Easing the sting of divorce for kids
By Maggie Guter, 12, with contributions by Thad Schmitt, 16, Faith Perala, 10, Will Guter, 9 and Julien Malherbe, 9

Most people know someone who has had an experience with divorce and many have had an experience themselves. It is not unusual.

Divorce can make many people, especially kids whose parents are divorcing, feel hurt and sad. Yet, in the Marquette area, there are no programs to help kids get through divorce.

Toni Landick, a guidance counselor at Marquette’s Bothwell Middle School, believes that divorce is hard on most kids.

“ I think kids respond with a sense of grief and loss and that’s very natural and it would be surprising to me if they didn’t feel that way,” she said.

“I hope that parents, counselors and other people would encourage a certain amount of grieving and talking about their loss, instead of sweeping it under the rug and expecting them to just get over it because it takes a long time. It’s something you deal with and get more comfortable with over time.”

Although Ilsa Ittner is now a well-adjusted adult and a third year medical student, her parents divorced when she was in third grade and she remembers the difficulties she dealt with vividly.

“ It brought on a lot of anxiety for me at the beginning because I never knew what they were going to fight about next,” she said. “I remember I was so angry, confused and worried.”

Judge Jennifer Mazzuchi, of Marquette County’s 25th Circuit Court, presides over many divorce cases every year. She believes that divorce greatly affects children and that parents should think of how their children will feel before making decisions.

“ Most parents act in the best interest of their children, but when people get divorced sometimes they’re not getting along very well and sometimes the feelings of the children get lost in the process,” she said. “I think that divorce in general is a pretty painful thing for kids. I do interview a fair number of kids and probably the most common sentiment is that they want to live with both of their parents. That’s what they want, but when the parents get divorced, that’s not one of the choices anymore, so divorce affects children tremendously, I think.”

Ilsa Ittner agrees that her parents’ divorce has definitely affected her life.

“Adjusting was very hard. My mom and dad could not be in the same room together. They couldn’t even have a phone conversation without screaming at each other. My mom would cry all the time and my dad was lonely,” she said.

Bill Mankee is the director of the SMILE program through the Marquette Friend of the Court office. SMILE is an acronym for Start Making It Livable for Everyone. Mankee works with parents that are divorcing and have children. Last year his office had 127 newly divorcing families come through. He shows them a short video and talks with them. He believes that divorce is a very stressful time for not only the parents but the children as well.

“ The program really helps families understand how to cope with all the changes and hard feelings, how to get over the hard feelings, and make it more about the children than about the parents,” he said. “I always try to remind the parents that the children should be their first concern, not their own concerns or needs.”

The SMILE program is the closest thing in the Marquette area to a program to help kids get through and get over divorce. However it only helps the parents help their kids.

Judge Mazzuchi said she does not know of any community programs built just around helping kids get through divorce.

“ We tend to focus a lot on the parents in the process because they’re the parties to the court proceeding, and in general you try to leave kids out of the courtroom or out of the contested hearings as much as possible,” she said.

Most kids who are having problems dealing with a divorce are most often referred to private and school counselors.

According to Landick, guidance counselors often act as a go-between between the parents and the school, and even between the parents and their child at times.

“ If we can assist in any way we will,” she said. “So very often in the case of a divorce, we will hear from a parent: ‘My husband and I are going through a divorce, this is going to be really hard on us and hard on our kids, we want you to be aware that this is happening to our child.’”

Landick believes that for the sake of the kids, not only the kids, but the parents, too, need support through the process.

“ I would suggest that each of the adults in the relationship get some sort of support for themselves. Emotional support. Find a counselor, find a pastor, find a friend, find a neighbor, someone that you can talk to and that can support you through it. That you can express your sadness and your anger to that person because the more you express it to another adult, or a friend in your life, the less you’re apt to let it spill over and have those feelings be expressed in front of your child,” she explained. “Because no matter what, that child still has a mom and a dad and they don’t like to hear bad things about either one of them. It hurts them no matter what.”

Mazzuchi believes that the parents have more impact on their children the court could ever have. If they help out, things go fairly well.

“ A court can issue whatever order it wants, but the day-to-day happiness of a child depends on a large part on the parents getting involved,” she said. “They can make life happier and less stressful for a child.”

Still, perhaps it might be beneficial to have some kind of counseling program in the community for kids whose family is being impacted by divorce. Ittner said she would have liked to be able to talk to someone during her parents’ divorce.

“ I think it would have been nice to incorporate a weekly get together for children with divorced parents, not necessary to discuss what is going on in their lives, but just to have a place of normalcy where they can do fun activities,” she said. “Also, to get to know a support group where they can find trust in someone so if they ever need to talk they have someone to go to. I never really had anyone to talk with about my feelings besides my parents and sister, which was hard.”

Landick agreed that it would probably be good to have some sort of group that kids going through divorce could go to when they need to.

“ They could sit down and just visit and maybe have someone come in who is familiar with the process and could help coach the kids through it,” she suggested. “Just talk and find out that other kids feel just the same as they do and that they are not alone in this process.”

Short of establishing a new support system, Ittner said the thing that most helped her with her parents divorce was knowing that both of her parents loved her through it all.

“ Children need to be reminded over and over again that divorce is not their fault and that their parents still love them either way,” she said.