Introduction
The handover is at five, at the Engen on the corner, because neither of you can face the other’s front door yet.
Your daughter gets out with her school bag and a packet of clothes, and in the thirty seconds while she walks from one car to the other, she is watching both of your faces very carefully. She always does. You’ve both noticed.
That thirty seconds matters more than almost anything else you’ll argue about this year.
Separating is hard enough on its own. Co-parenting after divorce is the long part that follows, and most of it is decided not by the court order but by how the two of you behave in the small moments the children can see.
It Isn’t the Divorce
Parents nearly always arrive carrying the same fear: that the separation itself has damaged the children, permanently, and nothing can be done about it.
The research is consistent on this, and it’s kinder than people expect. Most children whose parents divorce do not have long-term problems. What predicts how they do is not the split itself but the conflict around it, before and after.
There’s a finding worth sitting with: children in high-conflict homes that stayed together did worse than children whose parents separated. Where a marriage was full of hostility, children’s difficulties often eased after the divorce. Where it was quiet and the split came out of nowhere, they tended to struggle more, because it made no sense to them.
So the question isn’t whether you stayed together. It’s what your children are living in now.
The Three Things That Do the Damage
Open hostility is the obvious one. Rows at handover, the voice on the phone, the remark made in the car that you assumed went over her head.
The quieter one does more harm than most parents realise: putting the child in the middle. Asking what the other house is spending money on. Sending messages through them. Letting them see your face when their father’s name comes up. Children caught between two parents tend to turn it inwards, which looks like anxiety, stomach aches and a child who won’t tell either parent anything.
And the third is running the other parent down. Children work out early that they are made of both of you. Tell a nine-year-old his father is useless often enough and he will quietly wonder which half of him is the useless half.
None of this means pretending to feel warmth you don’t feel. Children can tell. It means keeping the adult business between the adults.
The First Conversation
If you haven’t told them yet, tell them together if you possibly can, and tell them at a time that isn’t bedtime or a school morning.
Keep it short and concrete, because what children want to know is practical. Where will I sleep. Will I change schools. When will I see Dad. Who will fetch me on Wednesdays. Answer what you can and say honestly when you don’t know yet, rather than promising something you may have to take back.
Say the three things that matter: this is a decision the adults made, it isn’t their fault, and you both love them and are both staying in their lives. Then stop talking and let them react however they react, including with nothing at all. Some children cry, some shrug and go back to a game, and some ask whether they can still go to the party on Saturday. None of those tells you how they really feel.
Avoid the detail of why. Children do not need to know about the affair, the money or the lie, and a child who is told becomes a confidant rather than a child.
Run It Like a Working Relationship
The most useful shift I see parents make is to stop treating the ex-partner as an ex-partner and start treating them as a colleague on a long project with one shared deliverable.
That means brief, polite, factual messages about logistics, and nothing else. No history. No digs. Nothing you’d mind a magistrate reading, because one day one might. Keep it to writing where you can; WhatsApp is fine, and a shared calendar is better than either of you remembering.
Two houses can have two sets of rules. Bedtime can be later there. The food can be worse there. Children cope with difference remarkably well, as long as it isn’t a weapon. Save the energy for the things that genuinely need alignment: school, medical care, religion, money, and how you’ll handle discipline for anything serious.
And protect the handover. Early, on time, friendly for sixty seconds, go. That thirty-second walk between two cars is the moment your child is reading, every single time.
Put It in Writing
I’m not an attorney, so take the legal detail from one. But a parenting plan is worth understanding, because many separating South African parents don’t know it exists.
Under sections 33 and 34 of the Children’s Act 38 of 2005, parents who share parental responsibilities can draw up a parenting plan setting out how they’ll manage them: where the child lives, contact with each parent, schooling, religion, maintenance. It must be in writing and signed by both parents. To be enforceable, it’s either registered with the Family Advocate or made an order of court, and the Act expects you to use help in drawing it up, whether that’s the Family Advocate, a social worker, a psychologist or a mediator.
It isn’t a sign that you’ve failed at being amicable. It’s the thing that protects the amicability when one of you starts a new relationship, or wants to move to Durban, or remembers December differently from the way you remember it.
On December, since we’re approaching it: the long summer holiday causes more co-parenting fights than the rest of the year combined. Agree it in writing, well before the schools close.
When Someone New Arrives
Sooner or later one of you starts seeing somebody, and this is where plenty of workable arrangements fall over.
A few things make it easier. Tell your co-parent before the children do, which costs you nothing and prevents an ambush. Introduce a new partner slowly, and only once it’s serious, because children who meet a succession of people learn that adults are temporary. Keep the new partner out of the disciplinary chain for a long while; they can be kind, involved and useful without issuing consequences.
And expect it to hurt the other parent more than they let on, even when they ended it, even when they’ve moved on themselves. That doesn’t make it wrong. It just means the handovers may be stiff for a few months.
If your child tells you they don’t like the new person, listen properly before deciding whose loyalty is being tested. Sometimes it’s adjustment. Occasionally it’s information.
<h3> What the Children Show You
Children rarely announce that they’re struggling. It comes out sideways.
Younger children often say it through play, or in a sudden return to behaviour you thought was finished with: clinginess, wetting the bed, tummy aches on school mornings. A teenager who has gone quiet may be managing you both, carefully, so as not to add to anyone’s load. Some become relentlessly cheerful and helpful, which worries me more than the ones who slam doors.
Watch for the child who has appointed themselves the messenger, the comforter or the referee. That child is carrying something they can’t yet say, and they will keep carrying it until an adult takes it off them.
Tell them, clearly and more than once, that this was an adult decision, that it isn’t their fault, that they don’t have to choose, and that both of you are staying. Then expect to say it again in six months, because children process these things in instalments.
Money, Which Leaks Into Everything
Maintenance disputes have a way of contaminating every other part of co-parenting, because money is where the unfairness of the whole situation becomes a number.
Two practical things help. Keep the money conversation in its own channel, separate from the arrangements about contact, so a late payment doesn’t end up costing a child their weekend. And don’t make the children the auditors. A teenager who has been told what her father pays, and what it ought to be, has been handed an adult grievance she can do nothing about.
If payments genuinely aren’t happening, that’s a matter for the maintenance court or an attorney, not for a child at a handover.
Look After the Adult Too
You cannot run a civil handover on an empty tank.
Most parents in the first year after a separation are grieving, broke, exhausted and furious, often in the same afternoon. That’s not a character flaw, and your own recovery from the separation isn’t self-indulgence. It’s the thing that makes the rest of this possible, because the days you manage the handover well are the days you had something left.
Find somewhere to put the anger that isn’t your children and isn’t your ex. A friend, a therapist, a long walk, a punching bag. Just not the people who are still growing.
One more thing worth saying to the parent who is doing most of the holding. Co-parenting after divorce is rarely symmetrical, especially in the first year or two. One of you is usually carrying more of the logistics, more of the emotional weather, and more of the cost. That is genuinely unfair, and letting it curdle is the single most reliable way to end up in the conflict you were trying to protect the children from. Deal with the unfairness where it can actually be dealt with, which is in a parenting plan, in mediation, or in a lawyer’s office, and not through the children.
How Therapy Helps
Sometimes it’s work with a child, who gets a place to say things they’re protecting both parents from. Sometimes it’s work with a parent on the fury that keeps leaking into the messages. Sometimes it’s the whole family in the room, or the two parents together, which is awkward for about ten minutes and then surprisingly productive, because the project is one you both actually care about.
What it isn’t is a referee for the marriage that ended. That argument has finished. This one is about the next fifteen years of being connected to someone you no longer live with.
Conclusion
You don’t have to like each other. You don’t have to be friends, or spend Christmas together, or pretend any of this was fine.
You have to be able to stand in a petrol station forecourt for thirty seconds without your child having to manage either of you. Most of co-parenting is built out of moments that small.
I offer support for parents and children working through separation, in person in Claremont (close to Rondebosch, Newlands, Kenilworth and Wynberg) and online across South Africa.
She is watching both of your faces. Make them easy to read.
About Me
I’m Paula Marais, a registered specialist wellness counsellor based in Claremont, Cape Town. I hold an Honours in Psychology (Unisa) and a Master’s in Creative Writing (UCT), and I’m registered with the Association for Supportive Counsellors and Holistic Practitioners (ASCHP).
I offer individual and couples counselling, in person in Claremont and online across South Africa. Online sessions are equally as effective as in-person sessions.
There’s no pressure and no judgment. You can reach me at info@paulamaraistherapy.com or on WhatsApp at 072 633 7661.
#CoParenting #DivorceSupport #ParentingPlan #ChildrenAndDivorce #SeparatedParents #BlendedFamilies #ParentingSupport #FamilyTherapy #MentalHealthSA #CapeTownParents #CapeTownTherapist #ClaremontCounselling #OnlineTherapySA #PaulaMaraisTherapy