One home or two? Kids of divorced parents commute regularly
Children as young as one travel between two homes each week. Is the popular "alternate weeks" model the best solution – also from the child’s point of view?
By Anne Karuvuori
The parents’ divorce is an everyday reality for thousands of children and teenagers. Last year alone it was experienced by 30,000 Finns under the age of 18.
More and more often marriages break up when the child is still in the toddler stage.
“Couples break up when the mother has barely arrived home from the maternity ward with the new-born”, says an overseer of children’s rights in charge of monitoring visitation rights.
The overseer often faces threats in her work and therefore prefers to remain anonymous.
Considering the situation, the amount of debate regarding these children’s lives after the divorce is non-existent in Finland, says Professor of Psychology Liisa Keltikangas-Järvinen.
Keltikangas-Järvinen wishes there was more dialogue, especially about the two-home model, which has become increasingly common in the past ten years in the Nordic Countries in particular.
The previous generation of divorce children lived almost without exception with their single mother.
The problem then was the child’s alienation from the father.
In the alternate living model, the connection with the father is also maintained, which according to Keltikangas-Järvinen is important.
Psychologists in many countries have noticed, however, that the two-home model has become a phenomenon about which one is only allowed to voice positive comments.
“It has simply been decided that it is a good thing.”
It is not uncommon that children as young as a year old change homes every week. With this rate, by the time they reach the age of 18 they have moved homes more than 800 times.
Based on Internet discussions, the system works.
“In the end this was the only right and perfect solution”, the mother of an 11-month-old child, who has entered into the week-by-week rotation, affirms on the web pages of the Kaksplus magazine.
“If we were to divorce, we would start the alternate week system. In my opinion the father has the same right to be with his children as the mother”, another person asserts.
Keltikangas-Järvinen wants the focus to be shifted on the child’s rights.
A child cannot be made to run after his or her parents.
“The smaller the child is the greater the danger that he will grow up void of any kind of fixed point to his life. No-one is able to predict the price the child may end up paying for this.”
Keltikangas-Järvinen bases her views on research into the brain.
The development of the human brain is still very much in progress during the first years of an individual’s life, and a child’s capacity to remember and understand is limited. Everything forms a much greater chaos inside a child’s head compared with the situation for an adult.
“Even in a single home environment a child needs concrete landmarks, through which to perceive his or her world. One’s own bed is an extremely important base.”
Similarly, a close individual has to be present at home, to whom a child can go for safety. It can be either the mother or the father, but the target cannot change continuously.
A child under the age of three will lose the recollection of the other home and parent in a week. He does not know if they exist.
“An adult can imagine how helpless it would feel to start every week in a new place with a person whom one does not really know.”
According to Keltikangas-Järvinen, a child’s confusion is added to by the fact that often at least in one of the homes the parent has a new partner with possible children of his or her own, perhaps accompanied by the couple’s joint child.
“The hecticness of human relationships is frightening. Who would step up and conduct a study of how many different family combinations a modern child has to live in?” asks the City of Helsinki's senior social worker Piia Pelkola.
A child’s take on the alternate living arrangement is difficult to study. One cannot ask a two-year-old of his view on the situation.
Three years ago Hannariikka Linnavuori interviewed for her doctoral thesis the 8 to 18-year-old children of divorced families, who had alternated between two homes since preschool or school age. So far the study is one of its kind in Finland.
Linnavuori noted that these children’s concept of a family was unique. Even after the divorce, one’s own nuclear family remained intact, but it lived in two separate locations. Home was in both addresses.
In Linnavuori’s view the parents and the surroundings should support this notion. “For a child it is extremely hard if the parents argue or if someone criticises his family.”
The parents’ new partners are the critical point.
”But sometimes the partner may become an additional support structure for the child.”
The discussion of the children’s situation after a divorce has stagnated into two basic camps, Linnavuori points out.
One group defends the child’s right to one home while the other group sees the two-home arrangement as a double blessing.
The thought processes of the children interviewed by Linnavuori differed from those of adults.
”For most of them, in the ideal situation their parents would have stayed together. If a divorce is inevitable, alternating between two homes is better than seeing the father only every second weekend.”
Moving between two homes, on the other hand, was seen as exhausting almost without exception.
What caused the most stress was to make sure that everything essential gets packed, such as clothes, school books, sporting equipment, girls’ make-up kits, and so on.
Between the one-home and the alternate living models Linnavuori calls for alternatives more adaptable to the child’s needs.
The fact that other options are not really even discussed speaks of the strong position that the alternate-week model enjoys.
Keltikangas-Järvinen wishes there would be more alternatives particularly in the ways the parents spend time with their children.
“If the two homes are close to one another, the contact can remain close without the actual moving back and forth every week. Both parents do not need to do the exact same things.”
The children’s rights overseer estimates that most parents take the thinking of alternatives seriously.
On the other hand, she also suspects that not everyone perceives how long a project childhood really is.
It requires 20 years of commitment and a lot of work from the parents.
And that goes regardless of whether one is divorced or not.
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 23.8.2010
Helsingin Sanomat
|
| 24.8.2010 - THIS WEEK |
 One home or two? Kids of divorced parents commute regularly |
|
