The biggest divorce mistake parents make | Erica Komisar

Hi, I'm Miriam Cates. Welcome to GB News. I'm here at the ARC conference. It's the second day, and I'm delighted to be speaking now to Erika Komisar. She's a psychoanalyst and an author. We've met a number of times, Erika, and some of your most influential work has been about early childhood and motherhood, and you've made great waves in this topic. But you've just brought a new book out about a different topic, or related but a slightly different angle. Tell us a little bit about your book. Well, the book is called A Child Healthy Divorce, and it's basically the concept that divorce is not something that's good for children, but if you have to divorce, then there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. And if you do it in a healthy manner, your children will be less impacted in terms of their future mental health. But there are so many sand traps or pitfalls that parents fall into when they're going through a separation or breakup or divorce that really impact children negatively. And the way I would think about it is that when parents are in a great deal of pain, because divorce causes a lot of pain, they aren't necessarily their best selves. And it's easy to lose sight of the pain that you are inadvertently causing your children because you're in pain. And so this is a book which really is compassionate to parents, but really helps them to understand these are the issues that you want to work on and do better on and really preserve your children's mental health. I think a lot of people will be used to hearing the statistics on how much better children do if parents are able to stay together and the success rate of marriages. And it's all very well, isn't it, to say if you can stay together, it is probably better for your children. But the reality is lots and lots of relationships do break down, and some of them are inevitable, and sometimes it's actually the best thing. So I mean, this is a groundbreaking thing to do, actually, I think, to guide people through that process. I mean, what's interesting is the original impetus for me writing this book is because new research came out, which is the old research by a woman named Judith Wallerstein, I think in the 80s, was that all divorce was bad for children, and you should always stay with your spouse. The new research says that yes, of course, divorce is bad for children, and as much as possible, preserve your marriage. But if you can't, in fact, for children to live in a very hostile environment with conflicts that can't be resolved, where parents really hate each other, is far worse for children's mental health than if parents divorce and co-parent in a healthy way. The question is, can parents co-parent and divorce in a healthy way? And so that's what the book was about. It was taking this research and saying, you know, some families do do better if two parents live separately, but then they really have to be careful of these sand traps that they easily fall into. I'm joined now by the founder and CEO of Tally Money, Cameron Parry. So what is Tally Money and what does it do? So you get an everyday account in your individual name, you get an account number and sort code, but instead of having an account denominated in pound sterling with your bank, you have milligrams of gold which we brand as Tally. The reason why we chose gold, everybody understands gold, it's universally understood and accepted. It's been increasing at over 11% on average for the last 25 years against the pound. In the last two years, it's up 60% against the pound. So if you had, you know, 10,000 pounds in a Tally account two years ago, it's now got 16,000 pounds worth of value. The gold hasn't changed, but the value and your purchasing power has. And so banks can't keep up with that performance. How easy is it to get a Tally Money account then? If you're a UK resident, it's really easy. Just go to your app store, download the app. You'll need photo ID. You can onboard yourself in a couple of minutes. Just your passport, your driving license. Yep. And you're up and away. So you know what you're getting. It's very simple, low fees. It's transparent. There's no hidden fees. There's no effect spreads depending on the amount you put in. And you just get to go ahead and be productive in your daily life. Build up your savings again because it's useful to do it now. I was going to say, so you're not, you don't necessarily, if people are watching this going, oh, it sounds a bit scary. You can open a Tally Money account, transfer. Is there a minimum amount you have to transfer? So you might think, I'm just going to play with this. I'm going to put a hundred quid in it that I've got this month. And I'm either going to spend it and see if I feel like I'm getting more value for money from my sale, from the things that I'm buying, or I'm going to save it and watch how that compares to maybe a hundred quid in your current account. To find out more and to get an exclusive GB News offer, simply scan the QR code or click the link in the description. So what are some of the practical tips that you're giving people? What can they practically do to make it better for kids? Well, I can tell you some of the things that are mistakes that parents make that some of my adult patients report later on as well and saying, these are the things that my parents did that hurt me the most. One of them is treating children like a possession, like a car or a house or a vase, you know, the idea of splitting them like a sandwich, as if you can split a child like a sandwich. So this whole concept of 50-50 guardianship has really done children a lot of harm because although you want to say we're co-parenting and we may have decision-making together, the idea that children have one stable place that they live during the week, particularly when they're older, when they're past the age of three, you know, when they're going to school, one place that they can lay their head down and then another place on weekends because it's very different when you give children the kind of consistency. The other thing is that I do tell parents if you can avoid separating or divorcing before the age of three, because as you know, Miriam, I write books about attachment security, and by trying to split custody of an infant or toddler who has a primary attachment figure, you actually may be disrupting a developmental process that's going to impact their mental health long-term. And then there are other really good tips in the book about how it's best if you don't use your children as messengers, how it's best if you don't overshare your pain with your children. As parents, we need to have some place to go with our pain, whether we're divorcing or not, a therapist, extended family, a faith-based priest, minister, rabbi, but you don't want to share it with your children. And what you definitely don't want to do is alienate your children from your ex, even though you have very angry and painful feelings towards your ex, because even though you're separating or divorcing from your partner, your child does not. And so, the idea of taking that other parent away from them is a very painful thing for that child. So, although you may be doing it inadvertently and unconsciously, it's very important that you not speak badly about your spouse, no matter how much they've hurt you, that you not speak badly about them in front of your children. Yes, tell your best friend, tell your sister, tell your therapist, tell your mother, but don't go to your children and overshare. And there's a lot more, but those are just a few of the grains of wisdom. Now, almost all parents want the best for their children, even if, you know, all of us, none of us are perfect parents, aren't we? We all screw up from time to time. But what you're asking of parents is quite a substantial level of maturity and selflessness in a situation where, like you say, they might be feeling very broken, very hurt, very anxious about the future. What can parents do to kind of take themselves out of their own emotion, out of the present situation, to try and think more long-term about the impact for their children? Because if you can't do that, it seems like you're kind of heading for quite a messy breakup. Well, none of it can happen without self-awareness. So, self-control can't happen without self-awareness. And self-awareness comes from, I mean, listen, I'm a psychoanalyst, I'm a therapist, so I'm going to say that when you're going through a divorce or separation, finding a therapist for yourself and your children is always recommended and always helpful. And I don't overstate that too strongly. It's a trauma that both parents and children go through, and it's very hard to go through trauma on your own. You may use other, there are other ways to get through trauma. You can use, as I say, a faith-based community, you can have extended family. The only issue with family that I would say is that they have their own agenda and they have their own feelings and their own opinions, and that can sometimes get in the way of you having a safe place to bring your feelings. So, just like you need a safe place to bring your feelings, so do your children. So, getting therapy for them as soon as you can with older children and adolescents, as soon as they'll allow you to, is always best because, again, it's a safe, objective place for them to bring their feelings that they may feel very self-conscious about expressing to you or to your ex. Now, what would you say to parents who are struggling with that co-parenting, maybe in later teenage years, where parents often have very different ideas about how much independence a child should have at a certain age. So, for example, even in a healthy, strong marriage, you might expect dads to have a different idea of when a child is allowed to go out on their own to mom. And in a healthy relationship, you kind of work that through and you compromise, or some person has the final say. But if you're living separately, if you're not in a relationship anymore, if you really still dislike, distrust each other, how do you resolve those genuine questions in a way that doesn't make the child feel like piggy in the middle? So, what's interesting is if you could resolve a lot of those conflicts, you might still be married. Yeah. So, and I try to get to families as early as I can as a therapist to do couples therapy to see if it's, you know, you can remedy. Yeah. And sometimes it's a lack of awareness on both parents' part that you don't have to agree on everything as parents. Yeah. And you don't have to agree to stay married as parents. That men and women are not the same. They're actually quite different and accepting the differences that are sometimes gender-based, but also accepting differences. I mean, one of the things that keeps marriages and families together is tolerance and patience and acceptance of each other's differences. And I would say that people are less tolerant of differences now, as we can see in society overall, but it's no different in families and relationships that there's much less tolerance for differences. And so to say that you can only change yourself, you can't change another person and working on yourself to be the best, most evolved parent, you can be the most sensitive and empathic parent. Even if your ex is not parenting in that way, what you do for your child is you help them by staying the line and being the best parent you can be. And when they come home to you from a different environment, you help to process their feelings about the experience of having two different homes and say, look, when you're with dad, you're going to have these rules. And when you're with mom, you're going to have these rules. And that's okay. And it's hard. And there's going to be a transition. And we realize that. But mom and dad have different rules. And these are mom's rules. And really not feeling that you have to adapt to your ex's rules or your ex adapts to yours, because in the end, you can only, of course, it's better for children when their parents are on the same page. But I would say even when couples stay married, they're often not on the same page. And children know which parent to ask. Yes, because they're often raised in very different ways. So unless you were raised in a very similar way, so we call it generational expression. If you were raised with very strict parenting, your spouse was raised with very sensitive parenting, then you're going to parent quite differently. And so, and it's not always a bad thing, because as I say, there can always be a good cop, bad cop in a relationship. And it's often the mother who's the more sensitive and empathic, and the father who's the rule setter and the standard bearer of discipline. And sometimes that switches and it's the opposite. But I would say that there, there's some value to not being exactly the same and in a complimentary way, offering children something very different. Really, really quickly, Erica, do you think divorce is now easier for children, given that it's much more common? Or do you think that's made it harder? So in the 1970s, for example, it's harder. And I'll tell you why, because of the rules that have changed in the legal system. So in recognizing men as having rights with children, that was a very good thing. And fathers being more involved, a very good thing. But what really happened is because of this gender neutrality issue in the world, the idea of a 50 50 split in children in terms of custody. So we used to have something called the tender years doctrine, which was the acknowledgement that children have a primary attachment figure, particularly in the younger years. And they need that primary attachment figure as much as possible. And they need the consistency of one stable home. That's their primary home. That doesn't mean they don't have a second home. Today, they're meant to have two primary homes and go back and forth. And in America, and in the UK, there's a system which we call 223, which is absolutely destroying children. Two days with mom, two days with dad, three days with mom, two days with dad, two days with mom, three days with dad. Now, if you've ever traveled, we say it's like when you're like 17, and you go backpacking in Europe, and you're like, it's fun. I'm in London, and today I'm in Spain. It drives children crazy. And one of the things I can tell you, that adults who've been through the process, come to me as adults and say, is that was very damaging. That it was for fairness for my parents, but they were not acknowledging how hard it was for me to be passed around like a sack of potatoes. Very insightful. Erica, thank you so much. So the book is called The Child-Centered Divorce. The Child-Healthy Divorce. And that's available now. Yes. Brilliant. Erica Komisar, thank you so much for talking to me. Thank you, Miriam.