‘Torn up and shredded’: When children lose a step-parent

My friend’s former step-brother learned this the hard way.

“We really looked up to him,” says my friend, now in her early 40s, of the step-brother she gained when her mother remarried. My friend was 10 at the time. “He was just the most beautiful, warm person,” she says of her former step-brother. “He’d come and sit with his guitar and play us music.”

But after her mother divorced his father, one year into their marriage, he was whisked out of her life. Neither her mother nor her step-father thought to keep their kids in touch.

Then, eight years later, my friend’s former step-brother called her out of the blue.

“He wanted to speak to my sister and I and proceeded to say how much he felt like there was something missing in his life,” she says. “And how we were such a huge part of his life, and he misses us. He wants us in his life.”

I don’t think people realise how bad things can get [for kids]. [Some] basically go off and do their own thing, and they don’t want anything to do with anyone.

Professor Bruce Smyth, the Australian National University

McIntosh is far from surprised.

“They’re forged in fire,” she says about step-sibling relationships. “And there’s quite a devastation when the loss is not explained and not justified and not justifiable.”

So why do so many parents and step-parents either actively or passively block their children from maintaining these valuable relationships?

Step-parents are often confused about what they’re entitled to ask for after they’ve separated from their partner, says Elisabeth Shaw, CEO of Relationships Australia (NSW).

“They’re saying, ‘Well, I’m not a blood relation, do I have any rights here to even want a relationship [with the kids]? And if I do argue for that, am I going to be supported, or is it kind of weird?’” she says. “Sometimes even friends and family say, ‘Well you’re done with that relationship, walk away.’”

And parents and step-parents are often too blinded by their own rage and sadness over their break-up to consider the children’s needs.

“It’s kind of well, ‘You’ve left, so to hell with you and you don’t deserve time now with the kids’,” says Shaw.

One of the first problems for children in this scenario is that they blame themselves for being left behind.

Children of all ages frequently carry a “fantasy” that they deserve to be rejected or weren’t good enough for the former step-parent or step-siblings to continue nurturing an ongoing relationship, says McIntosh.

It’s developmental, she explains.

Children under seven, she says, are “naturally narcissistic” and self-focused, so if they see their parents arguing, they assume it’s about themselves. And older kids “far more often than not” attribute the blame of their parents’ conflict to themselves, too.

“Children who continue to blame themselves do very poorly,” says McIntosh. “Particularly [with] the development of internalising disorders, like depression and anxiety.”

And children whose parents rope them into sharing their view that the other parent is bad or at fault for the break-up are at risk of low self-esteem and a warped emotional development.

“We just see how torn up and shredded they [the children] are by the whole recruitment campaign,” says McIntosh of children who become alienated from a parent who is demonised. “Oh, it’s shocking. It’s a double-whammy. The kid often loses both their relationship and their self-esteem.“

Because the scenario often puts children into “freeze mode”, a deeply internalised reluctance to get in touch with how they feel.

“Because you’ve actually got to defend against what you really feel” – for instance, love or fondness for the demonised parent – “in order to keep in the good graces of the parent you’re living with,” she says. This often leaves children constantly second-guessing themselves, and without the faith that others will help them, when they have a problem.

“I don’t think people realise how bad things can get [for the kids],” says Professor Bruce Smyth, a professor of family studies at the Australian National University who has researched high-conflict divorces and shared parenting after separation for 30 years. “I’ve seen some horrible situations; children basically end up without anyone because they’re so conflicted between one parent and one step-parent. They basically go off and do their own thing, and they don’t want anything to do with anyone.”

Some kids are lucky. They manage to continue relationships with family members they’ve lost touch with, even when parental, or step-parental, sabotage abounds.

“It’s a bit like, ‘Well, blood’s thicker than your bullshit’,” says one woman I know in her early 40s, of what happened to her after her father cheated on her mother with a woman he ended up marrying.

“So she was always the villain in my mother’s family,” says my friend of her new step-mother. “My grandmother would call her names.”

My friend was caught in the middle. She had half-siblings when her step-mother and her father had two children. But her stepmother treated her biological children as her “real” children, she says. ”I felt like, ’What have I done wrong? All I did was be born. When I went over to my dad’s house, I had to walk on eggshells. I didn’t want to do the wrong thing, or say the wrong thing. Having to censor yourself as an 8-year-old is really hard work.” Her step-mother forbid her kids, my friend’s half-siblings, to attend my friend’s wedding reception.

“The fact that our relationships have deepened since their mum and my dad have split up is a testament to the fact that blood’s thicker than vitriol,” says my friend, who relishes that, in adulthood, she has been able to fill something of a “big sister” role to her younger half-sister.

But not all children are in a mental space to fight to fulfil their emotional needs.

So what do therapists wish divorcing parents knew, when it comes to what their children need?

Loading

“What I tell parents is, ‘All the relationships that have held your child so far, [they] need to continue to hold them’,” says McIntosh, who has developed child-inclusive therapeutic resources that parents can easily access to enable them to do this. “I’m forever advising parents, ‘OK, it’s true, you’re really pissed off with him, but… you must hold a semi-compassionate view for the children in endorsing their view of the other parent’.”

She always guides parents that they need to approach separation or divorce negotiation not as bitter ex-partners, but as parents.