Do not communicate with your ex-spouse after a divorce and prevent him from meeting with children … Not so long ago, this was a fairly common situation. Times are slowly but still changing. How exactly, our columnist, psychologist Lyudmila Petranovskaya, tells in the preface to the book “Independent Mothers”.
More recently, in the days of our great-grandfathers, divorce was a rarity, something almost unbelievable. Marriages were the same as they are now, different, happy and not so, but they usually persisted. And if the children remained with one of the parents, then only as a result of the tragedy — the death of the father or mother.
Then times changed, and today we keep the marital union only if we are really happy in it. And we do not hold on to relationships if the union has ceased to be happy. Divorce is legally easy, it is no longer a financial disaster or a collapse of social status. But it still hurts a lot. The loss of a marriage is always the loss of a loved one, an important relationship. Often this is a lot of difficult experiences: resentment, jealousy, anger, disappointment, longing. This needs to be dealt with.
Blinded by resentment and disappointment, adults did not think at all about the feelings of children.
And if there is a child nearby — a small one who does not understand anything, or an older one who suffers along with his parents, or a teenager who has a family crisis added to his own crisis?
When a wave of divorces swept the country in the 1970s and 80s, few adults could think about children. All forces went to fight with «him» or «her».
Very often, after a divorce, children could no longer see one of the parents (usually the father) and even grandparents, aunts and uncles from his side. It was considered quite normal to «open the child’s eyes» to how bad the other parent was. It was common to arrange a “jealousy scene” for him if he was still bored and wanted to communicate.
Many men sincerely believed that since they no longer love this woman, then the children now have nothing to do with them, and in general they don’t owe anything to “this bitch”. Blinded by resentment and disappointment, adults did not think at all about the feelings of children, did not take care of them, could not become a reliable support for them in difficult times.
I recall the story of a famous actress about the birthday of her six-year-old son. After a noisy day with guests and gifts, the boy still did not go to sleep, everything was spinning at the phone. Mom understood: he was waiting for a call from his father, with whom she had a very painful divorce and an extremely bad relationship. The phone was silent. The thought of calling «that scoundrel» herself did not even cross my mother’s mind.
And it was a pity for the son, but a malicious thought also visited: here, let him see that his father does not need him. As it turned out later, at the other end of the telephone wire at that time was the boy’s father, whom he wanted to call him all day, but did not want to talk to «this hysterical woman.»
Modern parents are ready to learn and change, and most importantly, to remain adults even in difficult periods of life.
Fortunately, Mom already had a new husband, and fortunately he was a foreigner, with different ideas about how to behave with a child after a divorce. At first he could not understand what was happening, and when he understood, he could not believe that adults, parents, were so infantile and cruel to a child.
He demanded dad’s phone, dialed it, and in a minute the happy child already heard his father’s voice, after half an hour he slept sweetly, and the next day dad arrived with gifts, and it turned out that adult grievances and claims were nothing compared to his joy.
But the vast majority of divorced mothers did not have foreign husbands, there was no one to help them see what was happening differently. Therefore, the children suffered, learned to hide their feelings so as not to anger and upset their mother, mothers decided that “he forgot everything”, and dads quietly drank alone on their children’s birthdays.
Because divorce appeared as a right given by law, but there was no culture of divorce, safety measures, especially for children. The consequences of this are still being raked by adults, now people, sometimes on their own, sometimes with the help of psychologists.
Times are slowly changing. Today, when divorcing or deciding to raise a child not in marriage, parents increasingly understand that they are responsible for him, for his feelings. That their own decision to change (or not to change) their life should not be a disaster for him, should not shake his confidence that he has a mom and dad, they both love him, will protect and care for him, even if they now live separately.
It is not so much the composition of the family that is important, but the relationship of the child with the parents — with each of them.
Modern parents are ready to learn and change, and most importantly, to remain adults even in difficult periods of life. Be a parent to your children. They read books, search for information on the Internet, turn to specialists, they creatively find new ways to organize their lives, overcome stereotypes, learn to negotiate and trust. And they succeed.
In families with one parent, the same wonderful children grow up, psychologically healthy, free, self-confident, as in traditional families. After all, it is not so much the composition of the family that is important, but the relationship of the child with the parents — with each of them. And of course, the state of the parents themselves, how they cope with life, whether they are happy, whether they are in harmony with themselves.