MIND MOVES Marie MurrayParents may regard separation and divorce as the solution to their problems. Their children rarely agree. Few are the children who welcome it. Many are the children who are deeply distressed.
Additionally, the desire to divorce is seldom equal among partners, so that the parent who neither sought nor wished the marriage to end may feel angry and betrayed by the process. Children are usually aware of this, regardless of what they are told.
A high proportion of children believe something they did, or did not do, contributed to the family "downfall". This guilt imposes an inappropriate burden on children who may spend their childhood accommodating their parents' new arrangements without due regard to their own needs.
Conversely, other children may work to sabotage every effort at "successful" separation, in the vain hope that if they are sufficiently disorderly and distressed their parents may be forced to reunite, if only to deal with their disruption. Sadly, there are too many instances where the only person sabotaged is the young person who finds him or herself in trouble in every sphere.
Separation is not a single incident but a series of events. It is a family process that imposes change and intrudes into every corner of family life. For adolescents it can be particularly difficult because adolescence is already a time of immense change and sufficiently stressful transitional tasks without the additional burden of the almost inevitable parental acrimony that accompanies separation.
The immediate and long-term impact of separation on children and adolescents has been the subject of intense research, particularly since the seminal Wallerstein and Kelly investigations in the 1970s. Clinical research findings also emphasise "the unparalleled stress and psychological pain" experienced by young adolescents when their parents separate.
Emotional reactions may include shock, fear, self-blame, anger, anxiety, sadness and grief. Behavioural reactions may include unruly outbursts, or alternatively, age-inappropriate compliant and quiet behaviour. There is an increased risk of use of substances to dull the emotional pain.
Academic work and concentration may become more difficult as young people worry about the future, if there will be enough money, if they will have to move house or school, whether or not to invite friends home or hide their new family status, if their expectations for future opportunities are now altered and how they will tell their school friends and teachers that their parents have split.
Tension in extended family relationships is not unusual and loss of contact with special aunts, uncles or grandparents can occur. Occasions for family celebration can become convoluted challenges to family diplomacy. Traditional times of family togetherness can become conspicuously separate celebrations.
Some adolescents cope by distancing themselves from family, keeping busy with activities and friends, denying the significance of the changes or that they have any emotional impact on them. Others may react with acute sadness and mourning or resent being caught in the middle between parents' conflicts and their own conflicting loyalties to each parent.
Many young people grieve the absence of the other parent, particularly if the time spent with that parent becomes uncertain, limited or infrequent. Others, for whom 50/50 living arrangements are made, may equally resent the division of their world into two homes and two styles of parenting, particularly if reports of life with the other parent are expected on their return from either dwelling.
A common adolescent reaction to parental separation is to become excessively concerned about the health and welfare of the parent who is primary caretaker, especially if that parent seems to be financially or practically unsupported in the new arrangement.
In instances where there is any perceived abandonment by the parent who leaves the family home, excessive anxiety is experienced about the possibility of the remaining parent also departing, either because of anger, inability to cope or physical illness.
One of the more catastrophic losses occurs if the family home has to be sold. It erases the emotional evidence of the time and place before family change; severs the one concrete constancy during this time of considerable change.
But perhaps the most difficult adjustment expressed by adolescents is to new relationships formed by their parents. Embarrassed by parents' more visible sexuality now that their parents are single again, adolescents usually resent the presence of any new partner in their parents' lives, especially in the early stages of separation.
They may begrudge sharing their parent's time, or perceive that person to be the source of parental defection from the home; resent attention being squandered on someone they believe to be a family intruder or they may fear the hurt one parent will experience if they hear of a new partner in the other parent's life.
Most of all young people fear how they will cope with the stress of being "teens between" parents. There are many ways to ease this, which will be the subject of the next column.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
Marie Murray is director of psychology at St Vincent's Hospital, Fairview, Dublin.
A conference: Changing Families - Surviving Separation will take place in Menlo Park Hotel next Saturday organised by Galway Youth Federation (GYF) in association with the Marriage & Relationship Counselling Service (MRCS), which service co-ordinates The Teen Between Service on a national level.