A Child's Guide to Divorce

If anything has increased faster than the U.S. divorce rate, it is the publication of books about divorce. In the past few years, books have been written specifically for the edification of the couple contemplating divorce, the divorced mother, the divorced father, the gay divorcee and the new bachelor. But no author has had any advice for those who are usually most affected by a family breakup: the 3,000,000 or more American children of divorced parents. Not, that is, until Child Psychiatrist Richard A. Gardner wrote the newly published The Boys and Girls Book About Divorce (Science House; $7.95).

In his book, the New Jersey psychiatrist expresses views that are anything but conventional. He encourages his young readers to be suspicious when their divorced parents speak only good of each other; when no faults are acknowledged, a child may reasonably ask, "If he's such a great person, why did you divorce him?"' Dr. Gardner also warns youngsters against parents who insist that an absent father or mother loves the child despite evidence to the contrary. The thing to do, he says, is to ask for honesty, since "if you hide from the truth, you can do nothing about your problems."

Uncaring Father. How can a child find out whether someone loves him? "Fathers who live close by but do not visit, and fathers who live far away and hardly ever call or write either do not love their children at all, or they love them very little." There is "something very wrong" with an unloving parent; he deserves pity as,'well as anger, says Gardner, citing a patient who spoke of her uncaring father as "poor damn Dad." The psychiatrist's advice: seek love from those who can give it, and remember that if your father doesn't love you, "it does not mean that you are no good or that no one can love you."

As Gardner admits, such ideas are anxiety-provoking--to parents, not children. The same is true of four precepts for youngsters that are outlined in his text: do not believe everything your parents tell you; do not do everything they want you to do; try to help yourself "feel better," but do not try too hard; use your anger to help you get what you want.

For the child who is told that divorce came about because he was bad, Gardner has blunt advice: "Do not believe it. If one of your parents says such a thing, it usually means he has problems of his own that make it hard for him to see things the way they really are." Nor is "every bad thing" parents say about each other to be accepted uncritically: "Be very careful to believe only those things you are very sure of, or that you see yourself."

Best Answer. Questioned by one parent about whether the other is dating or spending a lot of money, a child had best answer: "Please stop trying to turn me into a tattletale." A son asked to spend all night in his mother's bed should "tell her that she should find a grownup man instead," and a daughter treated by her mother as an adult confidante "should suggest that her mother find friends her own age."

To Gardner, children are not helpless victims. Instead of wasting time "blaming people for things that happened in the past, things that cannot be changed," they can "start doing the things that will make the future happier." They can, for example, "make it their business to find friends so that they'll be less lonely." But they must observe W.C. Fields' rule: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again: if after that, you still don't succeed, forget it. One thing to give up on rather quickly, the author suggests, is trying to get parents to remarry each other, particularly when they have repeatedly said that this will not happen.

Before abandoning more reasonable goals, a child may try using his anger as a tool. For instance, a little girl angry at her father because he is always late for visits may persuade him to come earlier if she tells him how cross she is--but she had better use "words more polite than those which first came to your mind." Successful or not, she should remember that despite what children imagine, "angry thoughts cannot harm anyone"--nor can wishes, common to children, that a parent get sick and die.

Purple Hair. Anger does not always work. It is useless against playmates who taunt the child of divorce as different, strange or even sinful. But Gardner trusts the child's sense of his own worth to sustain him. "You are what you are, not necessarily what people say you are," he writes. "If someone were to say that your hair was purple and your skin green, this would not make your hair purple and your skin green."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.