What You Need To Consider When Planning to Tell Your Kids About Your Divorce

Telling your children about your divorce is not only difficult but also painful. It might be the hardest conversation you have in your life. Your children will definitely remember the conversation for a long time. Having a good Wilmington divorce attorney will help a lot with the divorce process but telling your kids about the divorce is all on you.

Your children may have noticed the signs of the divorce but having a conversation makes it official and it can get real very fast. When delivering such devastating news, communication and timing are the key. The following are some of the things you should keep in mind when telling your kids about a divorce:

• Tell them together
• Expect Questions
• Allow them to express their emotions
• Tell them about the future arrangements

Tell Them Together

If you have more than one child it is a good idea to break the news to all your kids at the same time and place. Parents should tell the children the news as a team too. Including the whole family has been shown to help children better deal with divorce.

Telling them together presents a united front and shows that the divorce was a mutual decision. Failure to do so may lead to the children to think that they are to blame for the divorce.

Using the word ‘we’ as much as possible in the conversation is a great tip for how to tell kids about divorce. The kids want to know that you as parents can still work together to perform your roles as parents even though you will no longer be part of the same household.

Expect Questions

Considering the magnitude of the implications resulting from the conversation you had with your children, you should expect to answer many questions. Quite frankly, your children deserve the answers.

The questions do not necessarily need to happen during the conversation that is why it is so important to follow up with each child after you have broken down the

news for them as a family. More questions will arise as the divorce proceedings go on.

Both parents should be open to answering questions together and separately.

Allow Them to Express Their Emotions

The emotions that may arise in your kids after you tell them of the impending divorce will range in type and diversity. You should also allow your children as openly as possible and be prepared to deal with the implications of the emotions.

The worst thing you can do is to make them feel as if their emotions are unwarranted. Understanding that it is a wound that may take long to heal is the best thing you can do to help your kids deal with their emotions.

Tell Them About Future Arrangements

One of the clear implications of a divorce is that things will not be the same moving forward. You should give your kids a rough idea of what will happen going forward in the future.

Will you still live with your spouse in the same house? Will they move out? Who will they be living with? What will visitations look like? The above are some of the issues you will need to address.

Having an experienced Wilmington divorce attorney could really help with telling your kids about the divorce. They have experienced the situation many times before. So if you want a divorce attorney who will be involved every step of the way, pick up the phone and call us now at (910) 769-7339.