Taking Care of You is Taking Care of Your Family

When you ride in an airplane with your child the steward tells you appropriate self-care procedures: When the oxygen masks decend, the parent is to take oxygen before they help the child. This is to avoid improper self-care and a failure of the parent-child relationship. Reaching out for support for your personal needs during separation and divorce will make you better able to respond to the needs of your children. Knowing more about how children, at each stage and age of development, experience separation and divorce will help too. The next section describes some of the feelings children and youth commonly experience as their parents divorce, and how you can help them adapt to the changes involved and move forward in their growth and development