Rethinking 50-50 care Through A Child’s Eyes

We challenge the idea that equal time is equal care and centre the child’s need for one secure base. Real stories from the consulting room reveal how conflict, absence, and “fairness” myths shape behaviour, learning, and long-term attachment.

• the hidden costs of two homes and split routines
• how “fair” time can ignore child stability
• signs of emotional harm and internal conflict
• why children rarely choose 50-50 when asked
• absent parents, broken promises, and self-blame

...Next,
• practical ways to reduce transitions and center school and friends
• when therapy helps and when structure must change
• safeguards, realistic boundaries, and reviewing orders over time

More to follow.....

Transcript

Setting The Child-Centered Lens

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, this is Kim Lee from the Children's Consultancy. Today I want to talk about a subject that's very close to my heart, and it is close to my heart because I work with so many children and young people who in some kind of curious contact arrangement that the parents have decided on separating or divorcing. What strikes me is that it is more often the case that the arrangements made do not have the needs of the child in mind, or if so, the interpretation and understanding of those needs isn't really based on anything reliable. Why this is of such concern is because I see children who, for example, might live in one house for half the week and then the other house for half the week. They have belongings in both. Sometimes they're not allowed to move one set of belongings from one home to the other home. They're caught between quite often two opposing or very different parenting styles. They may feel disconnected from their social group for half the week simply by virtue of the fact that geographics don't allow them to have easy access. Now, when children are very young, they may be seemingly accepting of this, but that's only on the surface. As they get older, they become acutely aware of the fact that they don't have a central place to reside. Instead, they are between places. And sometimes what we see is that the child or young person behaves in different ways in order to manage those situations. And when I say behave in different ways, it's almost as if they're one person in one environment and another person in another environment. It doesn't make any kind of sense to me that a secure base, the primary home, can be divided by two. It just clearly doesn't make any sense to me at all. I think there are times when it is possible to accommodate the idea of the child having access to both parents in this kind of way. But to be honest, it very seldom works in my experience. If parents are child-centered, and if they're able to have a good enough working relationship, then perhaps it might work. However, I do think it's time limited for a variety of quite ordinary reasons. But my concern is, well, what happens if the grown-ups don't have the child in mind, or only one of them does? And what happens if there's an acrimonious relationship? Well, it's very simple. What happens is children become the vehicles for the expression of that acrimony and the conflict. Sometimes this is subtle and other times it's overt. Some of the things I've heard children and young people tell me are truly harrowing. That they feel responsible for not upsetting either of the adults, that they're trying to please both adults. Sometimes they tell me that they don't feel like they can say what they really want and how they really want to be living. Because if they do, there will be some kind of conflict, some kind of outcome, or one parent might fall to bits. And this is a really huge responsibility for a child, and it's very often one that is unspoken. But just because it's unspoken doesn't mean that it isn't there. And certainly in the consulting room, it really is there, and children can be very, very open. Sometimes I say to children who are in these sorts of situations, tell me, what would you like? How would you like this to be? And what's interesting is they've never really been asked that before. It is very unusual when I asked that question to hear a child say, Oh, I'd like to keep it the way it is. More often than not, they'll say things like, I don't want to be there as much. I don't mind going perhaps a weekend or every other weekend, but I I don't I don't want to be there half the week. So I I think hearing this from children is very is very powerful and very telling. And in such situations, I will I will talk to parents about how it was that they came to this agreement in the first instance. How do they think it's working? What's it like for them? And what do they think it's like for the child? And often I will hear parents say it seemed fair. And I I wonder what that means. Fair for whom? Fair for the parents because they are having fifty-fifty contact. But is that right for the child because of the circumstances that creates? And as I said earlier, yes, there are some circumstances where it works. But in reality, there are so many where it doesn't. I also hear that sometimes, and it's usually mothers will say, I agreed to it because I was under pressure, or I agreed to it because at the time I thought it was a good idea. It's certainly with the former reason that's that's quite concerning, and certainly in those relationships where there is acrimony and conflict, the children may be used as evidence of ownership, so it becomes a kind of territorial situation, a kind of possession situation. None of this is, of course, good for children. It can be understood though that sometimes parents in good faith believe it's a good choice. And such parents may, when they come to the consulting room, be open to the fact that actually this is a situation that needs to be reviewed. Now, coming away from the 50-50 shared care arrangement, often these things are as a consequence of a court order, but that's normally when there is conflict. Sometimes people will make these arrangements in a voluntary fashion, so they're not ratified in court. In either event, the thing that is important to understand, and I keep coming back to this, is what is right for the child. A concerning feature of this kind of situation is when there is acrimony between parents and the way in which this is internalized by the child. And we call this emotional harm. And it's a recognized safeguarding concern because what tends to happen is that such children will become hugely conflicted and experience an internal distress which finds expression through behavior. You may see such children underfunctioning at school or having episodes of dregulated behavior, sadness, fearfulness. And to some large extent, I mean this is this is age-determined, so those sorts of things you might see in younger children, but it can happen with adolescents as well. And you can also see oppositional behaviours emerging which are to do with the fact that the child's internal chaos and conflict finds expression through anger and opposition. So, in a sense, when we think about how this may be harmful, we have to also think about what's the damage. Well, the damage has to do with the child's internal sense of their parents, the primary caregivers that they're attached to. And when the parents split, then the child experiences an internal split. It's almost like they have to divide themselves. That's damaging and often very painful to observe. So the child can't graduate because they're stuck in this internal conflict which does not self-resolve. What you tend to find is it then continues to find expression in in adolescents and beyond and influences the quality of relationships and attachments. I should say that the same thing is true of parents who don't separate or divorce, but where there is acrimony, and I've done a number of podcasts on the subject of domestic abuse and coercion and control and the effects upon children, which of course are very worrying. Now I want to talk more about what to do in circumstances like this. Because very often, although therapy can be a helpful thing, it isn't a solution. We have to look carefully at how we approach the whole question of contact when when parents separate or divorce. Because there are times when contact isn't this kind of proprietorial experience, it can be one where neglect is the key, where one parent disappears from a child's life and then may just come back expecting to resume, or a parent who disappears with the promise of return and raising expectations in the child which become disappointed. There are a number of children that I've worked with where that's the case, and it is deeply upsetting to see a child once again anticipating and hoping and expecting that this time it will be different only to have more of the same. Such children almost always hold themselves responsible. Why wasn't I good enough for the parent to stay? Why am I not good enough for the parent to return? This is deeply troubling for the parent with whom the child lives because they are the ones who have to pick up the pieces. And they're the ones that have to manage the inevitable tension between not wanting to vilify the other parent, but at the same time protecting their child. So I will be looking some more at this in the next past uh next podcast and also talking about the whole question of safeguarding legal considerations, realistic boundaries, and the protection of children's emotional well being. Thank you for listening.