Nobody tells you when you’re spending less time with your children that you really start paying more attention.
When you’ve got every morning with them, you don’t notice every morning with them. When it’s just a weekend, or the extra days during school holidays, you really notice. You’re watching what makes them happy, what they’re struggling with, what they take to bed with them. You’re listening harder because that time counts so much more.
I notice things I probably wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. Something I noticed was a gap.
Not just in my new family structure, but everywhere.
Ever heard of the ACEs study, or Adverse Childhood Experiences? Until the separation I certainly hadn’t. Back in the 90s they tracked tens of thousands of adults and found that more adverse childhood experiences lead to significant long-term impact on mental and physical health, relationships and outcomes. The thing that hit me was that divorce or separation is counted as an adverse childhood experience.
Divorce doesn’t seal the fate for your child, plenty of children with separated parents are fine, and there are loads of children with stable married parents that aren’t. The ACEs study shows strong correlation between instability in childhood and worse outcomes later in life, it doesn’t guarantee it.
In England and Wales, around 42% of marriages end in divorce, that’s almost heads or tails. Nobody teaches us how to raise emotionally resilient children, so how do we learn those skills, and how do we make sure our children have them too. Many of these separations involve children, and too many end up with significantly more time with one parent than the other. That time matters, less time for the ordinary, always pressure to squeeze everything in, always something that will have to wait until next time.
That’s a lot of dads paying a lot of attention on the days they have.
The question is: what do you do with it?
When I became a dad I was blessed with an understanding employer that allowed me to start working from home. I was there for the nappy explosions, first steps, lunch time with Daddy, I loved all of it, but cracks started showing between my wife and I, COVID didn’t help and eventually I realised we could both be better parents if we weren’t together. It wasn’t the together forever fairy tale we imagined, but it was best for the children.
I came away from it, like so many ex-husbands do, with the standard issue every other weekend and shared school holidays. That stung hard, at home with them every day: gone. I can’t pretend it doesn’t hurt any more, but I’ve come to accept it and to redirect my energy into making the time with them count.
I started paying attention to what my children needed from the time we had together. I wasn’t there every day to hear what happened that day, or to teach them what I thought was important, naming their feelings, knowing someone else’s feelings from their own, that love is deserved, not earned.
With only so many hours in a visit I’ve found it hard finding the right words, and the right opportunities for all this with my own children, so I looked to story books to help.
I found a few that dealt with these topics, but they were really clinical. I have one on the shelf along with the Teacher’s Resource Book that came with it. Credit where credit’s due but it wasn’t what I was looking for. There’s also plenty of books about unconditional love, but they aren’t it either.
I was looking for something that looked like a story because it was a story, something children would ask for again and again like they do with the Gruffalo.
I couldn’t find it. So I made it.
I’m not a therapist and I hope I don’t sound like one. Here’s what I’ve learned from paying closer attention, and from the research that backs it up.
Get your children to name their feelings early and often. Children who have words for what they feel are better at regulating those feelings. You don’t need an instruction manual, or a course. You just need to name what you see: “you look frustrated,” “that sounds like it was scary,” “I can see that really upset you.” Don’t try to solve anything. You’re giving them a vocabulary. And that vocabulary belongs to them.
Get your children to return feelings to their owner. One of the most powerful things you can do for a child’s emotional development is to make clear they don’t have to carry other people’s feelings. Your bad day is your bad day. If you’re stressed, annoyed, or upset, say so, and make sure they know it’s yours. “I’m having a hard day. That’s not your fault, that’s for me to fix, not you.” Children in difficult relational situations often carry weight that isn’t theirs.
Listen, really listen to your children before trying to fix. The instinct as a parent, especially with limited time, is to fix. Something’s wrong, let’s solve it. The research on what children need from adults is clear: they need to feel heard before anything else. Ask them how it made them feel, if they’ve already done anything about it, how that went, and what they think they need to do next. You can offer a fix after, but they might figure it out themselves.
Keep showing up. A consistent, available adult who listens and believes the child and doesn’t make them feel worse for coming outperforms any book or technique. They aren’t going to be children forever, be the version of yourself they’ll choose to come visit when they have their own family. Get this right and a lot of the rest just falls into place.
And don’t worry about getting things wrong. The phrase I say most often is: “I like being wrong, it means I can fix it and learn from it.” Children don’t need you to have solved everything, they need to know adults mess up too and that’s ok.
That last point might be my favourite. I encourage my children to tell me when I get something wrong, or I upset them so I can fix it. To me, it’s one of the most beautiful moments in the world when one of my children challenges me on something I’ve done as it tells me they trust me, they know I’ll listen, weigh up their argument and admit I got it wrong, and apologise. Children need to see adults repairing relationships, why not make it that they see us repairing the relationship with them as many times as they need.
Maybe a year ago I started some serious thinking, planning, research, what could a book teach a child, what characters would need to be there, how could they be written so the children actually enjoyed the stories and wanted to hear them again.
The result is Pip’s Wood, a series of children’s books following Pip, a small brave mouse who lives in a field at the edge of a wood. In the wood, there’s Fox. At the wood’s edge, there’s Owl. Across the series, Pip learns about feelings, friendships, what love actually looks like, and who the safe people in the world are.
The books use rhythm and rhyme and are written to be read aloud. They work as pure stories, so a child who doesn’t need the lessons enjoys them as stories about a mouse. A child who does need them just learns along the way.
There’s such a gap for these stories that I decided at the beginning that they’d be free to listen to and read, you can download them as text to read yourself, or listen to them online.
Book 1 “Faster! Higher!” is out now. It’s about inherent worth: the idea that you’re born deserving love, and that you don’t have to run faster or jump higher or be anything other than yourself to earn it. It felt like the right place to start.
If they’re useful to you or your children, every second that’s gone into the project was worth it.
The thing about having less time is that you learn to use it differently.
I can only speak for myself, I know that the attention I started paying, because I had to, has made me a better parent than I was when I had every morning.
JC Clement
