How do you prove the validity of a child’s feelings?
Decisions in Family Court are supposed to be made on based on proof – in theory.
It becomes the responsibility of the protective parent to PROVE that the environment the child is in when with a high-conflict, abusive other parent is harmful and unsafe. That spending time with the maladaptive, coercive parent is causing psychological and emotional injury. Both immediate and long-term.
Proving psychological and emotional abuse is near impossible.
Yet when the protective parent is consistently hearing things like “I don’t want to go”, “Don’t make me go”, “I don’t like it there”, and sometimes even explicitly expressing “I don’t feel safe there”, what does the protective parent do to prove the validity of those feelings?
If children are saying things like that, I can almost guarantee it’s not just because they don’t like the chores the other parent expects them to do there. It’s almost always something deeper.
Children are instinctually and biologically attached to both parents. They want to spend as much time with both parents as possible – especially after separation and divorce. Hence, if a child is expressing NOT wanting to spend time with a parent, then that in an of itself warrants a deeper conversation. It warrants asking some questions.
The right questions.
Children thrive in environments that are safe, predictable, and supportive. It’s not so much the physical safety but their perception of whether they feel safe or not.
So then whose perception should be taken as more “valid”?
The professionals, who come in to assess an environment the child is in and spend a fraction of the time in that environment, or the child who lives the reality of that environment every day?
The professional that sees that the child’s physical needs are being met, and the demeanor of the abusive parent (since they’re likely on their best behavior) to be quite contrary to any other accounts, or the child who experiences the truth of that parents’ demeanor and behavior consistently across time?
Protective parents may very well be telling their children that all feelings are valid. Yet when children share the feelings that the current system doesn’t want to hear, because from its perspective it’s actually about parental right and not about the child’s sense of safety, what do you do then?
Even though you may not want to, you are actively teaching your children that despite what you say, they’re feelings in fact do NOT matter.
Their voice doesn’t matter.
Their perception doesn’t matter.
That THEY DON’T MATTER.
The state of the current system is forcing protective parents to raise a generation of children that is going to grow up feeling like they don’t matter.
The mental and physical health challenges they will face, the cost to society both social and economic is immense.
And yet no one is willing to actually pause and LISTEN to what these kids are saying, and more importantly listen to the WHY.
Why? Because they are children and children don’t get to choose. And children don’t get a say.
Why is this system so hell bent on sentencing these children to a lifetime of hurt, pain and trauma?
WHY is no one willing to listen to what their gut, their truth, their intuition is telling them?
WHY is the protective parent forced to also dismiss, invalidate, and ignore their children’s feelings and convince the child against every instinct in them that it will be ok, and they must go to the other parents house even if they don't want to – because it’s their parent.
WHY? Because the current system refuses to acknowledge that not all parents have the ability or willingness to parent effectively and cannot wrap its head around the fact that NO, NOT all parents have the best interests of their children at heart.
It cannot get past the outdated and invalid assumptions that children lie and manipulate and couldn’t possibly have a valid reason for not spending time with a parent.
It cannot comprehend that if a child is not wanting to spend time with a parent it is likely due to that parent's own behavior that has distanced the child from them.
A system that perpetuates the harm these children experience and quite effectively and sets them up to need the same system in the future themselves.
So then let me ask another question….what do you do?
You do whatever you can to keep your family law matter OUT OF THE FAMILY LAW SYSTEM.
And if you’re in it, get out as soon as you can.
You can protect these children but it’s not going to be from within the system.
It will be from OUTSIDE the system.
And with the right supports, it will be far more effective than anything you can achieve from within it.
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