Really? You Expect Me to Believe That It Matters What I Say?

Editor's Note: Identifying details of the people in this story have been changed to protect their identities.

So, I met with some friends' kids a few weeks ago. They're younger than the kids I usually work with, but they are so cool (despite their tweener status). The older is a girl, we'll call her Sara, and the younger one a boy, called Rob. Rob is getting ready for a huge transition: he's going to go from elementary to middle school. 

His sister is also transitioning: she's been accepted into a local math, science and technology magnet school. This transition will be even weirder for them than it usually is, as they will both be attending public schools for the first time — they're both private school kids, but their parents decided that they couldn't afford it any more, so this will be their first foray into the public school system!

Sara's excited, because she's going into a magnet program, but Rob is a bit nervous because all his friends are still in the old K-8 private school, and his neighborhood school hasn't got the best reputation.

"So, maybe we should move to a new neighborhood with a different middle school,"  their mother suggested one day when they were talking about Rob being nervous. They both thought that their mom was talking about moving the whole family, their animals (2 cats, a dog, and several hamsters), furniture, and outdoor stuff, but as it turned out, she was not.

She was actually telling them that they were going to move out away from dad, the animals, and the neighborhood they'd lived in all their life because she and their dad are going to divorce. 

Here's the thing about this scenario: this mom told her kids about this situation while their dad was not at home. All the pop psychologists advise telling children about this sort of life-changing event together, as dedicated parents. Everyone I know who has gotten divorced after having children, has made an effort to sit down with the kids together and tell them about the changes that they are getting ready to experience.

But this mom didn't. Not only that, she piled on as soon as she got them into the new place. 

"I blame your dad for this. He has a pregnant girlfriend, and he doesn't love the two of you like he loves himself. All he is good for is making money and driving people around."  When Rob told me about this, I became perhaps irrationally upset (after all his dad WAS a taxi driver!)

I work on a daily basis, with kids who are in high school, and some of them have the types of lives that make you go home and thank everyone you know for your minor troubles, that in the morning seemed so severe. Some of them come to school to get breakfast, lunch, and a lecture from their teacher, because at least that makes them feel like someone is paying attention.

So, it infuriated me that this otherwise stellar, professional woman with whom I had spent every major holiday over the last 12 years, was meticulously tearing holes into her children's hearts. Regardless of why a marriage breaks up, people generally agree that the children are not at fault, and should not be blamed, but also should not be treated as their parents' sounding boards for all that went wrong with their marriage. Maybe mom believes that dad had an affair and got the woman pregnant. Maybe dad believes that mom had been having an affair for six years and just going through the motions at home for those same six years. 

Regardless, it isn't for pre-teens to help their parents come to grips with why their parents split up. I know that I almost cut out my own tongue to make sure that I never badmouthed my boys' fathers, and I know many people who do the same about their ex-spouses. 

Sara and Rob are now really struggling. Sara has 'blossomed' and doesn't know what to do with her new body — how to clothe it, wash it, or whether or not to draw attention to it. But she can't approach her mother, because her mother is so upset about her dad finding another woman who had a nice body un-wrecked by having children. She "knows" mom wouldn't want to hear questions about her own body concerns. Rob is worried that his dad got another woman pregnant because he once told his dad he wished he wasn't his dad.

No matter how much I tell him that Dad loves him, Rob still believes his mother, that his father left his mother because he no longer loved the kids. And was replacing them with new ones. 

What we say to our kids matters. All. The. Time. Our kids are like sponges, learning to talk by listening to their parents talking to them, learning their mannerisms from those around them all day long, learning to eat different foods by being introduced to them by their caregivers. When they go to school, they absorb foreign languages best when introduced to them in pre-school, they learn math as easily as they learn how to zip up their zippers when they are introduced to it in kindergarten. As pre-teens they continue to soak up stuff. They start wondering about themselves, and become self-conscious about themselves; how they present themselves to others, and how others perceives them. They begin to realize that life is a series of complex emotions, and they pick up on the smallest slights. Even things they hear that has nothing to do with them, becomes all about them!

Poor little Rob, so worried about his father. I invited Rob and his father to my house the other night. They made pizza together and talked about summer vacation.  Then his father told Rob that he loved him.

"No, you don't!" Rob screamed back at his father as he burst into sobbing tears.  "You love HER best, and SHE's having a baby for you that you will love more than me because you don't LOVE me anymore!" 

It was a long night. It was a night of tears, a little bit of laughter, quite a bit of anger, and, in the end, some grudging understanding that dad loved, not only Rob, but Sara too. And that Dad had no "girlfriend", just an empty house with a dog, a cat, and some hamsters waiting to see Rob when he came to visit with his sister. 

Sara still has to adjust to her mother's mood-swings, Rob has to be continually convinced that his father still loves him, but both children will be OK. Because it truly does matter what I say. When I say that I love them, and have time for them, they listen.

When their mother maligns their father, they listen. When their father doesn't speak up, they hear that silence.  Because it matters what we say to our children (even when they are married and out on their own), we need to remember that our pain doesn't have to become theirs, and that our fears don't have to be translated onto them, and that our love shines through our actions, but sometimes even more through how we speak to them.

Even when they are grumpy, angry teenagers!