Montrealer has online questionnaire
Jamie Woodford
Lethbridge Herald
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The dissolution of a marriage is, unfortunately, a common occurrence in today's society. Most of the time going through a divorce is a nasty ordeal, and it's never easy to tell people about it, let alone the children of that marriage. So, how does a couple broach the topic without traumatic repercussions?
That's what family therapist and researcher Vikki Stark wants to learn and she needs help by hearing from children of divorce.
Stark is looking for participants to fill out an online questionnaire for her international study on the impact of the moment when a child learns about their parents' divorce. Visit http://SurveyMonkey.com/s/ChildDivorceStudy to access the questionnaire.
"In every book about children and divorce there's a chapter about how to tell the kids, but this study is important because, yeah, we all know (when you) tell the kids, be gentle, tell them you love them, tell them it's not their fault - that's very superficial stuff, but what this study is, is trying to get to the deeper level because we're hearing it from the point of view of the people who lived it," she said. "I'm interviewing both adults who were children or teens when their parents divorced, and this morning I was working with a four-year-old whose parents separated two months ago. I'm hearing the little ones who are currently kids telling about what their parent did that upset them, what they worried about, how they would like to have it done differently, what they would want better, what was the worst part and all that stuff."
Stark, who is based out of Montreal, said gathering the information straight from the source is important so that parents can learn to talk to their kids about divorce in a way that causes the least damage.
"I've been working with families for almost 30 years, and I've worked with a lot of kids who are very disturbed about divorce, and about that moment at which they're informed," she said. "That moment when the parents, or the grandmother, or the neighbour or somebody sits down with the child and says 'your parents are separating' is the moment at which a child's life changes on a dime, and they're never going to be the same."
The day children learn of the divorce is a pivotal moment that divides their childhood in two parts.
"They define their lives in terms of . . . before the divorce we used to do this, after the divorce we used to do that. So it becomes like a watershed moment in their lives. At turning point moment," said Stark.
Although divorce isn't as taboo as it once was, Stark said it's still a difficult thing to go through and everyone deals with it differently.
"You hear about people where it was such a shocking deal, but now obviously it's more acceptable."
and they have people that they know (who have been through it), but the problem is that most people that they know have parents that had a terrible divorce because the majority of divorces are terribly conflictual and there's a lot of pain involved," she said.