How Much Is Your Damage Harming Children
There's an enormous significance to continuity in life, especially for children. Did you destroy theirs? Would you?
Once you’ve made the most important decision you’ll ever make, it’s important to keep the dream you had for them alive. How significant is what you’re doing today going to be on the young lives you affect? If you have to ask, you either don't pay attention or were never exposed to the truth.
Anyone witnessing the effects of broken homes knows the impact that carries. Hearts get broken, lives are upended, and dreams get shattered. It can be the most traumatic event of your life when a significant relationship or marriage fails.
As flawed creatures, prone to mistakes in judgment and failed tests of character. Unfortunately, it happens more than people want to think about. It’s likely because all anybody can do is the best they can.
It’s a crappy sentiment, and it implies a couple of things. One is that we don’t always act like our true selves, not all of us anyway. Anybody can fail a test of their character and fall from grace.
Secondly, it implies that our heroes aren’t perfect. Even those people that we idolize or emulate aren’t beyond falling. Sooner or later, even Superman had his Kryptonite. Eventually, even he intentionally took Zod’s life.
What these flawed, imperfect beings do is on them. It’s their responsibility to make amends for their mistakes and the damage their choices bring upon others. But do they stop to consider those caught in the crossfire? What about the ones not involved in the immediate picture? Even worse, what about the ones who are involuntarily involved?
It’s Not About You!
It’s important that our young ones feel some sense of continuity. After all, it’s not their fault that things go awry regarding relationships. But too many people forget their responsibilities when children are in the mix.
Keeping a relationship going for the child’s sake isn’t a good idea. Unless both parties are equally committed to improving the relationship and solving their problems, keeping things going for the child’s sake means exposing them to all the harshness two people can be guilty of displaying. How many divorced people, or jilted lovers, make the mistake of not including continuity for the child in their post-relationship plans?
Many parents, stepparents, or surrogate parents, don’t understand the effect their breakups have on their emotional state, and subsequently on their children.
Kids with a supportive home life during a breakup in the family will become more resilient as they grow. For kids to do this, parents need to care for their physical, psychological, and spiritual needs to provide their kids with the needed support.
What doesn’t happen in many cases is that the parents, or partners in the relationship, fail to prioritize the children that are caught in the crossfire of their failed relationships. The pain and emotional distress may turn even the most loving parents into very self-absorbed people, causing them to forget their obligation to their young.
How can we do better if we face a relationship breakup and there are kids in the mix?
Learn To Co-Parent
If you can’t do anything else, learn to co-parent. This brings us back to the quick point that continual learning improves our lives. But in this case, learning to co-parent and committing to making that work is a way to minimize the damages your failed relationship will bring to the world around you. All that’s required is making your child the priority.
That’s simple to say. Remember that you are dealing with deeply troubling emotional states when going through this kind of upheaval in your life. For many, it’s hard to take themselves out of the equation, and that’s what’s required. There are some things you can do to help.
Commit with your ex that you’ll have open and honest communication with each other. Schedule regular times to have conversations about your children. Discuss their needs, feelings, and behaviors. This will affirm to your kids that while you may not be together, you’re still parenting together. Work with your ex on schedules, parenting, or any of the important life decisions.
Have a plan. Remember the saying those who fail to plan plan to fail. This isn’t where you want to fail, and children deserve the effort. Having a written plan, or agreement, that covers co-parenting can assist both you and the children. It’ll help you more productively co-exist with your ex. For the kids’s sake, it’ll help minimize conflicts, which can damage the kids the most. There are even co-parenting therapists. Where were these in the 90s when yours truly could have used them?
Put the kids first! Always! As people, we are selfish pricks and self-centered little bitches. This has to stop. What this means for those of us that are in fractured families, is we have to learn to compromise with the other parent for the children’s sake. It’s that simple, and that complicated. Compromising with someone who’s hurt you won’t be easy, whether it is mentally, physically, emotionally, or a combination of the three.
The Primary Needs must be met. Safety and consistency must be maintained between the two homes. Once safety is taken care of, having some level of consistency between the rules, routines, and expectations is going to make it easier on the children and will eliminate the children being able to play one parent against the other. Neither parent should always be the bad guy, and the one with the least access has to remember that being the cool parent isn’t going to help their children grow and mature.
Remain involved with your children’s lives. When you’re the absentee parent, you have no idea the damage you cause by not being involved with your children’s lives. This includes their schools, extracurricular activities, hobbies, and friendships. When parents do this, the kids feel loved and connected to each parent, and they don’t feel they have to choose one over the other.
Conclusions
Parenting is hard. It’s a lifetime commitment to pain, disappointments, heartache, and suffering.
“Children are gods way of making death less disappointing.”
— Evelyn Harper, Two and a Half Men
Now that most guys are considering a vasectomy, and women are cringing at the thought of trying this, let me remind you that parenting can also bring some of the greatest joys of your life. One thing it’s not is about you.
It’s not to be taken lightly, and that’s a problem we see all too much. When you commit to having a child or accepting responsibility for the results of biology, it shouldn’t be undertaken without a great deal of thought. Once begun, there’s no way that bell can be unrung.
The best and scariest thing that ever happened to me was becoming a father. I was far too young, but when my ex said she wanted to keep the baby, I committed to growing up. She, on the other hand, didn’t. After raising him, I know the pitfalls and mistakes.
If you’re in a relationship or marriage, and there are kids involved, remember that it’s your job to maintain a resemblance of normalcy in their lives if your relationship fails. It might be hard to see your ex but focus on the lives you’re mutually responsible for. Put your hurt, guilt, and sad feelings aside. Parenting is like a thirty-year career nowadays. So step up, and do the dammed job right when the picture gets murky. At least then you and your ex didn’t rob your child of what could have been.
References:
Psychology Today
healthychildren.org
Divorce Mag.com
About the Creator
Jason Ray Morton
Writing has become more important as I live with cancer. It's a therapy, it's an escape, and it's a way to do something lasting that hopefully leaves an impression.
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Comments (1)
This is a sensible and well written article and I agree with what you are saying here. There are some of the variables and a breakup. Sometimes one of the parents is so psychologically damaged that they are not capable of co-parenting. That's when grandparents or aunts and uncles can be very helpful to the singular parent that is doing the parenting.