Divorce enquiries surge in March
Relate for Parents, the online provider of support and expert help for parents and families, handles more enquiries in March on the issue of divorce than at any other time of the year* and nearly twice as many calls about contact issues than the previous months.
January is a peak time for couples to decide to divorce and it might take them a few months to reach the difficult practical issues they need professional help on, such as establishing a new workable routine of seeing the children.
Steph Palin, relationship counsellor for Relate for Parents, said: “After a separation couples will live apart and establish who looks after the kids and when. After a few months it is likely to be when one partner realises the arrangements don’t quite work and they want to try something different – but re-negotiating these arrangements can be really difficult, especially when you are both feeling raw from the split.”
Steph also explains that this can be a crucial time to ensure children maintain contact with both parents and are assured by both parents that the split had nothing to do with them:
“Men, in particular, can find it difficult to handle this ‘changing of the goal posts’, especially if they are the one having the pain of saying goodbye to the kids every weekend knowing it will be another week before they see them. In fact, it is at this time, to avoid the pain and because they don’t feel they are helping matters, fathers can feel like giving up and losing contact with their children. This doesn’t have to be the case – the main thing a couple going through a break-up should remember is that it will get easier.”
Relate for Parents provides support and advice for more than 10,000 parents each month, including stepparents, adoptive parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and siblings, producing strategies to deal with the many challenges faced by those in a parenting role.
Relate for Parents’ seven tips for newly separated couples:
• Establish a routine as soon as possible so that children can get into a pattern of knowing where they will be. This will help them feel more secure.
• Keep a good level of communication with your ex IF that is safe to do. Children appreciate both parents still being involved in their lives. So keep your ex informed about school concerts, football matches, parents evenings and make every effort to attend together.
• Keep a calendar which shows when they will be with your ex’. Older children can then plan things with friends, and even younger children can count “how many sleeps ‘til I see Dad again”. Both parents should have the same calendar, so the children can check, no matter who they are with.
• Agree with your ex that neither of you will put the other down to the children, and that you will keep any negative feelings away from the children. After all, the children love you both, and they can feel as though they should not enjoy being with the other parent if one of you is always saying negative things about the other.
• Once a routine is established be flexible about contact arrangements, life happens and at times both of you will want to change the set agreements. There has to be a little give and take.
• Perhaps get a pay as you go mobile for your children and your ex to talk together. If your children know that they can always contact their other parent, -and you are fine about it, then they will feel less worried about losing contact with them.
• Never use the children to “get at” your ex because but the people most affected will be your children, not your ex.
For help and advice on this and many other parenting issues visit relateforparents.org.uk and listen to Jack – a separated father of one and his experience of resolving issues with his ex and watch the McIntyre family mini-series to see how they deal with different parenting and family challenges.
*Relate for Parents client contact from January – December 2009.