Well, research shows that the number one predictor of how well your kids are going to handle the divorce is how much conflict they experience.

And this is something that we’re going to spend a lot of time on in another episode where we’re going to interview a child psychologist and really talk about her research in those findings. But for purposes of today, we’re going to accept that research as true. And we’re going to accept that if you can minimize conflict for your kids while you’re going through this process, it’s really going to help them and it’s really going to lessen the long term impact of the divorce on them, and on the relationships that they’re going to build going forward.

When I think about this topic, I think about people that fall into two categories. And the first are what I would call the blatant violators. These are the people who in front of the kids are disparaging the other spouse, ‘your mom is a terrible person,’ ‘your mom is a terrible parent,’ or much worse, ‘your mom is a whore,’ your mom is some terrible thing that they’re saying directly in front of their kids, or ‘your dad is a jerk,’ ‘your dad is a no-good’ whatever. Obviously, these are the people who are the blatant violators. They’re the ones who are going out of their way to create conflict for the kids, forcing them to pick sides, forcing them to see the world through the eyes of the parent who’s just angry and mad and wanting to turn the kids against the other parent. Obviously, that’s all bad. And everybody should stop doing that. The more dangerous category of people that I see are what I would call the well-intentioned yet unaware violators. So they are the people who are not directly saying something negative, or they think they’re not saying something negative. But they’re saying other things that are really harmful, and they’re just not aware of it. And it may sound obvious, or you may be thinking, well I never do that… I never say anything bad about the other parent in front of my kids. Well, you may. And let me give you an example.

I had a client who told me very proudly, as though she had solved some big problem in her life, that she just tells her kids, we are not going to say anything bad about your dad. And when she said that to me rather than smile and congratulate her for her restraint… I must have like made a face or winced or something because it’s just a more subtle way of doing the exact same thing that the blatant violators are doing. And so on the surface of it, it seems okay, right? It’s got a good intention. We’re not going to say anything bad about your dad. But when you unpack it, this very simple statement is very harmful for a bunch of reasons. First of all, it assumes that there’s bad things to say about your dad, but we’re just not going to say them. And by saying we know that there’s bad things, but we’re not going to say them. It’s very conspiratorial, it’s inherently taking sides. It’s inherently saying to the kids, we have a little secret society where we know that this is true, but we are not going to say anything about it. So it’s damaging in that respect. It’s also damaging because we know these things to be true. But we’re also going to keep it buried inside and not deal with it and not talk about it. So on about three different levels. This is really, really not going to be a helpful thing for you to do or say even though you think you’re being neutral. You think you’re taking the high road; we’re not going to say anything bad. What you’re really saying is there’s a lot of bad things to say and we just have to keep them inside… so what can you do instead?