Now Kids’ Turn to Cope With the Pain of Divorce

It pains her to say it, but Ann Van Balen thinks many children don’t like her. She’s a divorce lawyer, and that makes her a low-down home-wrecker in the eyes of many youngsters, she said.

“I was talking to a group of kids a few years ago, and when they found out I was an attorney, boy did I get it,” said Van Balen, recalling an eye-opening meeting with several boys and girls whose parents were splitting up.

“They hate attorneys. We’re the ones who break up families.”

Now, Van Balen and a handful of other Bay Area family law specialists are setting out to change that point of view. They have put together an innovative program to lessen the trauma associated with divorce by teaching children how to cope with their parents’ breakup.

Called Kids’ Turn, the six-week program is the first of its kind organized by lawyers in California, according to family law experts. Although a handful of school districts and local organizations in the state have experimented with divorce-education projects for children in the past, their success has been limited, the experts say. The founders of Kids’ Turn hope to turn their program into a model for other areas by next year.

Family law specialists say Kids’ Turn reflects a growing desire to remove as much hostility as possible from divorce proceedings.

“This is the kind of thing that is the wave of the future,” said lawyer Jennifer Gordon, Kids’ Turn’s board president.

Since 1981, California law has required that all child-custody cases go through a court-run mediation process before going to trial. But most counseling and education programs coordinated by the courts concentrate on the parents. Kids’ Turn is designed for the rest of the family.

“It’s unique in that it’s focused around the kids’ needs,” said Hugh McIsaac, director of family court services in Los Angeles County Superior Court. “What often happens is that the parents are so caught up in their own trauma or pain that they forget the children.”

Kids’ Turn, still in its first year, already has attracted about 50 Bay Area children and their parents to its series of six weekly 90-minute educational sessions at an elementary school. Families hear about the program through word of mouth, from family law judges and through brochures available at San Francisco Superior Court. Although the program has been open only to children between the ages of 7 and 11, preschoolers and teens will be included starting this fall, program officials said.

Although most of the program’s $50,000 annual budget comes from donations from lawyers, judges, mental health professionals and business people, Kids’ Turn’s directors recently decided to ask each participating family to kick in $20. The fee, they say, helps defray the cost of materials, such as a book about divorcing dinosaurs that helps the youngsters begin talking about their feelings on divorce.

Organizers said the program eases children into talking about painful changes at home by encouraging them to discuss others’ problems.

The youngsters watch a video about a family going through a divorce, then discuss what the people on the screen are going through. Other tools used to get the children talking include games and a play featuring puppets. The kids act out their emotions in a game of charades, and brainstorm solutions to divorce-related dilemmas in a problem-solving contest between two teams.

Family members split up into three groups during the sessions, one for children and one for each parent. Three volunteers--most of them mental health experts, family law specialists, educators and other professionals--work with each group.

The sessions, which include a visit from a family law judge, are designed not only to help the children develop problem-solving skills but also to teach them about the legal process of divorce, said Steve Zemmelman, executive director of Kids’ Turn.

As many as 80% of the children of divorcing parents don’t know what is happening until they wake up one morning and find that a parent has moved out, according to a study published in 1980.

“When they do hear about it, it’s in bits and pieces, and usually loaded with a lot of feelings,” Zemmelman said. “We try to approach it in a neutral way.”

During one session, for instance, the children put together a newsletter expressing their feelings about what is going on. The following week, the parents respond. These exercises help families learn to communicate better and help children confront the permanence of divorce, something they often hear little about, Zemmelman said.

The program, said Linda Wong-Kerberg, the mother of 9- and 11-year-old children, “helped me understand my children’s feelings and how they’re experiencing the divorce process.”

“It opened up channels,” she said. “It opened up the communication between the kids and myself.”

Children learn how to avoid being caught in the middle of their parents’ disputes. They learn ways of saying no when one parent asks for personal information about the other or when one parent asks them to pass along a nasty message to the other.

For some of the youngsters, just discussing the divorce helped them feel better.

“We talked about stuff about our parents, and we had puppet shows about it,” said one 5-year-old girl. “It made things much happier.”

Lawyers see the San Francisco program as part of a trend toward kinder, gentler divorces. The 1980s saw a significant swing in courtroom emphasis in divorce cases, with increased attention paid to working out family problems, said McIsaac of the Los Angeles Superior Court.

In fact, most child-custody cases are resolved before they get to court, he said. In 1989, for instance, only about 2% of the 8,300 child-custody cases in Los Angeles County ended with a trial. But Kids’ Turn backers and other experts on divorce say even a friendly parting can leave children suffering unless parents let them know what is going on, how their family is changing and why.