How to Guide Children Through Parent and Partner Breakups

How to Guide Children Through a Relationship Breakup

[00:45] Children Tend to be Peacekeepers

Thom Knoles: One of the big questions that I receive from the world of householders is how to guide children whose parents have parted ways. And I think that the most important thing to realize is that children, generally speaking, are relieved, and it’s the parents who are making the drama about it.

I’ve rarely met an ideal relationship that has parted ways. When people come to me sometimes and say, “My partner and I are getting divorced,” or, “My partner and I are parting ways,” and they have a tearful look on their face, they’re generally surprised when I say to them, “Well, congratulations.”

And they say, “What do you possibly mean?”

And I say, “Well, you’ve arrived at truth. That’s fantastic.” And usually anybody else in the world has known that that relationship had reached its use-by date. It had reached its expiry date.

And one of the first to come to this conclusion is the children of the partners in question, because, with very few exceptions, and I would say one out of thousands, with very few exceptions, generally speaking, partners who part ways do so rather late in the piece compared with what everyone else wishes they would do. And I’ve often spoken to the children of partners who are parting, and naturally they are going through a little bit of angst, but the very best adjudicator of how hard it is on a child is not the parent.

Parents very often find that the state of consciousness their child is in at a time where they’re talking to the child about a change that’s coming, the state of consciousness that the parent is in is reflected by the child. Children tend to be peacekeepers, and they want the parent who’s talking to them to feel comforted by the child reflecting whatever it is the parent’s going through.

[03:28] Involve a Third Party for the Child to Speak With

So if the parent is anxious and the parent is sad, and the parent is wondering what’s going to happen next, and they project that, then the child is going to be the catchment for that and reflect that back to the parent. Though very often I hear parents say, someone will say, “Well, when our child talks to me, they’re terribly anxious and unhappy about what’s happening, because of you.”

And the other parent will say, “Well, it’s so interesting, because when they talk to me, they’re very upset and unhappy about what’s happening because of you.”

And well, that doesn’t say anything to me about what’s actually going on. It tells me that that child is a peacekeeper, and wants to agree with the given parent, for that parent, about that parent’s state of mind and that parent’s idea of circumstances.

And if parents have been in some kind of arguments with each other then usually the child will take sides with whichever of the parents is feeling rocky about the other one. The child will reflect that with that parent, and then when with the other parent, they’ll reflect whatever that parent’s thing is about the other parent. And the child just wants to have peace with their parent.

I would always recommend that a child has a third party, not the father, not the mother, not either of the parents, to whom they can speak candidly. Someone who doesn’t have a particular vested interest in the grievances of either party.

And there are always grievances because, as I’ve said, I’ve not yet met a couple who were in an ideal relationship with no grievances, who decided to part. It just never happened. “Oh, we were in a perfect relationship. Both of us agree that it’s a terrible thing that we’re parting, but we’re parting anyway.” I just don’t hear that.

So there’s a very important role to play here, and one fundamental idea in the Vedic worldview, and that is that all reports are reports upon the state of consciousness of the reporter. All reports are reports upon the state of consciousness of the reporter.

And of course, children are very quick to be adaptive, and it’s natural that children would like stability, and stability is a thing that children need to see arriving. Arriving in waves. If there’s a change of environment, if somebody’s going to not be around the house with that great a frequency anymore, the child needs to have an understanding about what’s happening and what it is they have to adapt to.

[07:01] Protecting Children’s Emotions

Or if the child, with whichever parent is in the departing side of the movement that’s happening, then the arrival at stable days, regular expectations, if it’s a change of environment, new friends and all of that, some great care has to be taken as with any kind of movement. Even if both parents in some other hypothesis were to be moving together to a new environment, there’d have to be a degree of care taken to be sure the child adjusts.

So my experience is that children actually are deeply adaptive. Very often parents make the grievous mistake of using their children’s emotions as weapons to bring vengeance upon a partner who they are departing from.

“Oh, you know, little Johnny is so upset because of you.”

And then the other one, “It was so interesting, because when little Johnny’s with me, little Johnny is really upset because of you. And this thing that you’re doing to our child, that thing that you’re doing to our child,” and all that.

Really, I think it’s terribly important that parents do not use children and their emotions as pawns to move around on the chess board to cause guilt or to levy blame upon another parent.

And so basically this is an area in which both parents probably could benefit from some external counseling. Either, if they can stand each other to be in the same room at the same time, or if they can’t stand each other, to receive such counseling separately.

It’s rarely the child that needs counseling. However, when I said that a child could benefit from a third party, my preference would be some mentor who is not taking sides in a relationship change.

[09:26] Don’t Stay Together “For the Children”

I like parents to lose the language of “breakup.” Breakup is a thing a boat does when it hits the rocks on a stormy shore. A change is probably better. That things are changing and things are going to get better. When things change, things get better. The idea of having a change in a relationship is for everything to get better.

And this is the kind of language that parents need to learn to adopt in order to minimize what it is that they bring, their stressed consciousness state, bringing that to the child is unfair to the child.

And so if the parents can rapidly gain some perspective and some context about what it is they’re going through, and to arrive at a view of evolution is all that can be happening, “Let’s find out about how this is evolutionary.” Then this is the very most important element in a relationship change, that the parents themselves arrive at an evolutionary point of view about change, and then the children will take their cues from the parent. Children always take their cues from parents. What else is there?

And in the world as it is made up today we’re learning that arriving at the truth of what’s going on in a relationship is a much more freed up, it’s a much more liberated thing than it was once upon a time.

There was a time, particularly in western culture, when the ideal was to become unhappy in a relationship and in, supposedly, in aid of the children’s happiness, continue on suffering year after year, decade after decade, the children having to watch unhappy parents living under the same roof. Those parents giving those children responsibility for the fact that they stayed together unhappy. And this is a terrible thing to do to a child.

No child in their twenties, thirties or forties would ever look back at what was going on between their parents and say, “Oh, it was such a good thing that even though they were miserable with each other, even though they were deeply unhappy, nonetheless, they stayed together for me.” No child would ever want that responsibility.

The child would always say, “Why didn’t my parents go and seek happiness? Why did my parents continue on being unhappy?”

And if the child hears, “Oh, well we did it for you darling,” the child’s just going to grow up thinking, “I don’t want that. Don’t force that on me. If you guys decided to stay together in an unhappy marriage, it wasn’t because of me, thank you very much. It was because of some decision the two of you came to about deciding to live in suffering.”

[12:57] Change is Evolutionary

And so it is also important that when examining relationships, irrespective of that relationship, and it having produced children, it’s very important for the sake of the children, for the adult members of that relationship to arrive conclusively at an understanding about change is evolutionary, and helping each other to move through change, to the extent that such help is relevant, helping each other to move through change in aid of the children being able to look up to their parents and see this is the exemplary way to manage a changing situation.

If the parents are not exemplary in it, how can the child be exemplary in it? So, we have to learn as adults how to take a much more stable, adaptive and broad-minded approach to each other’s needs. One of the worst things a child ever could hear from a parent would be to hear one of the parents say something like, as they’re speaking to a friend or something, “Oh, you know, well, she and I, or he and I, we should never have been married,” because what does that child think then?

“Oh, you’re cursing my very existence, in the foundation of my existence.”

No. Something more along the lines of, “We were destined to be together for a period, and that was obvious, and one of the great things that came out of our relationship was this child. One of the greatest blessings that came out.

“And in the fullness of time we discovered that each of us had grown into having different evolutionary needs, and we arrived in an arrangement whereby we could both meet and greet our evolutionary needs, and we made sure that our child knew that that was what was going on.”

[15:18] Avoid Speaking Ill of Each Other

So like that, a very important thing, this thing of blaming or who broke the relationship or who was this and who did that. And parents either implicitly, cleverly implicitly, or not so cleverly explicitly, causing a child to think lowly of one of their parents. This is a very ill-advised angle.

When a child hears something negative about a parent from another parent, what are you saying to that child? That child knows, “I’m 50% him,” or “I’m 50% her.” And so if my parent doesn’t approve of the other parent from whom I came, my parent doesn’t approve of half of me.

And so then for a child to hear negativity from the mouth of a parent about another parent, that child is actually hearing negativity about at least 50% of their own genetics. And this has a lasting scorching effect on a child’s self-worth and personal self-image.

And so we as parents need to grow up. We need to be proper illuminated beings who are supportive of each other and don’t badmouth each other, particularly ever, in front of a child.

Evolution is all that’s happening. This is the Vedic way of arriving at context. Arriving at context is, truth wants to come out, and there is no relationship that “shouldn’t” have happened. They don’t exist.

Relationships happen and sometimes a relationship has relevance for 60 years, 70 years. Sometimes a relationship has relevance for 60 days or 60 minutes. We can’t really say how long a relationship is relevant for, but if it started, then there was some context in which the parties to the relationship were drawing upon each other in order to gain individually and mutually.

[18:00] Honor the Other Parent

And so no relationship ever actually ends. What ends is the frequency with which you see each other and the proximity where you find yourselves waking up in the morning. And so, when a relationship has happened, there’s a remnant of that in the consciousness for the rest of time of that person’s life. We can choose to ignore it or we can choose to acknowledge it, but it’s a fact that doesn’t just go away.

It’s important for children to see parents taking into account that which was good that came from whatever period of time the parents were together. And for the children to see the parents having regarded that child as having been the very best thing that happened from the two of them having been together, for however long they were together.

So this is my counsel to parents who are embarking on separate adventures, seeking new horizons, as to how to deal with their children. Honor parents. Honor the other parent in front of the child. Always honor, always, ever honor. Never bring your own individual shortcomings, your inability to appreciate the state of consciousness of another to a child and teach the child how to see the lowest common denominator.

We need to show a child how we as adults see only good in their other parent. This is a very important thing I’m telling you. So with that move forward, onward and upward, and bring your children with you.

Jai Guru Deva.