How to Help Children Cope With a Divorce

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Dr. Laura Grashow a license psychologist with DrGrashow.com. Okay, so now let's talk about how to help children cope with a divorce. For this I want to emphasize two things mainly. The first thing I want to say is that when parents get divorce a child addition to parent's world being disturbed, a child experiences tremendous up evil potentially. All of a sudden the child is living in two different homes. They got two different sets of toys, two different sets of friends, two different sets of clothing potentially and so their lives have to be sort of reordered and reorganized. It's really important that there is consistency, predictability and dependability when it comes to that. So, you know if a parent promises something to a child such as an event that they are going to go to or a night they are going to spend together, it needs to be agreed upon before hand. So, parents need to work cooperatively as they can on scheduling things and then you really need to show up. You really need to be dependable and predictable. The next thing I want to emphasize that's really important for children for their emotional well being is not bad mouthing each other as parents. Remember you child comes from both of you and so he or she wants to feel good and proud about the parents the set of parents that they come from and when parents bad mouth each other, children feel trap and caught in the middle."