CHILDREN SHOULD NEVER HAVE TO CHOOSE WHO THEY ARE ALLOWED TO LOVE
For a child, divorce isn't just two adults separating.
It can become two worlds—and an impossible question:
“If I love one parent, am I betraying the other?”
Psychological research gives us reason to take that burden seriously.
A meta-analysis involving 115 samples and 24,854 divorced families found meaningful associations between interparental conflict, parenting, and children's psychological adjustment.¹
Another meta-analysis found that children's emotional, cognitive, behavioral, and physiological responses to parental conflict were associated with adjustment difficulties, including internalizing problems and lower self-esteem.²
Research also shows that post-separation parent-child contact problems can have multiple causes and require careful assessment rather than one-size-fits-all assumptions.³
That leads to something we should all be able to agree on:
Protect children from abuse.
Protect children from adult conflict.
Listen to children without making them responsible for adult decisions.
Preserve safe, loving relationships whenever possible.
No child should feel that loving one parent means betraying the other.
Childhood ends.
But the emotional burdens children carry during family conflict can echo long after childhood ends.
Children deserve the freedom to love the safe people in their lives without fear, guilt, pressure, or the feeling that love itself is betrayal.
That's not a mother's-rights position.
That's not a father's-rights position.
That's a child's-rights position.
RESEARCH
1. van Dijk, R., van der Valk, I. E., Deković, M., & Branje, S. (2020). A meta-analysis on interparental conflict, parenting, and child adjustment in divorced families. Clinical Psychology Review, 79, 101861.
2. Rhoades, K. A. (2008). Children's Responses to Interparental Conflict: A Meta-Analysis of Their Associations With Child Adjustment. Child Development, 79(6), 1942–1956.
3. Fidler, B. J., & Bala, N. (2010). Children Resisting Postseparation Contact With a Parent: Concepts, Controversies, and Conundrums. Family Court Review, 48(1), 10–47.