce, they’re surprisingly intuitive. Even a 6 week-old can sense that his rout line has been altered – he no longer sees both parents daily, he’s suddenly eating at a different time or sleeping in a new room. “They need structure and continuity to feel safe and trust that all is right with the world,” says Garry Neuman.

It’s least disruptive to keep infant at home and have the noncustodial parent visit frequently for short periods-an hour a day. When such visits are not allowed to happen, the child could be depressed or angry and may also interpret hostility, sadness or having a bad feeling that when they grow up such things might happen to them.

According to Mavis Hetherington and John Kelly, older kids hate to stand out from the crowd, so they may worry that the divorce will make them different and less isolated among their friends. Divorce can deeply trouble kids, triggering a range of reactions from anger and depression to behavioral problems.

In an interview with Sandra Samuel, a 25 years old student of the University of Maiduguri who grew up in a broken home, she explained that she grew up with fears about being able to sustain a happy relationship. Eventually she went for several therapies to help her, and said “growing into adulthood was definitely much harder.”

A child’s relationship with both parents is critical to the child’s adjustment. Although the distress of not being with both parents is one of the most painful parts of divorce, it is the continuing relationship that is essential to their long-term adjustment. Some parents fail to consider that their decision will have an effect on their children.

There’s no doubt that children from broken homes are twice as likely to grow and have marriages that end in divorce. But most experts agree that divorce itself isn’t necessarily a negative sentence for children. Parents who remain loving and consistent are capable of raising happy, well- adjusted kids.

Eunice Ahmed is of the Department of Mass Communication, University of Maiduguri.