Divorced Parents and the Unconscious Damage They Cause

It might be comforting to read of celebrities striving for an amicable divorce, a family shift where there are zero divorce effects on the children, and where, after signing the agreement, the divorced parents stay long-lasting friends. We want to believe this is possible today in our modern world. The unfortunate reality, however, is that even with the best of intentions, divorcing parents often slide into bitterness and competitiveness, if not openly, then subversively, putting their own story center stage and not their children’s.

Is putting the kids’ best interests first just a cliché, a narrative that divorced parents console themselves with to feel better about themselves and how they look to the outside world?

In this article, we look at manipulative actions that harm children. While we recognize that there are cases where divorcing women must resort to custody battles and hard financial talks, the examples in this blog post could have been avoided.  All the cases mentioned, involving kids and divorce, are real.

How Parents’ Conflict and Divorce Impact

According to the National Library of Medicine, kids who have lived through divorces – amicable or not – suffer stress from going back and forth between two homes and may also experience a decline in private time and emotional closeness with both parents, financial instability, and confusion. Adult children of divorce may suffer from a lack of trust in relationships, reluctance to form a couple, low self esteem, a tendency towards manipulative behavior, and a risk of divorce in their own adult lives.

It’s like many situations. We might know about the negative effects of divorce on children, having learned about them in the best divorce books on divorce. But in real-world practice, this knowledge doesn’t prevent us from acting like children ourselves and doing what we want to do.

How do we divorced parents grab hold of ourselves and right the course ahead, a course that better serves our children?

We must acknowledge our damaging actions, whether intentional or unintentional, and make a conscious effort now to minimize involving our kids in our adult divorce conversations and conflicts.

How Parents Involve Kids in Divorce Conflict

Looking back at my own divorce experience and those divorces of people around me  — colleagues, clients, or their extended families – I would single out communication and control as the typical formats of involving children in divorce-related conflicts.

It’s stunning how many divorcing couples and coparents don’t avoid using their kids as communicators!

Very often, you hear of a former couple blocking each other on email, text, or social media, boasting that they have “no contact” with the other coparent. The healthiest move, of course, would be to establish one go-to place to keep communication open between the coparents, such as a coparenting app like Family Wizard. But what actually happens?  Many parents, or one parent in particular, decide to rely on communicating through the kids, asking them to tell their other parent a piece of news, an event, or a schedule change. Some coparents even lean on their kids to convey difficult messages about money or logistics.

Using kids as messengers is an example of parents dumping unnecessary responsibility on their kids. This leaves kids confused, burdened, and feeling guilty.

Another example of poor parenting is sabotaging the other parent’s plans with the children just to make a point. I have seen several situations of a divorced parent stopping their children from traveling overseas just because they had the legal means to do so. One father I knew resisted a child’s heart operation, which required consent from both parents. If you ask these divorced parents, they will claim they act in their children’s best interests, but in reality, they seek power and control.

But what really drives manipulative behavior?

Reasons and Goals for Involving Kids in Divorce Conflict

The main reasons and end-goals for involving kids in divorce-related conflicts are the following: 

• Financial Benefit
• Control of Access
• PR Competition
• Revenge

Some manipulations involve several goals at a time.

Financial Benefit

This is about using the kids to get more money from the Ex in cash or spending. In writing this article, I spoke with two mothers who admitted to sending their kids on holiday to their father’s without packing the necessary sports equipment or clothes for the season. One was a skiing holiday, and the child was sent off without a winter coat, hat, or mittens. The other mother sent her son off to camp, a camp the other coparent had attended, and deliberately excluded from the suitcase a bathing suit and shorts. In both cases, the goal was to inconvenience the other parent and get them to spend money. In another case, a daughter was specifically asked to lie to her father about the amount of money she needed for a school trip.

What divorced parents seem to forget about these overt and sometimes passive-aggressive behaviors is how embarrassed and angry they can make the children. Later on, as adult children of divorce, they may find it hard to trust another person, or may have difficulty with financial discussions, or may seek to replicate this kind of behavior and manipulate others to achieve their goals.

Control of Access

A common misbehavior and is often exercised to emphasize one parent’s own importance, as a negotiation tactic to get financial benefits, or to punish the other parent as a means of revenge.  As soon as I told my friend that I am writing on this topic of divorced parents and the unconscious damage they wrought on their kids, she cited two examples of families where the father hasn’t seen the kids in years because the mother was unhappy with the divorce itself or the settlement.

When Custody Battles Become About Revenge, Not Protection

Some sole custody battles pursue control of access or revenge rather than saving children from a dangerous and unfit parent. The damage of custody battles for children is that the children are often exposed to the discussion of why one of their parents is unfit. In a family I know, the mother openly discusses in front of her 5-year-old son that she is trying to restrict his time with the father via court because the father is dangerous. During the restricted time they do spend together now, the boy spends it being terrified and expecting dangerous behavior, while the father is full of bitterness.

If the court asks a child where they want to live during a custody battle, some divorcing parents openly badmouth and accuse the other parent. In one case, a father groomed his son to speak against the mother in court to get sole custody. Later, during his adolescence, the boy was overcome with guilt for speaking against his mother, and his depression severely affected his studies and well-being.

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If you are getting a divorce with kids and see a custody battle in your future, you’ll want to read “Advice on Child Custody: 9 Tips for Working with an Attorney for Children (AFC)”

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PR Competition

Happens to normal people, too, not just celebrities. This is when divorced parents try to create a positive image of themselves in the eyes of their kids (and/or society) and a negative one of the other parent. PR competition includes telling the kids about the divorce without the other parent, or promoting one side of the story, and/or criticizing purchases or decisions made by the other parent. It can reveal itself as bribery with presents, expensive purchases of toys, luxury items, or brands, and holidays. This kind of manipulation often involves things that the other parent can’t afford.  PR Competition can also include striving to be “the cooler parent,” and confusing the children about where they should live. The “cooler parent” may offer more liberal rules at her house, and invite the children to leave the other parent’s home if the atmosphere is “too strict.”

Revenge

The most dangerous aspect of a divorce conflict, the end game of which is not to gain anything for yourself but to hurt the other coparent, make them suffer, and punish them for ending the relationship. The revenge-seeker thinks themselves entitled to having all the benefits they had during the marriage – money, status, place to live, access to kids, love, dreams, plans. By harming the ex-partner, they think they are restoring justice.

One of the most effective ways to hurt the Ex is by involving and hurting the kids.

Why is Involving Kids in the Divorce Conflict So Commonplace?

Using kids in the conflict is very easy. They are here, with you, and they care. They give an instant reaction to an unjust, awkward, or painful situation, a lot quicker than telling the press about how horrible an Ex is. When using kids as a tool for manipulation and an audience for the conflict, it is possible to see instantly that revenge has worked and the hurt has happened. There’s an emotional reaction that often explodes or creates hurtful ripples of effect.

In an age where free divorce resources for women and men exist for getting help, but in which many people still resist getting support, the only caring and responsive audience that listens to us for free is often the children.  They have little choice.

Smaller Things We Sometimes Do

Using their kids as pawns, here are some other manipulative things coparents do to each other: 

• Push kids to spend time with their other parent even when they don’t want to. Because we want the other parent to feel the burden of responsibility, to have to invest time and money, and not enjoy freedom too much.
• Not buy something for the kids, so they must ask their other parent.
• Be negative and critical of the other parent’s presents, activities, or time together. We might say nothing but communicate non-verbally, making a sad face when the child brings back a Dad present. We can never wash the jersey that they bought together.

How to Stop Using Kids in Your Divorce Battle

If you read anything here that relates to your own actions, don’t despair. It’s great that you have read this far. Here are a few more things on our divorce advice list that you can do to be softer on your children, who have suffered enough.

• When dealing with kids’ issues, make them the center of your narrative. Shift the focus of attention from feeling bitter and sorry for yourself, and think of them.
• In your life after divorce, nurture a genuine connection with your children, just you and them, not as a part of a dysfunctional triangle with their other parent.

Your child deserves to be seen as a person, not an extension of the other parent.

• Don’t outsource the communication with the Ex to kids
• Let go. If the child is of school age, stop controlling their relationship and activities with the other parent. Let them forge their own relationship, routines, fun stuff, internal jokes, and eating habits. Stop watching over them like a hawk, ready to condemn every wrong path
• If your Ex is bad-mouthing or blackmailing you, be calm in front of the kids. Minimize telling them your side of the story so as not to be sucked into a PR competition. (For more on coping with a difficult coparent, you may wish to read our 41 things to do if coparenting with a narcissist.)

Conclusion

Divorced moms like me want you to know that, more than anything, try to think of your child, their journey, feelings, needs, and positive growth. They deserve stability, love, appreciation, support with their studies and work, and their growth. Your divorce is an important part of their journey, but it’s not the only thing that defines them or their relationship with you.

They are even allowed not to care which parent is right or wrong. Just be with them.

NOTES

Anna Ivanova-Galitsina is a PR consultant, recently moved to Dubai, and is carving her new life and career in the UAE. She has two almost grown-up boys and is full of optimism in a new relationship after her divorce.

 

Whether you are thinking about divorce, coping with it, or rebuilding your best life afterwards, choose to acknowledge your vulnerability and learn from others. 

Get Smart, female-led support > Book a FREE Consult with SAS for Women.

 

*We support same-sex marriages. For the sake of simplicity in this article, however, we refer to your spouse as your “husband” or a “he.”