Co-parenting and youth development
Victoria Seiketso Sethibe | Thursday April 21, 2016 11:51
When parents go their separate ways, they do so because one or both of them would have decided that is what will work best for them. Research has shown that children experience anxiety and adjustment problems when both parents are undergoing a high conflict separation.
Below is an example of how uncooperative co-parenting can affect youth development:
Joy* decided to walk out of her physically and emotionally abusive marriage to John* when Denzel*, Michelle* and Tiny* were nine, seven and four years old respectively. Even though John was violent to Joy throughout their marriage, he did not want her to walk out on him.
He was left without an easy target to control and take out his anger problems on. Due to John’s unstable lifestyle, the primary custody of the three children was given to Joy and this left him even angrier. John takes everything personally and he feels the urge to win all the time. John was determined to make Joy’s parenting experience as much of a nightmare as he possibly could, with the hope that the children would opt spend more time with him. At Joy’s house, she tried hard to create a structure whereby the children would come back home after school, eat, play, do homework , watch some age appropriate programs on television and go to bed at set times. On the contrary, at John’s house there was no structure. Whenever the three children visited during the weekends and some holidays, they would grab whatever they wanted from the kitchen and binge eat whenever they felt like.
John consistently lived on take away and junk food. He made sure his kitchen was filled with sweets, biscuits and anything that promoted binge eating whenever the children were around.
Denzel, Michelle and Tiny also had unlimited access to any television channel of their choice at their father’s house. His unstructured approach to parenting became even worse whenever Joy tried to objectively communicate against it. The children’s development became even worse when John started bad mouthing Joy in an attempt to turn the children against her. He wanted to be seen as the “better” of the two parents.
The three children got caught up in their parents’ fight and instead of choosing John as the “better” parent, they got frustrated, felt insecure and developed some unhealthy approval seeking habits. Joy, out of frustration, developed the habit of throwing anger tantrums at Denzel, Michelle and Tiny whenever they displayed the habits they picked from their father’s house.
Denzel, the only boy out of the three children, learned to go all out of his way to please in order to gain acceptance at each of his parents’ houses. This approval seeking strategy made Denzel an easy target for bullies at the playing ground. Michelle and Tiny, on the other hand, learned to be manipulative as a coping mechanism.
In order to fit in at their father’s house, Michelle and Tiny would bad mouth their mother and they would also equally complain about their father’s parenting approach whenever they were at their mother’s house. The two girls even caused fights at the playing ground because of their manipulative behaviour.
Cooperative co-parenting is inevitable if both parents understand that the children still need to adjust well and thrive in two households, post the parents’ separation.