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    What’s Best for the Children of Divorce?

    Filed Under heteropatriarchy, love, questions 

    Do you know how children get shuttled back and forth between parents and homes after a break-up? Well, why don’t the parents shuttle back and forth - and the kids stay put?

    That notion had been brought to my attention a while back by … someone (I can’t for the life of me remember who). It was not their idea, but they’d been exposed to it recently. They pointed out that people want to do “what’s best for the children” but have a very hard time thinking outside the box when it comes time to figure out what’s best for children. This recent discussion about polyamory and its effects on children reminded me of this.

    There was at least this one couple who, upon divorcing, decided that what was best for their children was that their children get to spend a fairly equal amount of time with each parent, and yet live in one house, so that they could enjoy the stability and continuity associated with that. “It’s not their fault we got divorced, so why should they have to be the ones uprooted?” was basically their logic.

    So they kept the house they’d been living in before the divorce and the kids stayed there. The parents took turns living in the house. I think it was something like six months in the house for mom, and then six months in the house for dad - or maybe they rotated on a yearly basis. Was it a hassle for them? Oh yes - who likes moving that frequently? Staying close together meant that neither parent was going to pursue a better job opportunity out of state, and so on. They also had to share custody, which folks seem to have a real hard time with.

    If I’m not mistaken, the parents purchased or rented a single “off-house” so that they could easily move in and out of it when it came time to rotate. Whichever parent didn’t live in the kids’ house still saw the kids, but the kids didn’t have to pack their bags and miss out on weeknights and weekends with their friends/schoolmates to do so.

    I thought this was a fascinating concept - and very radical. Talk about child-centered! I can see immediately how adults would NOT be cool with this concept - and could list a thousand reasons for why this would never work for them or 99% of other people. That’s understandable, but I’m still impressed. Somehow these parents didn’t take for granted that their divorce automatically meant two households for the kids.

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    7 Responses to “What’s Best for the Children of Divorce?”

    1. Chalicechick on July 12th, 2007 6:13 pm

      TheCSO’s parents did a variation on that. I’ll see if he’s up for writing about it.

      CC

    2. Jess on July 12th, 2007 10:09 pm

      Fascinating.

      I was a shuttled child before I turned three, and my parents moved to opposite coasts. I have lots of airport adventure stories as a result. It was a big pain.

      But, it turns out that they both found the person they were supposed to be with after they were together, and they’ve both been married to that same other person for more than 20 years now.

      It’s wild how all sorts of kinds of families end up okay in the end.

    3. David on July 13th, 2007 6:25 am

      My take on this is different, Hafidha Sofia.

      I see divorce as a huge wound to children. One that lasts for decades. What’s best for children is: ‘Staying married.’

      There are valid reasons for divorce: severe physical abuse, substance abuse, psychosis, felonies, adultry. But study after study has shown that, in the USA, less than a third of divorce are for these reasons (incl those with kids).

      The rest are for reasons more vague - didn’t honor me enough, (s)he was too self-centered, we wanted different things… Such parents should do what’s right for the kids—and honor their marriage vows.

      There’s a lot of ‘happy talk’ about the effect of divorce on kids. Books and articles frame the issue as a way of helping kids make an adjustment to a temporary inconvenience, rather than stating the hard truth: divorce is a painful and lifelong burden to lay on kids. It should be a resort for extreme circumstances only.

      Divorce is a solution if there has been a catgastrophic collapse of trust. If the parents in the ‘house sharing’ story could still trust each other enough to make that situtation work &ndahs; then they should have stayed married.

    4. Jess on July 13th, 2007 7:17 am

      David — I’m sorry, but you’re just wrong.

      Of course, the ideal is to find the right person and to stay with them for the rest of your life. But it just doesn’t work that way, all too often. A good marriage is hard work, and some marriages just _don’t_ work. And even if there isn’t physical or emotional abuse involved, some couples (and their kids!) are much better off splitting up.

      My parents certainly were — seeing the people they are now, 30+ years after they got married, I simply can’t imagine them ever being together. And having two households where I knew that I was loved, and that were stable, was so much better for me than it ever would have been living in a household where Mom and Dad didn’t love each other and were painfully unhappy.

      Personally, I think it should be harder to get married in the first place, and there should be many more effective support systems in place society-wide to help foster healthy relationships _before_ as well as _through_ a marriage. And it should be more universally recognized that marriage is hard, and not just about having a big fancy wedding and riding off into the sunset.

    5. David on July 14th, 2007 7:24 am

      Certainly, not all children of divorce are wounded—but many are. It’s a crapshoot; parents never know in advance how bad the effects are going to be on their brood.

      Nothwithsdtanding a few happy-ever-after counterexamples, I still hold that divorce is a wound to children

    6. Jess on July 14th, 2007 8:37 am

      And no one is saying that it’s not. But sometimes the parents staying together causes more wounds than if they divorce.

      All I’m trying to say is that this is not an issue you can slap an absolute on and expect your ideals to work for everyone.

    7. NV on November 8th, 2008 2:44 am

      I’m in a middle of a divorce. I’ve been married for about 20 years but have been with my ex 6 years or so before. I know that since i found out what type of person he really is, he is s big FAKE. A smooth talker, think he’s a ladies man etc. he reminds me of danny devito. I look back and say to myself what really attracted him to me? Maybe he was a nice person. Anyways, I noticed something was wrong with him for about a year and he kept telling me nothing. I thought it was mid-life. Which I really think it was but he would NEVER admit it. Well, the girl he’s with used to babysit my boys, co-worker of his, we used to do things with her so, and boyfriend and family. He and his atty would accuse me of trying to be in the middle of our boys to say that I’m the one insisting that they don’t want to see her or have anything to do with her. Well,they had to get interviewed by the court and the court ruled out that I really didn’t have anything to do with their decision on how they felt. My ex still as of this day still denies this and now they have to get interviewed again. Our boys have told him several times that they do not want to see her or have anything to do with her. He’s an idiot because he can’t see what he’s doing to our boys. He’s only thinking about himself and that he feels he did nothing wrong and it’s all my fault the reason we are where we are. He can point the finger all he wants at me but as long as I know that I never committed adultery but valued my wedding vows. So, now our boys feel that they really do not have a voice or decision in what they want. They don’t want to live with her or anything. She is just a low life 26year old that got leftovers because her boyfriend didn’t want to marry her because she had issues, so she got a 47year old that’s going to old soon and yet he has to raise a 7month old. The two don’t realize that they have broken up two families and yet they feel they had no faults in any of this. What are the children to make of this all and how are they to live and cope with this situation where they can’t be heard? I dont want to put our boys into the interviewing process again. What do you suggest?

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