Child Custody, Consider the Kids in Your Dispute
Very often overlooked are the children in child custody cases, parents, courts and other interested parties spend hours arguing various merits of the divorce, or separation often overlooks how the child or children must feel.
Caught up between the two people that a child relies on for the first years of its life and often in the most formative years, a child does not understand why its parents are arguing. Very often the child will come to the conclusion that the parents are arguing over them, when often that’s not the case at all.
Children hear more than most parents realize, guilt becomes the order of the day when a child hears it’s parents whispered argument behind closed doors. If this continues for a while it’s understandable that the child will draw wrong conclusions.
When the situation gets more heated and eventually the parents decide that separation or even divorce is now on the cards. If not handled correctly by now the child will be convinced that they had done something wrong to have caused this situation.
Consider this situation parents threaten, scream, and insult each other, a child exposed to this sort of behavior from their parents are bound to be caught up in this dispute between the two people they rely on most. Parents in a battlefield tend to forget that their actions often lead to serious emotional trauma for the children. Children hearing this feel that their security is threatened, and can result in severe emotional instability.
If parents could only realize what they are doing to their children and seek counseling before it reaches the stage of separation or divorce. More often than not this does not happen and only after the situation has deteriorated and the parents have separated is child custody considered, will any sort of mediation be sought. A good majority of the time mediation is between the two lawyers, the children are still left out of the decision making process until it has been decided in court about child custody issues.
By this time the child or children are so traumatized by the whole experience, extensive and expensive counseling is required to help these children deal with an ugly situation.
Many times possessions become more important than the children, child custody battles will ensue and the children will feel like they are a tennis ball being bounced between two bats.
Forethought and taking time to evaluate a situation before it becomes a battlefield would go a long way to mitigate the traumatic experience many children face in a child custody situation.
Copyright Cynthia Taylor
December 17, 2009
