Google the cost of a divorce. Laura Seldon at Galtime.com suggests that if the couple has agreed on everything and just needs a lawyer to sign off, the price is as low as $300.00. A more realistic amount if the divorce is contentious is $15,000 to $20,000, which may be what the wedding cost. Both spouses have attorneys, but who represents the child or the children? No one! What if both spouses had to pay for an attorney for the children? What if neither spouse could ever be present when the childrens’ attorney consulted with them? What if all three attorneys had to be in court and with equal status at the same time to litigate the divorce? Finally, the real victims would have a voice.
What is a marriage? At its core, marriage is the most solemn promise you can ever make when children are the result. Children carry your everyday words and your everyday behavior to their graves and even pass them on to the next generation through your children’s children. Your unspoken marriage oath to your children does not end with a divorce.
Millions of children are unwilling victims of this divorce crisis, and the toll on them is often devastating. Pain is the symptom. The root cause of a divorced child’s pain is that the social unit that makes up the community in which the child’s identity develops, grows and is nurtured has dissolved because the promise both parents made when they brought the child into the world has been taken back and dissolved. Without the family the child is left exposed psychologically and socially. The child’s core sense of being can begin to disappear. Children of divorce question their own existence and even fear that they will dissolve just like the marriage dissolved because children lack a perspective and a life experience which establishes an identity. Adults have the power and the resources to reinvent themselves. Children of divorce do not have the resources to reinvent themselves.
So what is the real cost of a divorce to a child? Maybe their very sense of who they are.
Advice from a Miami family counselor: Celebrate the promise you made to your spouse everyday. Celebrate the unspoken promise you made to your children everyday.