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Originally Posted by footfootfoot
how that might be accomplished with minimum upset to the kids.
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Originally Posted by Undertoad
Rip it off like a band-aid.
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People's experiences in this area have always fascinated me, because when my own parents got divorced my brother was really torn up by it, while I honestly could not have cared less. It was hard for me to try to understand why he was so sad.
In school, I had a friend whose parents tricked him and his siblings about their divorce. First, they said, "Kids, guess what? Dad got a big raise, so we're going to get a vacation house!" It was just some random house, but the kids didn't know any better. Then sometimes dad wasn't home in the evenings, because he was working late or "remodeling" their new vacation home. And then when the house was ready, they went to stay at their new vacation house a lot, and they would go swimming and do lots of fun stuff because they were on vacation, except sometimes mom had a headache so she'd stay at the vacation house and nap while the kids went out swimming with dad, and then she usually had a lot of errands to run too, and sometimes she was so busy that dad would pick them up from school himself and they'd start the vacation without her...
And the crazy thing was, even after the routine had settled into a typical custody arrangement, and the dad eventually moved to freaking California and the kids would get on a plane by themselves to go visit him in the summer--even then, my friend would insist that his parents weren't divorced, they were married, and that the situation wasn't weird at all. Dad was in California because that's where the work was, you know, and he didn't want to make the kids change schools, and he had this really nice friend to help him keep the house clean and cook for him sometimes because, you know, he always needed mom to do that stuff for him.
At some point the gang was back together in our 20s, and he got drunk and admitted that now he understood, and he couldn't even decide how he felt about the deception, because he was definitely happier as a kid because of it, but now he was far more bitter and jaded than he would have been had he known the truth as a kid. "It's like Santa Claus!" he yelled. "My parents made me believe in Santa Claus until I graduated high school! Who the fuck does that?" Yeah, it kind of messed him up.