Thriving in the Future - Part One of Two Parts
If you are like most parents, you want your children to be successful at school, in their extracurricular activities and with their socially with their friends. Prior to your family reorganization, like most parents, you probably spent enormous amounts of time, energy and money attempting to ensure your children's success. You may even have had the tendency to try to provide those things for your children which you wanted as a child. You spent time helping your children with their homework and school projects; you have taken them to soccer, baseball, dance, swim meets and other activities; and you have probably spent a little more than your budget allowed to ensure your children had all that you could provide. Life is about to change dramatically.
During and after the family reorganization, you will not have the time, energy nor money you once had for your children. This fact alone will typically result in feelings of guilt and inadequacy. You do not have to subscribe to those feelings. Many of us in the mental health profession believe heavily involved parenting is many times over-parenting. Therefore, if you can not do what you once were doing, you may be right where you need to be.
What you may not have realized is when you load up your children with all of the goodies, the extras in life prior to your family reorganization, you are also loaded up the pressure and stress on both yourself and your children:
Previous Pressure and Stress on Your Children
If your children did not live up to your standards or appreciate your "sacrifices," it was an opportunity for them to see themselves as not good enough, not measuring up, not trying hard enough, or simply failing you. This type of pressure is extremely fear-filled because children's normal internal desires are to please their parents, to make their parents proud of them, and to demonstrate to their parents the kind of "adults" they are becoming.
Previous Pressure and Stress on Yourself
Financial and time requirements to provide all of the goodies and extras for your children.
The normal day-to-day pressures of an intact family are hard. But now, in addition to those "normal" pressures you will be adding the stress, the strain, the financial impact, and the emotional upheaval of being engaged in the adversarial family court system. You can well imagine the pressure cooker that is about ready to explode. In many families it does explode. Almost every day you can read in the paper or see on TV the outcome of too much pressure on a person going through the family court system; suicides, murders, kidnaps and all other types of behaviors from previous "regular" and "normal" parents. It just proves the point that when you put regular normal families, with regular normal daily stresses of raising their children, and add to those stressors the confusion, frustration, anger and hurt which the adversarial family court system exacerbates, the "regular and normal" person can become irregular and abnormal - something is going to blow.
My purpose here is to help you understand the stresses and pressures you are feeling are very real, and you need to do something about them before they do something to you. And now is the time to do something.
Now is the time, more than ever before, for you to take time to listen to your children. Time to get to know them as they really are.