What Separation Does to Children, and What Actually Helps
What children actually need is not a perfect separation. It is two parents who are not using them to manage their own pain. Here is what separation really does to children, and what helps.
Topic
Family & Separation
Date published
Read time
7 min read
Almost every parent going through a separation asks some version of the same question. Am I damaging my children? It is asked with real fear, and often with real guilt. So let me start with something that I hope is genuinely useful, rather than simply comforting.
Separation itself is not what determines how children come through it. What determines it is what happens around them, during and after.
It Is Not the Separation Itself
Children are remarkably adaptable. What tends to cause lasting difficulty is not the fact that their parents have separated, but ongoing conflict, feeling caught between two people they love, or being used — even unintentionally — as a messenger, an ally, or a source of comfort for an adult's pain.
A child does not need their parents to still be together. They need their parents to not put them in the middle.
How Separation Moves Through a Family Differently
Separation does not affect everyone in a family the same way. Each person, parent and child alike, experiences it from their own position, with their own history, their own losses, and their own version of what is happening. A younger child may experience it very differently to a teenager. One parent may be relieved while the other is devastated. Recognising that each person's experience is real and different, without flattening it into one shared story, is an important part of moving through it well.
What Actually Helps
Children do best when they are given honest, age-appropriate information, when they are not asked to take sides or carry messages, and when both parents — even amid their own pain — can hold onto the fact that their child needs them to stay parents first.
A Note From Sabrina Barbara
I do not say any of this from a purely clinical distance. I have been a child in a separating family, and later, a separating parent myself. What I have come to understand, from both sides, is that separation does not have to mean lasting damage. It can mean two parents who, even apart, remain a steady and loving presence for their children.
Your children do not need a perfect family. They need parents who are still, in their own ways, okay.