This article originally appeared in The Sunday Age magazine "Sunday Life" on 4 June 2000.This article originally appeared in The Sunday Age magazine "Sunday Life" on 4 June 2000.
My ex and I both independently read it that weekend. While we had intended for our separation to be done on good terms for the sake of our children, this reinforced that concept, and gave us definite ideas about how it could be done. The actions we took as a result have made an immeasurable difference to the happiness of our children.
As far as I know, the chances of this article ever being reprinted or distributed elsewhere (including on the web) are minimal. So I have placed it on the web in the hope that it may help other separating people - and more importantly, their children.
If the copyright holder objects to this material being here, please contact me (e-mail address below) and I'll remove it.
Traditionally, divorce means the kids live with mum and see dad for a few hours at McDonald's every other weekend. But there is another way - and a growing number of divorced couples swear by it. By Paula Goodyer
It's Sunday evening and 38-year-old Jonathan, divorced father of two, is nursing the emotional bruises of a weekend spent with his young daughters. With the wisdom of hindsight, he wishes he'd handled the separation from his wife differently. If only he'd spent longer in the marriage, he muses, maybe 12-year-old Chloe, his oldest daughter, would be watching less Foxtel and reading more Harry Potter. If only he had more input into their everyday lives, maybe both she and her sister, seven-year-old Meg, would eat more fruit and fewer Coco Pops, If only he spent more time with them, maybe both girls would have better manners. If only.
But Jonathan*, a businessman separated for five years, says that most of the time it's hard to instill any of his values into his daughters. In the years since he left his marriage, his only opportunity to be a parent is during school holidays and every second weekend when, he says, his kids expect to be taken on outings. But Jonathan wants to be more than a Disneyland Dad.
He aches to have his kids around him doing "normal stuff" but complains that his former wife has brought his daughters up to need constant entertainment. Now, weekends are turning into a battleground as, besides playing games and arranging bike rides and movies, Jonathan flexes parental muscle about bedtimes and table manners and his kids protest - especially Chloe who, teetering on the edge of adolescence, is starting to flex some muscle of her own.
"Now, she says she doesn't want to be with me," he sighs. "I'll ring her up and she'll make excuses not to see me at the weekend. I can feel my kids growing away from me. When you walk out of a marriage, you just don't realise how excluded you can become."
Meanwhile, on that same Sunday evening, Chris, an artist, has delivered his kids, nine-year-old Ellen and five-year-old Josh, along with their teddy bears, back to the house they share with their mother, Fran, every second week. Unlike Jonathan, Chris has never been a weekend dad. From the moment he and Fran split up two years ago, he was keenly aware how easily fathers can become sidelined as parents and was determined it wouldn't happen to him.
"There seemed to be this assumption that, as a mother, Fran knew what was best for the kids and that she'd call the shots and set the rules," he says. "That's when I realised I had to assert my rights as a parent so I made sure I saw the kids every day. The decision to co-parent - for the kids to live with both of us - came when I realised my kids were more important to me than my job."
Telling his boss that he would have to work fewer hours was what Chris dreaded most and he's convinced his career has done a backflip as a result. But making up for this is a sense of exhilaration as his confidence in himself as a father grows. He admits the first few weeks of juggling two kids and a job were a shambles but out of the chaos grew a new understanding of where he needed to polish his parenting skills: be better organised, be more selective about what the kids watched on TV and get to know their friends better. Now he just wants to be the best dad that he can.
There are some differences in the rules in each household - at Chris's place, bedtime curfews are strict and television is rationed to one hour a day, whereas at Fran's place, the kids get to stay up later and watch more TV. "But they don't whinge about it. They seem to accept that there are differences in each home," says Chris, who tries to fill the evenings with reading and other activities rather than television.
The time when Josh and Ellen are more likely to act up is during the changeover period between the two houses.
"They get very excited at seeing the parent they haven't been with," says Chris. "Sometimes, they get a bit naughty so we try and defuse this by having a break between going from one place to the other - we might stop off and visit friends and relatives, for instance."
"For children living in two different homes, parents are likely to see changes in behaviour, excitement or anxiety, on the day they change from one place to the next," says one family psychologist. "This re-entry phase can be difficult even when it's been a good visit and it can last from a couple of hours to a couple of days. It's best if parents can ease off on the usual rules and expectations for a few hours to give the children time to adjust."
But the parent of two teenagers who shared a similar arrangement with her ex-husband says the Sunday night changeover became so difficult, they decided to change the system. "It was the kids' idea to live with both of us. But we soon realised they found it a real pain having to pack up their things and move every Sunday night - and one more thing to blame on us," says their mother, Ruth. "When anyone got annoyed because they weren't getting their stuff together, the kids would come back with, 'well, the divorce wasn't our idea'."
Eventually, they decided to extend the time the children spent at each home, opting for their daughter to live with Ruth and their son to live with his father and meet regularly for dinner through the week. "It worked out much better," says Ruth. "When I thought about it, I wouldn't have liked to pack up and move house every weekend, either."
Our high rate of divorce means that 20 per cent of dependent children in Australia now live with only one of their natural parents, with the norm being that most kids live with their mother and see Dad every second weekend. But it's beginning to change. Although fathers like Chris are still in the minority, their numbers are growing as more separating parents opt to share the parenting. Increasing numbers of children now live in two homes instead of one, changing addresses every other week, or fortnight, or term, depending on the arrangements. At the same time, there's a growing recognition that the role of "weekend" parent can sometimes be frustrating and unsatisfying for both the parent - usually the father - and children.
The reason for this change, says counsellor Geoff Price, is partly because the women's movement gave many men the idea that they didn't want to be pigeon-holed by their gender any more than women did.
"Many men have realised they don't want to be stuck in their box of provider/protector/controller and that they want more intimacy with their kids," he says.
"Often, there's an unspoken agreement in marriages when kids come along that the father takes more responsibility for earning the income and the mother takes more responsibility of caring for the children," he points out. "But when marriages end, fathers often rethink what's important to them. They decide it's the kids who are the most important but that they've settled for having less time with them because they've been working to provide for them. Many fathers see providing as part of parenting," says Price. "But when marriages end, men often realise that limited time with their children isn't enough."
At the same time, he adds, the growth in divorce has made it easier to see more clearly the effects on children of both separation and the absence of fathers.
Back in the 1950s, when having separated parents was infused by as much shame as if your dad was doing time, divorce, rightly or wrongly, was seen as a strong predictor of emotional problems and delinquency. But by the 1980s, things had changed. As divorce rates soared, research findings become more optimistic, implying that most kids were resilient enough not to suffer major problems.
But now, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way, with "family breakdown" frequently cited as a factor in anything from teenage drug abuse to juvenile crime and more recent research showing that children of divorce have a higher risk of depression, anxiety and relationship difficulties.
According to Price, there's now a growing body of research into the effect on kids of absent fathers and, among the findings, are that children living apart from their fathers are more likely to have problems with education, have a higher risk of suicide and are more likely to run into trouble with alcohol and other drugs.
But, like many other professionals working in this area, he stresses that it's not divorce itself that wounds kids, the problem is the way divorce is handled. If there were a recipe for protecting kids from post-divorce fallout, a major ingredient would be cooperation between the parents - it makes for better parenting and less anxiety for the kids. But cooperation is often the first casualty of separation, especially when anger and hurt are often cranked up by an adversarial court system with its mindset of winners and losers. Nice people turn nasty.
Normally good, caring parents turned sour with a desire for revenge attempt to scuttle their children's relationships with the estranged parent. Absent parents ringing up to speak to sons and daughters are told that the kids are in bed. Parents who turn up at the appointed hour for an arranged visit find there's nobody home.
It's bad for kids, it's bad for parents and it doesn't have to be this way, insists Price, whose work as a counsellor specialising in relationships and mediation is part of a more hopeful trend to defuse separation hostility and improve the quality of parenting after separation.
In an ideal world, says Price, separating parents would consult a mediator before hiring a solicitor. "Rather than making a bee-line for lawyers and drawing the battle lines, parents are better off first trying to figure out how to make the best of the situation. We need to be saying 'what does each member of the family need and how can we negotiate something that meets all our needs?' We need to be saying, 'we can't change the past but let's do what we can to make things OK in the future'."
His approach is to steer parents out of combat mode and towards cooperation, helping them negotiate a parenting plan in which both parents come to an agreement about everything involving the kids - from who they'll live with and how they'll be brought up to issues like education, nutrition and how much TV is acceptable.
Post-divorce parenting won't be perfected overnight but there are hopeful signs of change - more couples are attending parenting after divorce courses now available through the Family Court and other organisations and the Family Court has softened some of the language of divorce.
Words like "custody" and "access" - which imply ownership of children - have been replaced by kinder words like "contact" and "residency". Along with the words, the rules are changing. Once, the responsibility for making decisions about the children's welfare was in the hands of the "resident" parent. Now that responsibility is shared between both parents, depending on which one the child is with at the time.
"It's very easy for contact parents to feel alienated and not part of their children's life," says Dr Carole Brown who is the general adviser, dispute resolution, of the Family Court in Canberra. Putting more emphasis on sharing the care of children is a way of making both parents feel involved. The court also offers parenting plan kits to help parents draw up agreements, as well as providing courses to help parents cooperate with each other and to give "absent" parents - still usually the father - some clues about how to parent, given the constraints of limited time.
Price's advice to contact parents is for them not to feel driven to provide endless treats and outings.
"There are other ways of connecting with kids," he says. "Like walks, reading, drawing and letting them see you get on with normal life - having them around to help you cook things or fix things, depending on the interest of the child, helps create intimacy. It's often moments when you're not doing very much with kids when they blurt out what they want to say and you need to create the space for that to happen."
Yet, he adds, contact parents often feel pressured to fill the space with activities, with the best of intentions.
At the same time, says Price, it's very easy for parents to get their needs as adults confused with the needs of children. "Our needs might be to feel close but the child's needs after a week at school might be to just veg out. He or she might not want intimacy at that particular time and as parents, we have to be sensitive to what children need."
"I see a lot of angry dads who want more time with their children," adds clinical psychologist John Waring, who encourages contact parents to try and be involved as much as possible with the child's school and to try and go to football or netball practice if their kids play sport. It's also a lot easier for kids to have a good relationship with a contact parent if one parent isn't denigrating the other, he points out.
"Some parents feel kids need to know how bad the other parent is but kids should be allowed to form their own opinion through having an open and honest relationship with both parents. It doesn't matter what mum thinks of dad, or vice versa, along as they keep it to themselves, otherwise it sets up issues of loyalty for kids."
For a while after he and his wife separated six years ago, Brendan Lynch was playing out his parenting role on the movies and McDonald's circuit and finding it totally unsatisfying. Besides finding it expensive, it wasn't conducive to talking to his kids and seemed to reinforce the fact that they were apart.
What changed things was when both Brendan and his former wife decided it was time to repair their relationship, not just for the sake of their children, but for their own completeness. After all, the things about each other which had drawn them together in the first place hadn't disappeared with the divorce, they decided.
Now, instead of picking up his two children and taking them out each Saturday, Brendan goes over to the house they share with their mother and her new partner an hour's drive away. He spends the day with them at their home, often staying overnight.
"We hang out, we play games, watch a bit of TV, ride bikes, go for bushwalks, just like anyone else does on the weekends," says Brendan. "I think that having both parents around at the same time makes a huge difference to the children. Kids whose parents divorce often have this fairytale that their parents will eventually be together again. But if that's not possible, I think it's good for children to see their parents together, making plans for them." Brendan, too, has a new wife and everyone gets on well. "We are an extended family," he says.
"I probably have more meaningful time with my children now than I did in the last year of the marriage. When you're angry and depressed, your head is somewhere else instead of focusing on your kids. For most divorced couples, the bitterness never goes away but if you can try and find those things that made you want to marry that person in the first place, you can establish a better relationship with them and have a better relationship with your kids as a result.
"Sometimes, I think there's a stereotype about divorce that doesn't help, as if society has an expectation that if two people get divorced, they're meant to hate each other and that it can almost become a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can always find the negative in something but if you think about it, you can find something positive, too."
Not far from Brendan lives his friend, Alex, who, since his divorce three years ago, has his three children living with him on Mondays and Tuesdays each week, while their mother, Katrina, who lives one stop away on the train line, has them on Wednesdays and Thursdays. Both take it in turns to have the children on Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays. Messy as this looks at first glance, it makes a lot of sense. One of the problems of sharing the parenting between two separate homes is that things often get left behind.
But Alex and Katrina have structured the week so that the same parent takes the kids to the same after-school activities every week so there's no risk of musical instruments, for instance, being left behind. It also means that if each parent has two child-free nights each week to do a class or go out because both parents share the weekends equally, no one ends up being a "recreational" parent. When they decided to separate, sharing the parenting was a foregone conclusion, says Alex. "Katrina didn't want to be a sole parent and I didn't want to be a weekend parent." His home-based job as a computer engineer gave him the flexibility to make the arrangement possible.
But when he explained this to his solicitor, the reaction was that he could "do much better" if he pushed for sole custody. He'd get a bigger share of joint assets and more benefits. "You'll hold all the cards," the solicitor told him, spoiling for a fight. Appalled by this adversarial approach - and the legal fees involved - Alex and Katrina instead consulted Geoff Price who helped them deal with some relationship issues and fine-tune their property and parenting agreements, agreeing that each household would stick to the same rules and that each parent would consult the other before making any changes.
There are some differences in rules, concedes Alex. "The kids say I'm too strict about TV and that their mother is more lenient," he says. "But if the kids say, 'Mum lets us stay up until 11pm', all I have to do is pick up the phone and call Katrina and check."
"I am more laissez faire in some ways," admits Katrina. "I think it's because as a single parent, I feel less controlling than I used to. But, in general, our parenting styles are similar - we have a lot of common ground and we expect similar standards."
Shared parenting has many advantages. Children get to spend equal time with both parents in a more balanced relationship. When children see their father as the recreational parent, they're more likely to be in conflict with their mothers and create discipline problems for their fathers, says Geoff Price. On the other hand, it's not a solution for everyone. In order for arrangements like Alex and Katrina's to work, parents need to live close to each other, have the earning power to make it possible and be willing to cooperate.
"It also depends a lot on the age and the nature of the child," Price says. "Some one- to three-year-olds may need more time with their mother but, on the other hand, a one- to three-year-old who's used to spending long periods with their father may be able to cope with having more time with him.
"But in adolescence, when social life becomes all important, teenagers may need to live with the parent whose home is closer to their friends. Again, it comes down to considering everyone's needs and because needs change, arrangements need to be reviewed regularly."
For many women, the hardest thing about shared parenting is letting go of part of their role, but for Katrina, letting go was made easier by the fact that even before the separation, she was commuting two days a week, leaving Alex in sole charge.
"I'd already let go to a point," she says, but admits there were times at first when she found it hard not seeing the children for days on end. "I felt lonely for them. We have a very physical relationship with lots of hugs and I missed that. It also meant that there were things in their lives I wasn't part of and sometimes I had this feeling I was excluded from their lives."
Three years after their separation, Alex and Katrina are amicable and, unlike some parents, are not only able to go to the same school functions but are happy to sit next to each other as well.
"Sometimes, I have moments when I think of something critical to say about Alex but I bite my lip and if the kids say something critical about him, I don't buy into it. I'll just shrug and say, 'Well, that's the way he is'."
The sharing arrangement has made her more tolerant of her children, says Katrina. "Our relationship has improved. I used to be a real disciplinarian but I think the fact that I can have a break from the kids means that when problems come up, I can deal with them with more of a sense of humour.
"There's also a predictable period of time when I can work without interruptions. I can go to work until the job's done and not be watching the clock to get back to the babysitter. I think it's easier to do my work properly and my parenting properly - I'm not trying to fit these things together. It's really worth doing, worth struggling through that initial difficult patch, and your children will appreciate you for it.
"I think our kids have no doubt that they are loved by us and I think that's not always the case. Sometimes, kids feel as if one parent has deserted them."
* Some names have been changed.
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Article by Paula Goodyer, The Sunday Age "Sunday Life" and The Sun Herald 4 June 2000.