FOR MEN AND WOMEN with children of any age, divorce becomes a challenge to maintain, establish, or reestablish caring and loving relationships with them, no matter how alienated you are from each other. How well you will relate to each other is critically dependent on the way you handle your separation and legal divorce.

Think for a moment about what "the divorce made in hell" does to the self esteem and love children feel toward themselves and their parents. When parents perpetuate the war against each other that began in their marriage and continues in unabated fury in their separation and divorce, it can have a devastatingly negative effect on their children's social and psychological well-being. When children hear their parents repeatedly call each other "deadbeat," "untrustworthy," or "irresponsible" in the heat of their divorce, the children learn to mistrust themselves and the world.

Parents are the children's entire world in the early years of their development. Even with all the talk about social and economic factors causing so much insecurity, anxiety, anger, envy, and bitterness in children these days, parents are the primary determinants of their children's outlook, behavior, and ability to cope constructively with the slings and arrows of this world. This does not mean that economic and social factors are irrelevant. To the contrary, it is extremely important to have support systems such as decent schools and decent jobs at decent pay. But parents come first. They are the ground children learn to stand on, while the support systems are superstructures that can have little positive effect if parents don't take primary responsibility in enabling their children to grow up as valued human beings.

A child watching his or her parents savaging each other in the divorce learns that the world is a treacherous ocean in which he or she might drown at any time. If you can't count on the persons you love and trust the most— your mother and father in your formative years—who can you count on to give you the security you need?

If parents continue to focus on blaming each other long after their legal divorce takes place, the self-esteem of their children plummets. Such children begin to feel: "I am made from both my mom and dad and I love them both. But if my mom thinks my dad is bad, then the half of me that comes from my dad must also be bad. And if my dad thinks my mom is bad, then the other half of me from my mom must also be bad. Does that mean I'm not really worth anything as a person?" If a son or daughter expressed themselves in the above way to both of their parents, their mother and father would both be shocked.

Since children are enormously resilient, parents can correct the children's misconceptions of the impact of divorce. However, in order to provide a new, ongoing sense of positive self esteem in their children and a new stable sense of emotional and physical security, parents need guidelines as to how they can make this come about.

By becoming aware of how children may think and feel about divorce, you can empower yourself to correct their attitudes and behaviors and reassure your children that they did nothing whatsoever to cause your divorce. You can assure them that you love them and that they have nothing to fear, as evidenced by your ability to solve new problems constructively. Above all, you can learn to act in a manner that will allow the children to love both parents.

Mel and Pat Krantzler are co-authors of The New Creative Divorce. They are directors of Creative Divorce, I Love & Marriage Counseling Center.

ACTION:
Put more time and energy into improving your relationship with your children.