![]() ![]() ![]() Don’t be melodramatic when you tell the children …įarquharson tells the story of a friend whose parents split up. ‘Definitely the hardest conversation’ … telling your children. “You need to allow yourself to fade into the background, to get to the stage of being amicable,” says Farquharson. Look at it through the eyes of your kids’ future therapist. What I’m saying is, don’t look at your own behaviour through the prism of the previous generations: our parents and their parents were often unbelievably bad at this. Every Monday for 15 years after their separation, my dad would ask how often my mum used the Magimix, and my sister and I would have to make up some fake culinary endeavour because the true answer was never. My parents had a custody battle over everything, down to the Magimix. “Now, people – even through affairs, even through the trauma of breakup – are prioritising the children’s feelings over their own.” “I think there was slightly more selfishness to divorce in the past,” she says. We chose this.” But it is not always obvious in the moment what putting the kids first would look like, and even when it is, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Put the children firstĪs Whitehouse says, separating parents should “constantly prioritise how to anchor the two little people who didn’t choose this. And if you can avoid it, do not argue by text. Whatever you need to say, there is a reasonable way to say it. Others are borrowed from hostage negotiation – five minutes of active listening, where you don’t interrupt, then you take two and a half minutes to reflect on what has been said, then you get a turn. Some are borrowed from protest movements – agree a hand gesture for “let’s do this later” and back away. We can all be reasonable.” They cite techniques for taking the heat out of a difficult conversation. Whitehouse queries whether there is any such thing as a truly mutual split, but says: “We come to conclusions at different times, we feel things at different times. It doesn’t have to be amicable to be reasonable Together and apart … co-parents Anna Whitehouse and Matt Farquharson. I think it’s incredibly useful because it creates the expectation that you can always stay civilised, and the permission not to turn everything into a drama. But yeah, if something breaks on my watch, I just fix it.” They don’t want to sound blase, but in these books, they seem to have written something like a blueprint for successful co-parenting after divorce. “The breakdown of any relationship comes with pain. Whitehouse is keen “not to give a rose-tinted glamorisation,” to their divorce after 17 years of marriage. “Everything runs a bit more smoothly when you’re just doing it yourself.” “There used to be so many points of ridiculous domestic tension,” says Farquharson. It is extraordinarily tidy, which in itself is – the way they tell it – a good argument for getting divorced. I meet Whitehouse and Farquharson in the house they share, although not at the same time. They have now published a pair of books, Divide and Conquer: the first focuses on the impact of children on their lives, the second is a guide on how to look after them post-divorce. Both journalists, the couple – with Farquharson as Papa Pukka – went on to co-write parenting books: Parenting the Sh*t out of Life and Where’s My Happy Ending? They also host the podcasts Dirty Mother Pukka and Where’s My Happy Ending?īut the realities of trying to hold it together led to their separation earlier this year. Blogging as Mother Pukka about the realities of parenthood, Whitehouse had built a large following. This realisation drove them to start a campaign, Flex Appeal, to push for more flexibility for working parents so they would not be “forced to make a choice between earning a living and having a family”. At one point, Whitehouse worked out that she was “earning about £5 a month after childcare costs”. ![]() You’re in debt just by existing,” he says. “If you are the most average couple in the UK, living in an average place, with average bills, on average wages, and you add a grand a child a month for childcare, you’re in debt before you’ve even gone to work. After Anna Whitehouse and Matt Farquharson had their second daughter, six years ago, they realised something: it is not financially viable to have two young children in the UK. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |