It’s my belief that kids of divorce should live an equal amount of time with both parents. I feel it’s important to keep everyone as connected as possible. It’s been my experience the courts generally agree with this too, unless there are physical dangers for the children, signs of abuse or neglect, or the distance between the homes is too great. For the latter, that’s what Summers are for – it’s when you can really start to equalize things for the kids.
You don’t need a psychology degree to comprehend the importance of a healthy attachment between kids and both of their parents (especially during divorce), but you do need a heart, some compassion, and integrity to get it.
You’ve seen it before where one parent lacks those qualities and triangulates the kids into the spousal conflict because of an inability to integrate the reality of the divorce into his/her personality type. Dr. Craig Childress, a clinical psychologist in Pasadena, CA says that personality type has a fear of abandonment and inadequacy. Childress says that type of parent puts a great deal of energy into keeping kids away from his/her ex-spouse to “show them” just who’s been abandoned, and who the inadequate parent is. The kids in this scenario lose… BIG TIME.
Why not make it easier on the kids?
Parents who control the amount of time children of divorce spend with their other parent are fostering a new hallmark of the parent-child relationship: Anxiety.
And it’s not just my opinion – studies show kids of divorced parents are far less stressed if they live part-time with each parent.
This contradicts some (vengeful) parents’ thinking that kids who move back and forth between homes have a social disruption and higher stress. Researchers at the Centre for Health Equity Studies in Stolkholm, Sweden wanted to know for sure.
The hypothesis: Kids who lived part time with both parents (of divorce) are less stressed than those who lived with just one parent.
The researchers looked at national data from almost 150,000 12 and 15 year-old students and studied their psychosomatic health issues including sleep problems, difficulty concentrating, loss of appetite, headaches, stomachaches and feeling tense, sad or dizzy.
They found 69% of them lived in nuclear families, 19% spent time living with both parents and about 13% lived with only one parent.
Not surprisingly, kids in nuclear families reported the fewest psychosomatic problems, but the more interesting finding was that students who lived with both of their separated parents reported significantly fewer problems than kids who lived with only one parent.
Translation: kids of divorced parents are happier and healthier with both parents playing an equal active role in their daily lives.
An argument made for anything less is a disturbingly transparent logical fallacy.
Hot topic – more to come,
Tanya B.
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