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Home › Articles › Parenting Strategies › Dealing with Divorce

Dealing with Divorce

3 Steps to Help Your Preteen Cope

By Teri Brown

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3. Reassure
One of the most challenging issues parents face with their preteen during a divorce is that children of this age tend to place themselves in the middle. They often feel responsible for managing their parents' post-divorce relationship.

"Older children are better able to separate themselves from their parents' conflicts, and younger children tend to see these conflicts as beyond them, but preteens may take an active role in trying to control them," Grelling says. "This is often overwhelming and frustrating to children, leaving them feeling caught in the middle. It is important to reassure them that the divorce is not their fault or their problem to solve, despite how much you appreciate their support in other areas."

Grelling offers the following tips on helping preteens deal with the divorce of their parents:

  • "Minimize the level of overt conflict with your ex-spouse, even if this means backing down from disagreements, letting them 'win' in legal battles, etc. If the two of you simply can't have a civil relationship, minimize the amount of contact you have so that you don't fight in front of the child. These conflicts are the single greatest source of stress to children of divorce.
  • "Try to maintain some consistency and collaboration in parenting with your ex-spouse. Perhaps the greatest developmental threat to preteens from divorced families is that parents don't set limits in an effort to win 'popularity contests' with the child, or that the childhimself takes advantage of the poor communication between households to take inappropriate risks.
  • "Stay involved with your children. This is especially important for fathers of preteen girls. Evidence suggests that even fathers from itact families tend to pull away from their daughters during these years. Following a divorce, this is often extreme, and many fathers lose contact completely within a few years after separation. We know that the long-term effects of this are potentially devastating for both boys and girls during their adolescence.
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