I’ve just read a nice book for parents who want to help their children cope with their divorce. It’s called The Everything Parent’s Guide to Children and Divorce by Carl E. Pickhardt, I found it refreshingly candid and practical, and it costs just a little more than $10.
Pickhardt lays out simple, straightforward tips that any parent can use who wants to help his or her child cope with divorce. My favorite was the section on adolescent children, with its delightful reframe: “Adolescence is a functionally abrasive process. By creating ongoing opposition between them, it wears the dependence down between parents and child so that by the end of adolescence, each is willing to let the other go.” My Mama said it another way: “God turned you into a teenager so I’d be willing to let you go to college.”
Pickhardt also deals honestly with the added stress on single parents of modeling appropriate gender roles for their children, as well as traps into which single parents can fall if they’re not careful. His book is affordable, readable, and true. Well done.