When I heard Alec Baldwin's famous phone message, I had already worked with families of divorce long enough to recognize that his frustration wasn't really with his daughter Ireland. But it did reinforce something I have always believed... that the only truly innocent party in a divorce is the child.
I work with these innocent children in an 8-week program called Children of Divorce and Changing Families, a program of Divorce Recovery, Inc. Our mission is to help kids learn to cope with the changes that a divorce presents and the anger/sadness/confusion that often accompanies it.
The parents meet in one group and we divide the kids into peer groups. My group is the 10 - 12 year olds.
On day one, we teach the kids a mantra/cheer that happens to also loosely describe our lesson plan: I didn't cause it. I can't fix it. All I can do is cope! At the end of each class with hands joined in the center, the kids yell the mantra in unison at the top of their lungs in an attempt to be louder than the peer group next door.
After working with hundreds of kids, I am happy to share that most of them understand/accept the phrase "I didn't cause it" quickly and grasp that the divorce is not, in any way, their fault.
But many feel they are being punished as if it were their fault.
• They feel punished when they are encouraged/expected/forced to choose sides.
• They feel punished when they are asked to snoop at the other parents house or when "grilled like a suspect" upon their return.
• They feel punished when they can't have both their parents attend their game/play/birthday party because their parents won't be civil to each other for even an hour. (I have actually been asked more than a few times if having divorced parents that don't get along means they'll have to have two weddings).
• They feel punished when you say bad things about the other parent. And this one is huge, they don't care if what you are saying is true, hearing it makes the child "feel sick in my heart" and he/she just wants you to "please stop saying bad things about somebody I love".
But don't take my word for it.
There's a website where these and other kids share their very personal frustrations in art-form and I invite parents to see with their own eyes the emotional results of their actions.
The website was born of an art therapy/venting project I introduced to our pre-teen group. Kids were invited to express their divorce related frustrations on a postcard. We gave them crayons and markers, and even supplied them with label makers, because some kids were concerned that their parents would recognize their handwriting. We provided old parenting magazines for them to cut up and watched them hunt for pictures of happy families that they would then rip apart and rearrange to illustrate their own broken families.
After they finished, the kids were given the choice of sharing their postcard with the class or putting it directly into the mailbox. Many were never shared in class. But sitting in my car after class I would look through them. Being familiar with their issues by the time we did this exercise, I could usually match up the card with the child. But every once in a while I would get a surprise that would bring me to tears. Like the sweet, quiet, tiny-for-her-age, tomboy whose card revealed "I was daddy's girl until the divorce. I went with mom."
And so I wonder if I would recognize Ireland's postcard if she were to send one in. Would it be one of the many "cut-in-half" themed cards that litter the site?
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