When Parents Separate

On a Sunday evening, an eight-year-old is putting her things into the small wheeled suitcase she now keeps half-packed by the door. Over six months she has learned which jumper is at which house, which toothbrush stays with which parent, and which book she’ll be allowed to finish later in the week. She doesn’t complain. But on this particular Sunday she asks her mother whether the cat will be alright while she’s gone, and her mother has noticed that this is the kind of question she asks instead of the one she means.

Her mother has kept it together for most of the day, and somehow the question knocks the legs out from under her. She sits on the bottom stair and watches her daughter wheel the suitcase to the door. The cat is fine. The child is asking about something else.

Parents often come to us with some version of this Sunday evening. Every family’s arrangements are different, and the grief shows itself in different ways, but it’s the same grief. The parent in the room with us is more tired than she knew it was possible to be. She’s grieving, though she isn’t supposed to call it grief. She’s watching her child more closely than she has ever watched another human being, and trying to work out whether anything she does this week will be the thing her child brings up in therapy at thirty.

That last question is the one most likely to keep her awake at night, and the answer is more reassuring than she dares to hope.

What the child is doing

A child whose parents are separating faces a developmental task that is almost too big to manage. She’s trying to make sense of a world in which the two people who held it together no longer do. She spends Saturday at one address and puts on her school uniform on Monday at another. The adults around her use words like custody, contact and the arrangement, which don’t describe anything she recognises. She has to work out how her life fits together now, and the adults who would normally help her are part of what she’s trying to understand.

Without the words for it, she does what children do. She says less at supper, or gets louder. She gets a stomach ache on Sunday evenings. She becomes fiercely attached to a cuddly toy she never used to care about. She asks, trying to sound casual, whether the cat will be alright. All of it is her way of working out where things stand now.

The question parents ask us most often is whether to tell their child together, and the form it takes matters less than they fear. Tell her together if you can. Keep it calm and brief. Be truthful, in the sense of not lying, but edit what you tell her, so that you don’t lay the adults’ grief at her feet. The conversation she’ll remember is the short one in the car three weeks later, when she asks the question that’s been on her mind.

What she cannot say

There are some things a child in this situation feels but generally can’t put into words. It helps to know what they are, because then you can listen for them when they come out indirectly.

She wants both her parents to be okay, more intensely than she could tell you even if she had the words. She’s watching each of you for signs that you aren’t, and adjusting accordingly. A child who has stopped saying much may have decided that her job, this Sunday evening, is to make her mother’s evening easier. It can look like strength. She’s a child doing a hard job that isn’t hers.

On some level, she thinks this is her fault. Under nine or so, a child’s thinking puts her at the centre of why things happen. News this big has to have a cause, and she’s the only cause she has full information about. Older children know better intellectually, and feel it anyway.

She’s afraid of losing the parent she isn’t with at the time. Every drop-off is a little like a bereavement, and every pickup a little like getting that parent back. A child who clings at the front door, refuses to go, or is fine at the door and then bursts into tears later in the day is asking the question her attachment system asks: is the other one still there?

She’s also often furious with one or both of you, and isn’t permitted to be furious in a way that would be useful. The anger has to go somewhere, so it comes out in other ways: a row about school shoes, or a sudden opinion that the other parent’s flat smells funny.

The role she must not be given

In the families we see, the deepest damage comes from the confusion over roles that can follow a separation. A child can be drafted into roles that don’t belong to her: the confidant, who hears more about the other parent than is good for her; the messenger, who takes the practical questions across the hallway; the therapist, who is told late at night how lonely her parent is; and the responsible one, like the eldest who is told she’s now the little mother. Each of these costs the child something the parent didn’t mean to take.

The single most useful thing you can do as a separating parent is not to confide in your child. She would bear it, and that’s the trouble, because bearing it would shape the way she grows up. Take adult things to adult places: a friend, a counsellor, a group of other parents who have been through this. That way your child gets to be a child.

For the practical side of single parenting after a separation, we send parents to Gingerbread. Its advice service closed in April 2025, and what it offers now is written guidance and free membership of local and online single-parent groups. Its pages on school holidays, maintenance and telling extended family are the clearest UK source we know on how to run a household once the family’s arrangements have changed. For someone to talk the emotional questions through with, there is a confidential helpline for any parenting or family worry. Coram Family Lives, 0808 800 2222. Mon-Fri 9am-9pm; weekends 10am-3pm; closed bank holidays. Outside those hours the line is closed. Samaritans answer at any hour on 116 123, and Shout answer if you text the word SHOUT to 85258. Help is free. For the developmental questions, Anna Freud’s resources for separating parents are the right read if you want to think clearly about what your child is doing with the new arrangement.

The week-to-week

Beyond the big conversations, separation comes down to everyday details.

A small child understands the two-houses routine better as geography than as a story. Give her a map with both houses on it and the days at each marked in colour, and put a short list on the fridge of what stays where. For a child under nine, the routine is her security, and the calendar matters more than any conversation about feelings.

Many separating parents dread the handover, particularly the awkward minutes at the door. Your child is watching the two adults she trusts most to see whether they can still stand in the same hallway. Keep it brief, factual and predictable. “She had a good day, she finished her reading, her swimming kit is in the side pocket. See you on Wednesday.” Resist the temptation to use the doorway for a longer message about the arrangement. Put that in a text later, and keep the doorway for your child.

A related pattern is the gift-and-treat dynamic. The parent who has the child for less time, or who feels more guilty, makes up for it with chocolate, the cinema and relaxed screen time. The other parent, doing the school run and the cold mornings, notices with bewildered fury that the difficult half of parenting is happening at her end. Raise it once, between the two of you, when the children are asleep: “I think we’re drifting into a treat-house and a normal-house.”

In front of your child, don’t say anything about the other parent that puts her in the middle, such as “Your father never sends the money on time” or Your mother doesn’t understand. She can’t do anything with sentences like these except feel less secure. When the criticism is fair and you feel it strongly, take it elsewhere.

The book we most often give separating parents is Philippa Perry’s The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read. It says little about separation directly. Its subject is the patterns adults bring from their own childhoods and how those patterns shape what they do with their children. In a separation, when everyone’s old patterns are set off at once, it’s the book we have seen help parents most.

What the child needs from each of you

What your child needs from each of you is more modest than loyalty or a united front: one adult who, on this particular afternoon, is okay enough to be the parent.

That’s a lower bar than the literature suggests, and easier to reach. In the research, and in the families we see, children aren’t damaged by the fact of the separation. They’re damaged by sustained adult conflict in front of them, by unmanaged adult grief they’re asked to take on, and by the loss of a parent who has become emotionally unavailable because they’re caught up in their own pain. Each of these is something a separating parent can work on, and none of them requires the separation to be undone. When we explain this, it’s often the moment a parent first breathes out.

Most separation distress is normal grief. Some children tip into something more concerning, and the parent watching closely is best placed to notice. What we would take seriously: a sustained change in mood that does not lift with small good things; withdrawal from friends, from school, from the things she used to want to do; any direct statement about not wanting to be here at all; self-harm. Take those to your GP, and to the standing crisis block at the foot.

At different ages

A separation is a different event for a four-year-old and for a sixteen-year-old. The bands below are a rough guide. Some young children are ahead of their band, and some older children, under the strain of a separation, regress into a younger one for a term; either is normal.

If your child is between four and seven. A child this young can’t yet understand separation as an idea; what she has is the routine, and the routine is her security. Make the new geography concrete and predictable, and expect some regression. In many cases, a four-year-old who had stopped wetting the bed will start again for a few months, and the right response is aimed more at her sense that the world is no longer fixed than at the bedwetting itself. Keep handovers short and rehearsed. Where you can, keep the bedtime story the same in both houses, with the same two books and the same teddy. At this age she needs sameness in the parts you can control, and it helps to point the sameness out, lightly: “We have the same story at Mummy’s house and at Daddy’s house.” That one sentence does more than you’d think.

If your child is between seven and nine. She now has the understanding and the words, and she’s starting to form opinions. She may take sides without meaning to. In a bad week she may tell one parent, in some detail, what the other one has done wrong. Turn the report down kindly, without scolding her for offering it: “I don’t need to hear about Daddy’s house from you, but I’m glad you had a good Wednesday.” Redirecting her like this teaches her that she isn’t the messenger. Keep her out of the logistics of the arrangement entirely. The school bag is the adults’ problem, even when she’d like to be helpful and manage it for you.

If your child is between nine and eleven. With secondary school getting closer she’s more self-conscious, and at this age she’s often outspoken, sometimes judgmental, and sometimes openly furious with one parent on a Saturday and with the other a few days later. Let both the fury and the affection come, and don’t take either personally. She’s testing whether the parent in front of her can still be that parent when provoked, and the answer she needs is yes. In the heat of it, don’t defend yourself, and don’t criticise the other parent. “That sounds hard. Tell me what made today bad.” Then listen, because the anger is telling you about her week.

If your child is in early to mid secondary, eleven to fourteen. The peer group now comes into it. She may be embarrassed by the separation in a way she wasn’t at nine, and she may not want her friends to know which weekend she spends with which parent. Take this seriously without making it the family’s main topic. Where you can, keep the arrangement from complicating her social life: the friend who comes over on a Friday doesn’t need to be briefed about Saturday. Use the approach from the chapter on teenagers who stop talking to you, and be around without asking questions: be in the room, make the supper, and don’t make her debrief.

If your child is in mid to late secondary, fourteen to sixteen. At this age she may withdraw, or, less often, weaponise the situation: threatening to move in with the other parent, refusing to come on the scheduled weekend, keeping her bedroom door closed at both houses. Treat these as her way of telling you something. In most cases she’s trying to manage a lot of real emotion with the limited resources of a fifteen-year-old. Keep your house open to her without making her presence there the test of your relationship. Tell her calmly that she’s welcome whenever she wants to be there. Then don’t keep score of the weekends she chooses to spend elsewhere, by text or by hint.

If your child is sixteen and beyond. She’s on her way out of the house anyway, and the separation reaches her differently. She’s forming a view of her parents’ relationship the way an adult does, and she may want to know, for the first time, what actually happened. Be truthful with her in the way one adult can be truthful with another: edited and calm, without laying your grief at her feet and without pretending the story is something it isn’t. The conversation she’ll have with you about this in five years is the one that matters more, and this one is the rehearsal for it.

Your own grief, and the longer arc

The parent in front of me is often trying not to grieve. The children are watching, the practicalities never let up, and everyday conversation rarely allows for grief on either side when a marriage ends. So the grief gets put down and isn’t picked up again.

It has to be picked up, somewhere away from the children. Grief for the relationship that ended is one grief. Grief for the family as it was is another, and it’s the one that catches people out, because it arrives long after the romantic grief and is about a family unit (Sunday lunches, the cat on the radiator cover, the Christmas tree in the corner) that isn’t coming back. The parent who lets herself grieve is the parent most available to her child. The parent who suppresses it is the one who, on a difficult day, snaps about a recorder lesson.

In most cases, the eight-year-old at the front door with her small wheeled suitcase will grow up to be someone whose parents separated, in much the way that other people have parents who didn’t. It will be part of her life story without being the centre of it. The things that make the difference are ones you can influence: how much conflict she sees, how much of your grief you ask her to take on, and whether the parent in front of her on a Sunday evening is broadly available. It’s slow, tiring work, but you can do it, and many people do.

The cat will be fine, and in time, so will she. Asking about the cat was what she could manage today. Your part is to sit on the bottom stair and not ask her to do any more.

NOTES

1. Perry, Philippa. The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did). Penguin Life, 2019. Perry’s account of the rupture-and-repair cycle and of catching ourselves in our own reactivity.

Where to go further

Philippa Perry, The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (and Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did) We mention this book earlier in the chapter. It’s the clearest writing we know on the patterns adults bring into their parenting from their own childhoods, and in a separation, when those patterns are all set off at once, it’s the book we have seen help parents most.