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Transcript

This Divorce Mistake Can Make Your Child Choose Sides · Children, Divorce & Family Psychology with Dr. Bill MacLaney

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: There's a divorce mistake that can put your child in a position they never were supposed to be in.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: And most parents don't realize they're even doing it because they feel completely justified in a moment.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: You may be telling the truth, you may not even think saying anything particularly negative, but over time your child can start feeling pressure to take one parent's side against the other.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Dr.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: Bill McLaney.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a clinical and forensic psychologist, and a significant part of my work involves separation, divorce, high conflict, and court-involved families, as well as damaged parent-child relationships.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to show you how this happens because it usually starts with much smaller comments and reactions than parents expect.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_00: It usually starts small.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Most parents are not sitting at the dining room table saying, your mother's a terrible person, or your father ruined our family.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: It usually starts much subtler than that.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: The child comes home from the other house and you ask a question with a little edge in your voice.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: They tell you they had a great weekend and your expression changes.
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: Or you say, I'm not going to tell you what your mother did.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: Which of course tells them there's something they're supposed to know.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Children are very good at picking up at that.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: They start to notice what is safe to say in each house, what they should probably leave out, and which parent gets uncomfortable when the other ones comes up.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody ever has to say, choose a side.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: The child can start feeling that pressure anyway.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: And this is an important point.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Children adapt to the psychological environment surrounding a divorce.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: If talking positively about dad repeatedly changes mom's mood, the child learns something from that environment, even if the mother never says a negative word about dad.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: The child starts to edit themselves.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: One of the first ways you see this is your child starts telling you less.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say they come home from the other parent's house and say, we went jet skiing.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: It was awesome.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: And you say, Oh, that's nice.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: But your face changes a little.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: You get noticeably quiet.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Your child notices.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: The next time they come home, they leave a few things out.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_00: After enough of those moments, you ask, What did you do with dad's?
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: And you get nothing.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody told the child to keep secrets.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: They simply learned that talking about having a good time with dad makes mom uncomfortable.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: And now the child starts to manage what each parent gets to see.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: They know which stories are safe in which house, when to change the subject, and when showing too much affection for one parent may create a reaction from the other.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: Once a child starts doing that, the problem gets bigger than what they do or don't tell you.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: Now they're trying to manage both parents emotionally.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: Now the child has a loyalty problem.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: Children usually have emotional attachments to both parents.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So imagine a child keeps hearing, your father is selfish, while also thinking, I love my dad.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: Now the child feels stuck.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: If I defend dad, mom gets upset.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: If I agree with mom, what does that mean about dad?
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: There's no good choice.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: Some children start defending one parent and becoming angry with the other.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: Some learn to keep the two halves of their lives completely separate.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: In more serious cases, a child may start pulling away from one parent because that makes detention easier to live with.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean every child who hears a negative thing about a parent is going to reject the parent.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: Parent-child contact problems are much more complicated than that.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_00: But here's something important psychologically.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes choosing one side actually reduces the child's distress.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: If loving both parents creates a constant loyalty conflict, aligning with one parent can simplify the child's world.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Now there's a good parent and there's a bad parent.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: The ambiguity goes away.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_00: The loyalty conflict decreases.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_00: The child may actually feel better in the short term.
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't necessarily mean the solution is psychologically healthy.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: It means it's solved an immediate emotional problem for the child.
• 3:39
  SPEAKER_00: And once that happens repeatedly, the pattern can become very difficult to undo.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: When criticizing your ex starts landing on your child, there's another cost parents often don't think about.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: Children build part of their identity through their parents.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: They notice that they look like dad, have mom's temper, share dad's sense of humor, or react to things the way mom does.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_00: Those connections are part of how they figure out who they are.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: Now put that next to repeated comments like, your father is selfish, your mother is crazy, and especially you're acting just like your father.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: That can land much harder than the parent realizes.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because now the child is not only wondering, is dad bad, they may start wondering, if I'm like dad, what does that mean about me?
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: That becomes especially important during adolescence when kids are already trying to figure out who they are.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: They may think you're describing your ex, that your child may hear something about themselves.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: The story starts shaping what they say.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Once a child has heard the same story about a parent long enough, ordinary things can start getting interpreted through the story.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_00: Let's say they heard mom doesn't care about you.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Then mom is 10 minutes late, or she misses an event.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: Now that moment can become evidence.
• 4:48
  SPEAKER_00: See, dad was right.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: That doesn't mean the child's complaints are false.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: Mom may really have made mistakes.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: There may really be hurt or disappointment.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Dad may have had made serious mistakes as well.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Now, the problem is that once a child is given a powerful adult narrative, it can be much harder for the child to separate what they actually experience with mom and dad from what they've been told that the parent is like.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: And when those two things get entangled together for months or years, the relationship becomes harder to repair.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the things we sometimes have to untangle later in our compass family reconnection program.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_00: At that point, everybody usually has a different story about what happened.
• 5:28
  SPEAKER_00: I'm less interested in picking a winner than I am in figuring out what happened to the relationship and what is keeping it broken now.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm only telling my child the truth.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the most common responses I hear.
• 5:40
  SPEAKER_00: But everything I told my child is true.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, maybe your spouse may have cheated.
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_00: There may have been serious money problems, ugly legal disputes, or behavior during the marriage that you had every right to be angry about.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not asking whether those things happened.
• 5:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm asking, does your child need to carry them?
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Can they actually make sense of that information at their age?
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_00: Does knowing it help them?
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_00: Or does it simply give them one more adult problem to manage?
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: And there's one question I think parents need to ask very honestly.
• 6:10
  SPEAKER_00: Am I telling my child because they need to know or because I need somebody to know?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: Those are not the same thing.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_00: Your child does not need to become the historian of your marriage in order to survive your divorce.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: They do not need every detail of the affair, the lawsuit, the child support fight, or what your attorney said about the other parent.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: There are adults in your life who can hear that.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_00: Your child usually should not be one of them.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: If this is helping you understand what may be happening underneath the resistance, give the video a like and subscribe to the channel.
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to be doing a lot more on divorce parent-child relationships and how to catch these problems before they become much harder to repair.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_00: What if the other parent really is dangerous?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: Now there are absolutely situations where children need information about the other parent.
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: There can be abuse, substance problems, serious mental health issues, or other genuine safety concerns.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_00: In those cases, you may need to protect your child and give them an age-appropriate explanation for what is happening.
• 7:07
  SPEAKER_00: But protecting a child and recruiting a child are two very different things.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: A younger child may not need to hear your father's an alcoholic and can't be trusted.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: They may need something much more simpler, like dad is dealing with an adult problem now, and the adults are making sure you're safe.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_00: The exact wording depends on the situation.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: The point is that you can protect your child without turning them into the judge, the investigator, the messenger, or your ally against the other parent.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: That distinction becomes particularly important in court-involved families because allegations may also be part of the ongoing litigation.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_00: Your child should not have to evaluate the evidence.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: That is an adult responsibility.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_00: What job are you giving your child?
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: So before you say something negative about the other parent, I want you to ask yourself three things.
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: Does my child actually need to know this?
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Does telling them help my child or does it help me?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_00: And most importantly, what job am I giving my child when I tell them this?
• 8:03
  SPEAKER_00: Do they now have to defend you, comfort you, keep a secret, defend the other parent, decide who's telling the truth, report back from the other household?
• 8:12
  SPEAKER_00: Choose sides.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_00: That is a lot to hand to a child.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And once you look at it that way, the standard changes, you stop asking only, is what I'm saying true?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: You start asking, what does my child now expect to do with this?
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: This is usually the more important question.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: Repair is harder than prevention.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: Once these patterns have been repeated for years, there usually isn't one conversation that fixes them.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: This is part of why at COMPASS here with our family reconnection program, we use stages.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there are legitimate hurt that needs to be addressed.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes the disconnected parent has things they need to take responsibility for.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes there's anxiety or avoidance that has become reinforced.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes loyalty pressure needs to come down before the child can even begin approaching a relationship differently.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_00: You can't start at the finish line.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_00: So the earlier parents understand how these patterns develop, the better chance they have of preventing some of the damage in the first place.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: Your marriage ended.
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: Your child's relationship with the other parent does not automatically have to end with it.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_00: You do not have to protect your ex's reputation.
• 9:15
  SPEAKER_00: But when it's safe and appropriate, one of the most important things you can do is protect your child's psychological freedom to develop their own relationship with that parent based on their own experiences.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: And if your child is already at the point of saying, I'm not going, watch my video on what to do when a child starts refusing parenting time because by then the problem has moved beyond the few comments and into the relationship itself.