A Note To Complicate Your Thinking Further: Listen Up!
If visitation is too much for a child, he or she will exhibit anxiety, confusion, learning problems, anger and/or depression and may be burdened with issues about attachment, security and control for the rest of his or her life. This is a tough situation for kids -- all the more so because the anger and distress the adults feel in a divorce can so absorb them that they don't even recognize the effects on their children. It should be noted, though, that just because your child exhibits anxiety and depression, it may not be the visitation causing it. It may be the adults around him or her. When adults convey the idea that they don't think life is under control, kids under 12 can become very anxious and depressed. Divorce is a time when, in my experience, fathers and mothers become hyper-sensitive to the mistakes of their ex-partners and oblivious to their own transgressions.
If you are in a divorce, get some comfortable, confrontive help from someone who knows what he or she is talking about. Don't wait till your child is ten years older and addicted to drugs and having promiscuous sex and engaging in criminal behavior to wonder if there was anything you could have done better in the process of tearing your child's life apart.
If visitation is too much for a child, he or she will exhibit anxiety, confusion, learning problems, anger and/or depression and may be burdened with issues about attachment, security and control for the rest of his or her life. This is a tough situation for kids -- all the more so because the anger and distress the adults feel in a divorce can so absorb them that they don't even recognize the effects on their children. It should be noted, though, that just because your child exhibits anxiety and depression, it may not be the visitation causing it. It may be the adults around him or her. When adults convey the idea that they don't think life is under control, kids under 12 can become very anxious and depressed. Divorce is a time when, in my experience, fathers and mothers become hyper-sensitive to the mistakes of their ex-partners and oblivious to their own transgressions.
If you are in a divorce, get some comfortable, confrontive help from someone who knows what he or she is talking about. Don't wait till your child is ten years older and addicted to drugs and having promiscuous sex and engaging in criminal behavior to wonder if there was anything you could have done better in the process of tearing your child's life apart.
AND don't dismiss your own damaging behaviors on the basis that your partner is doing them, too.
AND -- this little last set of words to the wise: 1) Anger makes you dumb. 2) Vengence is destructive. 3) Telling yourself you don't care is a load of crap you will regret later. 4) You picked your partner and either he or she was already the way he or she is now or he or she got that way on your watch. 5) Your child will not divorce his or her other parent and will always feel 50% made of that parent -- so all the dirt you dish on that other parent is dirt you are dishing on your child. 6) It takes about two years to get past divorce if you are one of the divorcing people. Kids don't get past it, they just learn to live with it.
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