Divorce Can Create Added Stress for Everyone at the Holidays

Tips for the holidays to help those dealing with gray divorce.

Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

Key points

• Divorce can stress parent-child and extended family bonds and strain the most enduring family relationships.
• Adjustment for all family members and friends can take months or years during and after parental divorce.
• Creating a "we statement" for divorce and holiday activities can benefit everyone affected by a divorce.

Gray divorce refers to couples 50 and older. Researchers find that since 1990, the U.S. divorce rate of this group has doubled, and they predict it will grow by a third by 2030. The same phenomenon is occurring worldwide. Researchers named it "The Gray Divorce Revolution." Yet most people don't know it has been happening or how it impacts family members and their relationships.

When you hear the words divorce and relationships, what comes to mind?

Thirty years of research about families in later life indicate that parent-child relationships are essential to both parents and children throughout their lifespan and that the quality of relationships between parents and their adult children is associated with the psychological functioning of both generations. The late psychiatrist and researcher John Bowlby asserted that the parent-child bond is "from the cradle to the grave."

Dr. Louis Cozolino, psychologist, professor, researcher, and author, writes that the field of interpersonal neurobiology understands humans as individuals born into relationships. From birth to death, we develop and live our lives through myriad relationships. Researchers find that being in all types of caring and meaningful relationships with marriage partners, family, friends, co-workers, and others can alter brain structures and biochemistry.

Researchers Wallerstein and Blakeslee said, "Divorce is deceptive. Legally, it is a single event, but psychologically, it is a chain—sometimes a never-ending chain—of events, relocations, and radically shifting relationships strung through time, a process that forever changes the lives of the people involved."

When you picture holiday traditions, what do you see?

Holiday movies, TV shows, magazines, novels, poems, and songs depict family holidays in two ways. They are bursting with happy faces, joy-filled gatherings, and cheerful celebrations, or family members in excruciating pain assault our imagination. Parental separation and divorce can transform traditional family holiday conviviality into experiences of loss, grief, sadness, and conflict. Understanding the damage that conflictual divorce causes can help parents and family members comprehend how gray divorce can strain all familial relationships.

Sharon Strand Ellison, the developer of Powerful Non-Defensive Communication, says she realized decades ago that we'd been using the "rules of war" as a metaphor and infrastructure for communicating with each other. She says using the rules for one activity—war—for a completely different activity—communication—doesn't work. When one or both divorcing parents are in pain from deception, betrayal, and broken promises in their marriage, it is easy for them to feel like adversaries and slide into what Sharon calls the "war model" of communication, attacking, blaming, and shaming each other. This kind of communication between parents can draw family members into adversarial positions, supporting one parent against the other and morphing the family celebration from conviviality to trauma.

Here are tips to help parents help their children, grandchildren, extended family members, and friends navigate the holidays in ways that benefit everyone.

1. Realize that your family is restructuring. The transition doesn't happen quickly and can take months or years.

2. Manage expectations. If the divorcing parents are unable to be amicable during the first year or two and family members are aligned with each parent against the other parent, everyone could pause and agree to pass on the large family celebration.

Here are some examples.

• If they have children, adult children and their children could attend a family celebration with one parent and that parent's side of the family and then attend a family celebration with the other parent and their side.
• Adult children in college could not come home and instead spend time with their friends at their family homes or elsewhere.
• Adult children could hold the holiday celebration at their homes and invite each parent and any family members aligned with that parent to attend at different times.
• Adult children could decide not to hold a family holiday celebration and celebrate with each other.
• Adult children could decide to start their family tradition of going away for the holiday.

3. If divorcing parents can be amicable, create your "we statement" and share it with people who are important to you. Meet with family and friends or write them and share something like this.

• We have decided to end our marriage.
• We intend to be amicable with each other.
• We are co-parents, and we value all family relationships for ourselves and our minor and adult children.
• We are co-grandparents, and we value all family relationships for ourselves and our grandchildren.
• We will speak respectfully to and about each other, especially in the presence of our minor and adult children (and grandchildren), and we request that you do the same.
• We believe all family members and friends deserve to have relationships with whomever they want, so we don't want you to feel you must take sides.
• If family members and friends are amicable, we can get together this year for holiday celebrations. Otherwise, we will pass on group family holiday activities this year.
• We want to hear your ideas and what you prefer because this holiday season is a new experience for all of us.
• We intend to keep holiday gatherings cheerful about the celebration, not the conflict we may have.

© 2024 Carol R. Hughes, Ph.D., LMFT.