Sandra Blakeslee - What About the Kids?: Raising Your Children Before, During and After Divorce

W HAT A BOUT
THE K IDS?

Raising Your Children Before, During, and After Divorce

J UDITH S. W ALLERSTEIN
S ANDRA B LAKESLEE

This book is dedicated to the hundreds of gallant children and parents
who generously shared their intimate feelings and struggles with me so that those
who came after would benefit from all that I have learned.

When I was a young mother and my four-month-old daughter cried for an entire afternoon, I reached for Dr. Spocks Baby and Child Care for advice on what to do. I quickly learned that babies her age start teething, and on close inspection, her tiny swollen gums confirmed the diagnosis. I felt immediately reassured. Benjamin Spocks book, with its well-worn pages, guided me through many of her developmental milestones, well into her adolescence.

When my grandson turned two and wasnt speaking as well as other children his age, my daughter consulted Dr. T. Berry Brazeltons classic book Infants and Mothers. There she learned that all toddlers develop language according to their own pace and that her worries were misplaced. Dr. Brazeltons other books helped her find answers to many parenting questions as her children grew up. She, too, immediately felt reassured, as if the kindly doctor had just paid a house call.

But if you are among the millions of American parents who have decided to divorce and you subsequently hear your children tossing and turning long after you put them down to sleep, you wont find the special kind of advice you need from most experts on child development. Dr. Spock and Dr. Brazelton dont write books about the effects of divorce on children. And so you probably find yourself feeling alone, confused, and in a state of shock, struggling to get out of bed to face each new day, dealing with your whimpering, red-eyed children who havent slept, and trying to calm your angry adolescents who yell, Whats the matter with both of you? How could you be so selfish? How could you not care about my needs? Or you may feel freer and happier than you have felt in many years, but youre still facing distress in your children. How is it they dont understand? What do they want from you?

When you decided to divorce, you knew what you were trying to escape. You can describe it in Technicolor. But now you face a new problemwhat lies ahead? Building a life after divorce is as demanding as building a marriage. Just as a marriage license makes any kind of marriage possible, a divorce sets into motionbut does not shapethe postdivorce family. Both you and your soon-to-be ex-partner will need to determine who lives where, who cares for the children on a day-to-day basis, and how your responsibilities as parents will be shared or not shared. Will the post-divorce family continue the disappointments that marked your marriage or will it be a fresh start? Will it add new pain or will it help you and your children to create a much happier family? How will you and your spouse get along after the breakup? How will your new lover get along with the children? Or with your soon-to-be ex? Youre entering the divorce with far less information about whats ahead than you had when you entered your marriage. If youre to protect your children and yourself, youre going to have to learn a lot of things very fast.

As you read through these chapters, I hope youll keep in mind the many facets of the job ahead. When you got married, you really faced only one major complex challengeto build a marriage that worked for both of you. But now that youre getting a divorce, you are about to be challenged by three major, interlocking challenges. Moreover, you have to work on them all at the same time, here at the outset and in the years to come. The first challenge is to get your life under control, literally to restore yourself and rebuild your social supports. You must find your equilibrium and fashion a new identity that is strong enough to cope with the stressful years that lie ahead.

The second challenge involves you and your children. You need to prepare them for the breakup and to support them through the crisis. Youll need to choose the best custody arrangement for them and reevaluate it at regular intervals, as they grow older and have different needs. The third challenge is to create a new relationship between you and your ex-partner. You need to define for yourself what it means to be a co-parent after divorce and how you will carry it off together. Its an entirely new family role.

All three of these challenges begin the day you decide to divorce and last, in many respects, until death do you part. This is why divorce is so complicated and why so many people dont benefit from their divorces. Just because you succeed at one challenge does not mean youll do well at the other two. But if you succeed in meeting all three, I believe you can open up new opportunities in your life and put the disappointments of your marriage behind you, once and for all.

Because these challenges last many years, this book is a guide for parents who are thinking about divorce, who are in the process of getting a divorce, or who split up a few or even many years ago and are deeply concerned about how their children are doing in the post-divorce family. It describes the changes that you will experience in those first few days, weeks, and months after the decision is made and what you can do to take and stay in control of your life. I can tell you exactly what to say to your children and how, depending on their ages, they are likely to respond. I can lead you through those first crazy years after divorce and describe what you can do to protect your children from harm. I will help you decide how to choose the right kind of custody for your child and how to help each child settle into his or her new schedule without tears. Most of all, I can show you the changes that lie ahead once the dust settles. The turning points are numerous, the danger points are unexpected, but so are the opportunities. I will be your guide.

Why me? Why should you trust me? For starters, I have talked to more children and adolescents of divorce than anyone else in America. I have also spoken to parents all over the country and learned from what they had to say. As founder and director of the Center for the Family in Transition in Corte Madera, California, I have met and worked with thousands of divorced and remarried parents and their children from every economic background and culture that the California melting pot has thrown together. Ive counseled them through every phase of the divorcing process, from separation through the post-divorce years, including second marriages and sometimes second divorces.

More than thirty years ago, I began a small study of sixty couples and their 131 children who were going through a divorce, and I have, through all these years, kept in close touch with three-quarters of the children and most of their parents. I interviewed them at the time of their parents divorce, a year later, and then every five years up to twenty-five years after the event. I knew them when they were little and am still talking to them now that theyre in their thirties and forties with children and stepchildren of their own. My research has always been based on a case method approach to understanding human behavior and motivation. This means I put my faith in the power of individual stories to shed light on crucially important themes in our contemporary culture. Instead of asking 1,000 people in a questionnaire how often they visited their father (every day, once a week, once a month, never), I like to say, Tell me about your dad. If a young woman begins to cry or her body stiffens as she slowly responds to my request, I learn a great deal about her feelings and her relationship with her father that is not conveyed by tabulating the number of visits. This kind of face-to-face study has a power that cant be matched in large surveys. And it has enabled me to distill a message from children of divorce in their own words and to capture their voices as they grew up in the post-divorce family. I have written three best-selling books about these children of divorce whose childhood and adult lives, I submit, are emblematic of millions of young Americans.