^ This is heartbreaking, PP, and should be required reading at the top of the Relationship Forum, so that all the cheating parents on there who insist that the cheating is an adult issue that doesn’t affect the kids can get a clue.

Divorced 6 years ago, my kids were 6 and 8. We kept it amicable. The kids seemed ok the first few years, when my ex and I were each living alone. The biggest issues were that the younger one was extremely attached to me, so we had to adjust the custody schedule to limit the number of nights he went in a row at his dad's house. As they got older, we were able to transition them to a less disruptive schedule.

About 3 years after the divorce, my ex introduced them to his girlfriend, and our then-11 year old remembered her as his dad's secretary. He started asking lots of questions, her kids told him that their mom got divorced at the same time we got divorced.

My son started seeing a therapist for anxiety as he moved into 7th grade, and he started talking to her about his "fear" that his dad had an affair. The therapist met with us and advised that the cat was out of the bag, and that we should address what happened.

Ex refused, said it was an adult issue. I followed the therapist's advice and had a long convo with my son about how sometimes, good people make bad choices, but that doesn't make them bad people. I talked about how much both his dad and I loved him, and the end of our marriage had nothing to do with him or his brother. I reminded him how good of a dad he had, pointed out all the fun vacations they had been doing since the divorce. Son seemed to really take to that idea that sometimes, everyone makes mistakes but that doesn't have to define who they are as humans.

Looking back, I can see now that over the next two years or so, my son started resisting going on joint vacations with his dad, girlfriend, and her three much younger kids. He would complain that the trips were too noisy and not fun because all they did was "baby things," which I know wasn't true based on his younger brother's experience on the trips. I assumed it was just the older one turning into a teenager, and teenagers can be surly like that.

Last year, my ex bought a house with that girlfriend and started blending families. Within a few months, my son started drinking at his dad's house. Leaving out empty beer cans, being obvious about it. I knew nothing about it until the school called me because he came to school drunk one morning. Clearly, it was a cry for help. Started cutting himself and wearing long sleeves to hide it. Told his friends he wanted to die.

At his first hospitilization for suicidal ideation, the floodgates opened. He screamed and raged at his dad, asking his dad if he was even sorry for cheating on his mom and did he even think what he did was wrong. The psychiatrist clearly told my ex and I that what my son was really saying was "are you sorry for what you did to HIM, how his actions hurt HIM."

My ex could not say the words that his son needed to hear. Could not say he was sorry for the way his relationship with his girlfriend started, and that he understands it was hurtful. Just insisted that "it's too complicated for you to understand, and you never should have had to know about an adult matter."

My son is more stable now, but wants nothing to do with his dad. Refuses to go to his house unless the other kids aren't there, and my ex refuses to modify the custody schedule because they prefer having all the kids on the same schedule so they can have alone time. He's on multiple medications for depression, and still struggles with suicidal ideation.

Younger son has proven remarkably resilient through all of this. So I'm not sure what to tell you - some kids will be fine, some won't, even when they go through the same exact divorce as their siblings.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Divorce is harder when kids are teenagers. Boys also usually act out. There are a lot of studies on this.
Divorces that are not high conflict and just want to put the kids first and not fight over every single thing are usually much easier on everyone including the kids. I’ve read that girls tend to fare better and kids usually do much better if they are under the age of 12. I personally think a divorce with an only child would be much more difficult than a divorce with a sibling when you can go through the experience together. In my experience the whole thing was pretty uneventful and seamless and my kids are perfectly happy and are exactly the same as before. But I have two girls and my kids are the same age as OP’s kids. We also did not tell them until everything was done and there was a place for them to live it was different we were not going to tell them “we’re getting a divorce but we don’t know what’s gonna happen”; we told them and all the details were sorted out so they did not have any anxiety about what was going to happen because we already had the solution.

You seem pretty invested in believing that your kids find the divorce to be a non-event. Wait until they are a little older - they will become much better at expressing their resentments. You may have handled this in the best possible way, but that does not change the fact that it changed their lives and will continue to impact them even as adults. Your narrative doesn’t seem to allow any room for their feelings, only what you want their feelings to be.

+1 as a child of amicably divorced parents, you’re trying wayy too hard to convince yourself of something that just is not true. Girls ARE, in general, pleasers and more likely to internalize hard things…so I definitely believe if you keep asking them for reassurance that they’re fine, they can sense what you want them to say and they’re saying it. But that’s far from actually being “perfectly fine”, trust me

So, say your parents had remained unhappily married-would you then have been 'perfectly fine'?

That's not the point, defensive divorced person. The point is, don't tell yourself the kids are fine after divorce. Either way, they aren't fine. Don't delude yourself.

The worst of all is divorce and then subsequent unhappy marriages.

So, you didn't answer the question. Ok.

I'm not the PP who said "perfectly fine", so I really can't. But it's annoying when divorced people think that if their marriage is terrible then their divorce is great. Sorry but both situations can be terrible. Kids are happiest in an intact family where the adults get along pretty well. Or with a single-parent-by-choice, that's fine too. If your marriage is unhappy, divorce is only a partial solution. Sorry but that's how it is. And getting defensive about how much your marriage sucked doesn't change it.

Or-the marriage can stink, but the divorce can be decent and amicable and everyone can end up happier and less stressed. My kids are, indeed, 'fine'. You do not get to decide that they aren't, particularly considering that they decided that themselves. You're nobody to my family, you have no say and your opinion means nothing to my family. Maybe try analyzing your words and attitude and you may find out the source of your unhappiness.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Divorce is harder when kids are teenagers. Boys also usually act out. There are a lot of studies on this.
Divorces that are not high conflict and just want to put the kids first and not fight over every single thing are usually much easier on everyone including the kids. I’ve read that girls tend to fare better and kids usually do much better if they are under the age of 12. I personally think a divorce with an only child would be much more difficult than a divorce with a sibling when you can go through the experience together. In my experience the whole thing was pretty uneventful and seamless and my kids are perfectly happy and are exactly the same as before. But I have two girls and my kids are the same age as OP’s kids. We also did not tell them until everything was done and there was a place for them to live it was different we were not going to tell them “we’re getting a divorce but we don’t know what’s gonna happen”; we told them and all the details were sorted out so they did not have any anxiety about what was going to happen because we already had the solution.

You seem pretty invested in believing that your kids find the divorce to be a non-event. Wait until they are a little older - they will become much better at expressing their resentments. You may have handled this in the best possible way, but that does not change the fact that it changed their lives and will continue to impact them even as adults. Your narrative doesn’t seem to allow any room for their feelings, only what you want their feelings to be.

+1 as a child of amicably divorced parents, you’re trying wayy too hard to convince yourself of something that just is not true. Girls ARE, in general, pleasers and more likely to internalize hard things…so I definitely believe if you keep asking them for reassurance that they’re fine, they can sense what you want them to say and they’re saying it. But that’s far from actually being “perfectly fine”, trust me

So, say your parents had remained unhappily married-would you then have been 'perfectly fine'?

That's not the point, defensive divorced person. The point is, don't tell yourself the kids are fine after divorce. Either way, they aren't fine. Don't delude yourself.

The worst of all is divorce and then subsequent unhappy marriages.

So, you didn't answer the question. Ok.

I'm not the PP who said "perfectly fine", so I really can't. But it's annoying when divorced people think that if their marriage is terrible then their divorce is great. Sorry but both situations can be terrible. Kids are happiest in an intact family where the adults get along pretty well. Or with a single-parent-by-choice, that's fine too. If your marriage is unhappy, divorce is only a partial solution. Sorry but that's how it is. And getting defensive about how much your marriage sucked doesn't change it.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Divorce is harder when kids are teenagers. Boys also usually act out. There are a lot of studies on this.
Divorces that are not high conflict and just want to put the kids first and not fight over every single thing are usually much easier on everyone including the kids. I’ve read that girls tend to fare better and kids usually do much better if they are under the age of 12. I personally think a divorce with an only child would be much more difficult than a divorce with a sibling when you can go through the experience together. In my experience the whole thing was pretty uneventful and seamless and my kids are perfectly happy and are exactly the same as before. But I have two girls and my kids are the same age as OP’s kids. We also did not tell them until everything was done and there was a place for them to live it was different we were not going to tell them “we’re getting a divorce but we don’t know what’s gonna happen”; we told them and all the details were sorted out so they did not have any anxiety about what was going to happen because we already had the solution.

You seem pretty invested in believing that your kids find the divorce to be a non-event. Wait until they are a little older - they will become much better at expressing their resentments. You may have handled this in the best possible way, but that does not change the fact that it changed their lives and will continue to impact them even as adults. Your narrative doesn’t seem to allow any room for their feelings, only what you want their feelings to be.

+1 as a child of amicably divorced parents, you’re trying wayy too hard to convince yourself of something that just is not true. Girls ARE, in general, pleasers and more likely to internalize hard things…so I definitely believe if you keep asking them for reassurance that they’re fine, they can sense what you want them to say and they’re saying it. But that’s far from actually being “perfectly fine”, trust me

So, say your parents had remained unhappily married-would you then have been 'perfectly fine'?

That's not the point, defensive divorced person. The point is, don't tell yourself the kids are fine after divorce. Either way, they aren't fine. Don't delude yourself.

The worst of all is divorce and then subsequent unhappy marriages.

So, you didn't answer the question. Ok.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Divorce is harder when kids are teenagers. Boys also usually act out. There are a lot of studies on this.
Divorces that are not high conflict and just want to put the kids first and not fight over every single thing are usually much easier on everyone including the kids. I’ve read that girls tend to fare better and kids usually do much better if they are under the age of 12. I personally think a divorce with an only child would be much more difficult than a divorce with a sibling when you can go through the experience together. In my experience the whole thing was pretty uneventful and seamless and my kids are perfectly happy and are exactly the same as before. But I have two girls and my kids are the same age as OP’s kids. We also did not tell them until everything was done and there was a place for them to live it was different we were not going to tell them “we’re getting a divorce but we don’t know what’s gonna happen”; we told them and all the details were sorted out so they did not have any anxiety about what was going to happen because we already had the solution.

You seem pretty invested in believing that your kids find the divorce to be a non-event. Wait until they are a little older - they will become much better at expressing their resentments. You may have handled this in the best possible way, but that does not change the fact that it changed their lives and will continue to impact them even as adults. Your narrative doesn’t seem to allow any room for their feelings, only what you want their feelings to be.

+1 as a child of amicably divorced parents, you’re trying wayy too hard to convince yourself of something that just is not true. Girls ARE, in general, pleasers and more likely to internalize hard things…so I definitely believe if you keep asking them for reassurance that they’re fine, they can sense what you want them to say and they’re saying it. But that’s far from actually being “perfectly fine”, trust me

So, say your parents had remained unhappily married-would you then have been 'perfectly fine'?

That's not the point, defensive divorced person. The point is, don't tell yourself the kids are fine after divorce. Either way, they aren't fine. Don't delude yourself.

The worst of all is divorce and then subsequent unhappy marriages.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Divorce is harder when kids are teenagers. Boys also usually act out. There are a lot of studies on this.
Divorces that are not high conflict and just want to put the kids first and not fight over every single thing are usually much easier on everyone including the kids. I’ve read that girls tend to fare better and kids usually do much better if they are under the age of 12. I personally think a divorce with an only child would be much more difficult than a divorce with a sibling when you can go through the experience together. In my experience the whole thing was pretty uneventful and seamless and my kids are perfectly happy and are exactly the same as before. But I have two girls and my kids are the same age as OP’s kids. We also did not tell them until everything was done and there was a place for them to live it was different we were not going to tell them “we’re getting a divorce but we don’t know what’s gonna happen”; we told them and all the details were sorted out so they did not have any anxiety about what was going to happen because we already had the solution.

You seem pretty invested in believing that your kids find the divorce to be a non-event. Wait until they are a little older - they will become much better at expressing their resentments. You may have handled this in the best possible way, but that does not change the fact that it changed their lives and will continue to impact them even as adults. Your narrative doesn’t seem to allow any room for their feelings, only what you want their feelings to be.

+1 as a child of amicably divorced parents, you’re trying wayy too hard to convince yourself of something that just is not true. Girls ARE, in general, pleasers and more likely to internalize hard things…so I definitely believe if you keep asking them for reassurance that they’re fine, they can sense what you want them to say and they’re saying it. But that’s far from actually being “perfectly fine”, trust me

So, say your parents had remained unhappily married-would you then have been 'perfectly fine'?

Anonymous wrote:

Divorce is harder when kids are teenagers. Boys also usually act out. There are a lot of studies on this.
Divorces that are not high conflict and just want to put the kids first and not fight over every single thing are usually much easier on everyone including the kids. I’ve read that girls tend to fare better and kids usually do much better if they are under the age of 12. I personally think a divorce with an only child would be much more difficult than a divorce with a sibling when you can go through the experience together. In my experience the whole thing was pretty uneventful and seamless and my kids are perfectly happy and are exactly the same as before. But I have two girls and my kids are the same age as OP’s kids. We also did not tell them until everything was done and there was a place for them to live it was different we were not going to tell them “we’re getting a divorce but we don’t know what’s gonna happen”; we told them and all the details were sorted out so they did not have any anxiety about what was going to happen because we already had the solution.

You seem pretty invested in believing that your kids find the divorce to be a non-event. Wait until they are a little older - they will become much better at expressing their resentments. You may have handled this in the best possible way, but that does not change the fact that it changed their lives and will continue to impact them even as adults. Your narrative doesn’t seem to allow any room for their feelings, only what you want their feelings to be.

+1 as a child of amicably divorced parents, you’re trying wayy too hard to convince yourself of something that just is not true. Girls ARE, in general, pleasers and more likely to internalize hard things…so I definitely believe if you keep asking them for reassurance that they’re fine, they can sense what you want them to say and they’re saying it. But that’s far from actually being “perfectly fine”, trust me

Anonymous wrote:There is more than one poster in this thread whose kids have done well. I'm one of them, and I'm not the quoted one above. My kids have done well, I know you want me to say oh it's awful and messed up, but in fact they're not and our lives are going along well.

My kids, 19 and 17, are ok *now.*

It’s been four years. The first three were really rough including a stay in a partial hospitalization program for one of them. Lots of expensive therapy for both. Increased risk taking and depression for the younger one. I wouldn’t say the divorce was high conflict on a sustained basis — we genuinely put the kids first. But if messed them up, no doubt about it. They’re “ok” now but I wouldn’t say they weren’t forever damaged.

Some of it is also seeing their mother without me as the buffer. Throw in her affair which one of them deduced and told the other about and there was more disillusionment. It also hurt my relationship with the older one who deduced the affair because she would constantly grill me for details and I would never discuss it with her so she saw that as an invalidation of her feelings (I couldn’t figure out how to talk about it without it sounding like I was disparaging her mother, which I wasn’t willing to do). I tried to redirect those questions to a therapist but she took that as rejection. It was a rough couple of years, I am not going to lie.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Kids are eight and almost 11. Been divorced for two years and they are absolutely fine and were always absolutely fine. We told them mommy bought a new house and they literally said “great! can we go pack?”

We never fought in front of them in fact we’ve barely had any relationship whatsoever at all. One of us kept the house one of us moved nearby. It was pretty much a non-event. They’ve been fine the entire time. I don’t really think marriage matters that much… I think it’s all about the parents. If you can be civil in front of each other and even sometimes go to the same school activities together, it really is fine. Their only inconvenience is really switching houses but they told me that they don’t really mind having two houses at all and sometimes the switching is annoying but it’s really not that bad because we live minutes apart.

This is a very common attitude. It then shocks parents when their kids as teens become sullen, withdrawn and emotional. Once they are teens they then have a better understanding of relationships and can express emotions and better reflect and understand their own emotional responses. They understand they can feel resentful for having to not have emotions before and making sure their parents felt ok.

So do yourself a favor now. Take some time to actually think about your kids. Think about what it must be like to suddenly not know which place is their house when people ask - where do you live? which house is they tell the person? Now they have 2 bedrooms - but which one do they know feel is their one? which one do they really feel secure in? the holidays are coming up - what they want is to wake up with both parents there to celebrate but they instead worry about what it will be like to split the day, will their parent be sad they aren’t there all day? will they be sad? Your kids have feelings. They aren’t robots.

Thus is what teens do basically by definition as they process the world around them and try to find their place in it. But nice job trying to pin it on the parents' divorce. The goths, punks, transgender, etc, are probably due to divorce too.

Anonymous wrote:Kids are eight and almost 11. Been divorced for two years and they are absolutely fine and were always absolutely fine. We told them mommy bought a new house and they literally said “great! can we go pack?”

We never fought in front of them in fact we’ve barely had any relationship whatsoever at all. One of us kept the house one of us moved nearby. It was pretty much a non-event. They’ve been fine the entire time. I don’t really think marriage matters that much… I think it’s all about the parents. If you can be civil in front of each other and even sometimes go to the same school activities together, it really is fine. Their only inconvenience is really switching houses but they told me that they don’t really mind having two houses at all and sometimes the switching is annoying but it’s really not that bad because we live minutes apart.

This is a very common attitude. It then shocks parents when their kids as teens become sullen, withdrawn and emotional. Once they are teens they then have a better understanding of relationships and can express emotions and better reflect and understand their own emotional responses. They understand they can feel resentful for having to not have emotions before and making sure their parents felt ok.

So do yourself a favor now. Take some time to actually think about your kids. Think about what it must be like to suddenly not know which place is their house when people ask - where do you live? which house is they tell the person? Now they have 2 bedrooms - but which one do they know feel is their one? which one do they really feel secure in? the holidays are coming up - what they want is to wake up with both parents there to celebrate but they instead worry about what it will be like to split the day, will their parent be sad they aren’t there all day? will they be sad? Your kids have feelings. They aren’t robots.

Anonymous wrote:OP, your daughters do not see this coming. Do not go into this conversation thinking they do.

+ 1

They are little kids not little adults

Anonymous wrote:Divorce has an impact. It's often generational. Many people posting saying their kids are doing great likely only look at the surface level impact or superficial things.

I've lived through my parent divorcing 3 times. My parent would say I'm fine. I would say im fine overall. My approach to relationships and people has been affected. I recognize that things don't last forever. I never went into my own marriage thinking it would last. Things don't have a sense of permanence to me. I'm not as trusting. My spouses parents were married 40 years. He went into marriage a lot more optimistic than I did.

I'm a successful adult with a job, home and I travel

Someone from a broken home is likely to divorce or never marry. Their kids continue the cycle most times.

I'm not anti divorce but obviously people saying there is no impact are in denial.

This. My life is not ruined. I'm "fine". "Children are resilient" stems from a study that said children of divorce had no *lasting* psychological damage *as adults*. But that doesn't mean it was easy for me as a teenager or that it's easy for me now. It's a giant hassle, especially as my parents grow old, and they have financial problems and failed second marriages that they would not have had if they had stayed married. Unhappily in your first marriage is better than unhappily in your second or third marriage IMO.

Now, when I was younger I would have put on my bravado and said flippantly that the divorce was for the best and everything's great. But that's only because I didn't fully understand the long-term impact and what it would be like for me as an adult. I just don't have that secure foundation that people have when they come from a happy intact family. And the logistical problems are getting worse.

OP, my kid's a junior in college.we split when he was two and a half. He's OK. He's got issues. We ALL do. Everyone on the planet. But the divorce made us better parents. Hindsight is 20/20.