Will Your Child Be a Casualty of Your Custody Fight?
Ah, to be happy at home. And no time of year conjures that thought better than Thanksgiving. Christmas is kind of the end all, be all, but its movement from year to year (mid-week this year) makes it a tough holiday to navigate. Thanksgiving is always Thursday, and except for retailers and restaurants, just about everyone accepts it as a four day holiday allowing ample time to journey over the river and through the woods to some family member’s house and spend some time.
Meanwhile, an article published a few months ago by an outlet called Bold Media reminds us that in a day when half of marriages end in divorce, there is a large sea of unhappiness out there and it is seriously afflicting our children-and not just in the short run. I read this following a week where the decisions issued by the Superior Court contained two where kids were subjected to years of relentless litigation over their custody by parents who just would not let go. You won’t see a specific chronicle of these cases from me, because, in both of them, the parents wrote their own appellate briefs and did so defectively; such that the court indicates it really couldn’t get to the merits.
The central topic here is the damage inflicted by this kind of warfare. Sadly, parents tend to view their children as adults in miniature; failing to appreciate that developmentally, children don’t have emotional mechanisms to cope with family warfare. The article by Phoebe Mertins catalogues the consequence of enduring quarrels over “right parenting.” Here is the list:
- Children become hyper-vigilant about conflict. Like a submarine, they can’t predict when it will surface and how serious it will become.
- Children struggle with commitment. They are taught in school and in church about the importance of family commitment. Yet, at home, they see parents whose commitment to each other is vacillating or has given way to relentless hostility.
- Suppressed emotions. A child facing parental conflict is constantly on edge -fearing that
- An expressed viewpoint or emotion will be used as ammunition in their parents’ ongoing conflict. A father wants to encourage football. Mother prefers soccer. The child might have a real preference but senses the danger inherent in expressing it because it will alienate one of his parents.
- A skewed view of normal family life. Conflict becomes normalized. Again, the outside community celebrates family life as a means of growing together. Children of high conflict relationships can’t square this idealized family life with what is going on in their parents’ relationships. They watch television where comedies portray family disputes and misunderstandings as humorous. Meanwhile, they aren’t seeing any laughter (canned or otherwise) in their family drama.
6. Trust issues. Children would like to be open about their wishes. At other times, they want to confide in a parent. But if that confidences is betrayed in some way or twisted by a parent pursuing an agenda, children will withdraw and accept the fact that there is no one they can talk to openly who will try to see the problem through their eyes.
7. A divided response to the conflict. Depending on their own personalities, children often divide over how to respond to high conflict custodial arrangements. Some withdraw and hide from any involvement. These children can sometimes harm themselves by cutting or other self-destructive behaviors. Other kids are wired differently and ally with one parent yielding concerns over parental alienation. They may also adopt their own forms of aggression and display them at home or in school where they are said to bully siblings classmates.
8. Divided approaches to responsibility. This can happen with all children but when there is high conflict in a divided family arrangement, some children will try to be model kids while others will engage in erratic and dangerous behaviors. It is not uncommon to see children in the same household adopt completely different approaches with one child having the perfect attendance and report card while his/her sibling won’t go to school at all. The one child hopes that model behavior might encourage similar behavior by the parents. The other child resorts to punishing the parents by acting in anti-social ways.
9. Intimacy issues. The data seems clear that young men in particular are having challenges forming adult relationships that are lasting. Whether this correlates to conflict between parents in childhood is not established. But, if your childhood is one marked by constant warfare between your parents, why would you want to risk replicating that aberrant behavior.
10. Negative views of marriage. This really is a derivative of the intimacy issue.
The list goes on reaching 17 but much of this is a spin on the first eight enumerated items. High conflict among parents can affect a child’s self worth, trigger anxiety or depression and/or suppress the desire to express needs that might trigger conflict. It can also produce children who become overly dependent while others can’t wait to sever ties with a conflict laden custodial environment. Again, the child’s personality and the approaches of the parents to that conflict have lots to do with these reactions. One might think that a child raised in a battleground situation could not wait to depart from it for college or employment. But some children stay in hostile environments because they have figured out how they can “manage” in it. The thought of heading into the outside world when you perceive that it’s just another set of now unknown viper dens is harrowing. These children don’t know how normal relationships operate and tend to assume that high conflict is normal because it is all they have seen.
If forced to read Ms. Mertin’s article, almost no parent would want any of this for a child they profess to love. Yet the custody cases we have seen this year in the appellate world seem to indicate that parents in pursuit of the “right” custodial result cannot discern that their children are suffering; some in silence, others not. The other reality is that judicial systems are designed to hear evidence and reach a fixed conclusion. They are not well equipped to manage anger infused households on a daily, monthly or annual basis.
Have a peaceful Thanksgiving and realize that in the long run your kids don’t really care whether they eat the bird in mom’s custody or dad’s.