Ask:
... to help deal with the divorce?
My son and daughter were withdrawn and sad in the weeks leading up to their father moving out. His verbal abuse of me, tantrums and outbursts directed towards them were taking it's toll. I thought that once he moved out they would feel better but for a short time it got worse. I did not know until a year later that my daughter was having issues with depression - by then she didn't feel it was necessary and refused to go. My son was less skilled at hiding it, but he didn't want to go to counseling, he chose to confide in his best friends dad and his scout leader. In retrospect I wish I had been better prepared for how the divorce would impact the kids - 4 yrs later I find out just how hard it was for them to let go of the dreams they had of their father becoming the dad they always wanted. My son is ok now, my daughter who had her first baby in November is now on antidepressants. She says she has been depressed off and on since her dad left 4 yrs ago, it got worse after her son was born because she worries her boyfriend will turn out to be the same kind of dad her father was. She is also refusing to consider marriage. I wonder if counseling would have prevented all this?
Answer:
Wow another tough question....but a good one.
Our situation was a little bit different, we kept 99% of it away from the kids, not that we didn't have the occasional "slip up". And we always told them that it wasn't their fault, that they didn't do anything wrong.
We would go into teacher/parent conferences and the teachers would tell us that you would never know they had divorced parents.
With all of that said, I am sure that they could have used some counseling....I think deep down inside they do wish that we would have stayed together, and that is enough to get depressed about even if you are happy. KWIM??
I think my son took everything a lot harder than my daughter did. My kids were also much younger than it sounds like your kids were.
However, I don't think it is EVER to late for counseling...if you think that might help you could try to get them to go now. If they do need it, they will only get better. If they don't need it, the counselor will, or should, tell you that they are fine.
Good luck to you and your family!
On the other side of the coin.....just before I did get married, my parents had been married for almost 20 years....and I kept telling myself that if they could get married young and make it last 20 years then so could I. My Dad left my mom 2 months after my wedding. Talk about a HUGE shock...I spent the good part of the first year wondering if the same thing was going to happen to me.....my first husband had an affair into year 8. And that was the beginning of the end.
Answer:
My DD was 15 and my DS 23 when the ex walked out. It was devastating to them.
He left 10/28 and we did not decorate that year for Christmas. Nobody was in the Christmas mood. That was almost 11 years ago. The ex was close to my DS for a while. Now he barely calls him and see him 3 or 4 times a year. He never sees DD. He sends her a Christmas present but never anything on her birthday.
DD does suffer from depression. I'm not sure the ex caused it because I am a depressed person and she probably inherited it from me. But she definitely has issues with men in her life. She has been married and divorced 2 times. They were both short marriages.
She does not have any children. I might add that she is ADD and LD and has had IBS since she was 10 years old. She had been in and out of counseling since she was 10.
She is on her 3rd round of anti depressants. She will take them about 9 months and then stop. She was really in bad shape this time. She had been in a 2 year relationship with a verbally abusive man(I would prefer to call him a boy). There is a lot of anger in my DD for her Dad. She has called him the sperm donor for years. Now she calls him Terry, his name.
She has been in counseling this time since Jan. and just on AD for 2 weeks. Counseling never hurts. You just need the right counselor and sometimes that is hard to find.
DS now knows his Dad does not have time for him in his life.
I don't think we will ever know exactly how much divorce does hurt our children.