Your Feelings Don’t Belong Between Your Kids and Your Ex

When your relationship ends and you have to share the kids with your ex, emotions can run high. How can you manage to separate your feelings from the parenting relationship?

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not my ex-husband’s biggest fan. In fairness, I’m sure he’s not exactly raving about how awesome I am either (although I am). I also must admit, to be totally transparent, that he’s been an absent parent for the majority of both my sons’ lives — no visits, and for many years, no child support came either. Our marriage was miserable, and the things that happened after it was over didn’t do anything to improve the situation between us.

But there’s something else I can tell you. No matter how I feel about their father, and no matter what their father has or hasn’t done, I have made sure that my kids never decided how they felt about him based on me. Now that one is an adult and the other is not far behind, they’ve come to their own conclusions about him. While those conclusions are much the same as my own, I’m both proud and relieved that they found those conclusions on their own.

So how do you keep your own feelings from influencing your kids? It’s not easy, but I promise it’s worth it.

Photo by Bruno Nascimento on Unsplash