Separation is hard on parents. It is harder on children.

What is actually happening

Eleven things about children and separation.

The first four are what the separation looks like from a child's position. The rest are what reduces the damage, and all of them are within a parent's control.

1. 01

   The two of you are not on the same timetable

   Psychologists describe the loss of a long relationship in terms close to bereavement — shock, denial, fear, depression, anger, sadness, and eventually acceptance. Both parents go through it. Almost never at the same time.

   The person who initiated may have been working through it privately for a long period before saying anything. By the time they speak, they have arrived at planning: schools, money, property, the practical future. The other parent is starting the cycle at that moment, and reasonably experiences the first parent's focus on logistics as coldness about the relationship ending.

   Neither reaction is wrong. But the mismatch is responsible for an enormous share of early post-separation conflict, and recognising it for what it is takes some of the heat out.

2. 02

   Children are told far less than parents think

   Most children are not adequately informed about what is happening to their family. A substantial minority report that nobody spoke to them about it at all, and only a very small proportion feel they were given a full explanation.

   Where each parent gives a different account, the confusion compounds — the child is left to reconcile two incompatible stories about their own life, usually by deciding one parent is lying.

3. 03

   The conflict harms them, not the schedule

   Parents overwhelmingly focus on how many nights the children spend with each of them. The evidence points somewhere else: the level of conflict between the parents predicts how children fare far better than the division of time does.

   Moving between two households that are at war is genuinely hard work for a child. They learn to modify their behaviour in each house to keep each parent happy, which is why children commonly tell each parent a different thing — the version they believe that parent wants. Managing an emotionally volatile environment displaces the attention that should be going to school, sport and friendships.

   Worse, children frequently read parental unhappiness about the arrangements as being about them. The internal logic runs: they are angry about the time I spend with them, so they are angry about me, so I must be the problem.

4. 04

   What it looks like at different ages

   Reactions vary with age and, to some extent, with gender. Broadly:

   • The younger the child, the greater the short-term impact. Infants and toddlers cannot understand what has happened and may have difficulty with attachment to each separated parent.
   • Around five, children do not readily conceive of a parent as having any role beyond being their parent — so they read a parent's emotions and behaviour as being about them, and blame themselves.
   • Between five and eight, children may try to distract parents from conflict by misbehaving.
   • Between eight and twelve, children may consider intervening, or actually do so.
   • Older adolescents tend to remove themselves — spending more time away from home, which can shade into risk-taking.
   • Boys more often experience parental conflict as threat; girls more often turn it inward as self-blame.
5. 05

   A quiet child is not necessarily a settled child

   Most children experience some confusion and dissatisfaction about post-separation arrangements. They are the ones doing the moving between houses and seeing less of each parent than before.

   So an absence of complaint can itself be the signal. It often means a child has decided not to express their own needs because their parents seem unable to absorb them — and in some cases the roles reverse entirely, with the child managing the parent.

6. 06

   Reduce the conflict. That is the whole task

   Resolve the money and the arrangements, and stop re-litigating them. Do not become fixed on the night count — parents count nights, children do not. What children consistently report wanting is not a particular schedule. It is for the fighting to stop.

7. 07

   Tell them the same story the other parent is telling

   Which means discussing it, negotiating it, compromising and agreeing on it first. That is work, and it requires the kind of communication most separating couples are least capable of at exactly that moment — which is one of the more useful things a mediation can be used for.

8. 08

   Build a working alliance with the other parent

   Children do not only have a relationship with each parent individually. They have a relationship with the relationship between their parents, and they monitor it closely.

   The more cooperative that relationship, the better the child does — and the better their relationship with each parent separately. You are not required to like each other. You are required to be able to run a logistics operation together for a decade.

9. 09

   Do not denigrate the other parent

   Children identify with both parents. They hear criticism of one as criticism of a part of themselves.

   Denigration is often subtler than abuse — "he left us", "she does not care about us" does the work without a single insult. Keep a clear line between how you feel about your former partner and how your children are entitled to feel about their parent. Those are different relationships, and your children's is not yours to manage.

10. 10

    Do not use children as messengers

    Not as carriers of messages, and not as a source of information about the other parent's household. Both put a child in the middle of a dispute they cannot influence and should not be inside.

    This means finding a direct channel with the other parent that works — dealing with each other as parents rather than as former partners.

11. 11

    New partners, and change generally

    Many parents agree not to introduce children to a new partner until a set period has passed, and not to do so without telling the other parent first. Both conventions exist to stop the other parent learning about a new relationship from their own children, which is a situation that embarrasses the child and reliably produces conflict.

    More broadly: an arrangement that suits your children now will not suit them in a year, and will be wrong in five. Build in review points at the obvious milestones — starting school, starting high school, a parent repartnering or needing to move. An arrangement with no review mechanism has a dispute built into it.