Tuesday 11 March 2014

Is divorce still a dirty word?

I was quickly trawling through my FB feed today, when I came across this comment from one of the contributors of ivillage...

My son came home from school today and asked me to explain what divorce is. I fobbed him off. What should I say? Jo xx

For a minute I thought I had stumbled across an Agony Aunt column from the 1950s. Really? Fobbed him off? Is divorce such a hard thing to explain to a child in this day and age? Don't most people know people who aren't married, or who are separated/divorced? Don't most kids see TV shows with people who aren't married or who have remarried? (or is it just my boy who shares my love of Modern Family?!)

The world has changed a lot since I was a kid. My eldest is 7, and I've had to field questions about homosexuality, teach about stranger danger, explain what certain unsavoury words are (even if the explanation is simply not to repeat them again), discuss death, religion and politics. I found myself needing to explain separation and divorce to him even before it happened to me, and it was by far one of the easiest tricky questions to deal with.




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