Is there an age when a child can cope best with divorce?

According to a new study, the younger the better. Nell Frizzell agrees

THE phrase “staying together for the children” has always struck me as nonsense. Ever since, as a nine-year-old standing by a blue sofa, I begged my parents to get divorced — knowing that I was yet again going to be ignored — I have seen the tissue of lies that sticks to those words. They are as stupid as the phrase “it’s what they would have wanted” at a funeral.

What often holds an illmatched set of parents together isn’t familial duty but financial interdependence, fear of being alone, illness, religion, conditioning, complacency or cowardice. And the longer you, as a child, have to live in a house tarnished by disharmony, violence, discord or depression, the worse it will be for you; not just in that moment, but for your ongoing mental and relationship health.

So it came as no surprise to me to read new research, from University College London, which says that parental divorce is less harmful if it happens in early childhood. According to the analysis of 6,000 children born in the UK, those who were aged seven to 14 when their parents split are 16pc more likely to suffer emotional and behavioural problems than those whose parents stay together.

Big news, you might say. Children from discordant homes fare worse than those whose parents are in a loving relationship.

But what is really interesting is that children who were between three and seven years of age when their parents separated showed no differences to those whose parents were still together. In short, if you’re going to break up, better to do it sooner, rather than wait until your children are older and more likely to form harmful patterns of behaviour themselves.

My parents — a couple so spectacularly ill-suited that even their best man, in his wedding speech, made a joke about their throwing crockery at each other — spent my childhood on and off. They finally separated for good three weeks before my final year school exams. The timing was spectacularly bad and I told them that if they ever dared get back together, I would never speak to either of them again: a promise I was fully prepared to keep. The effect of all this instability and absence and uncertainty was to give me a hardline and total disbelief in long-term lasting love for all of my teens and most of my 20s, until finally (with much help from partners and professionals) I started to see that emotional interdependence can actually be healthy, as well as dangerous.

Of course, having your parents separate is painful, sad, destabilising, scary and a logistical nightmare. Anyone in the “broken home” gang will recall the nasty, slinking presence of a parent as they go around the house taking items from shelves and out of cupboards before leaving the family home. We will all remember the sobbing adults on the stairs; grim weekends of enforced “quality time” with an estranged parent; the terrible, silent dinners.

But all that is, I would argue, far better than spending your formative years under house arrest with two people who loathe each other. Better to have a disorientating break while you’re young, than to suffer years in the company of two people enacting a corrosive war of insults, screaming, lying, gaslighting, sulking, infidelity or violence, centimetres from where you’re trying to do your homework.

The idea that you are some- how protecting your children by exposing them to the most poisonous elements of human behaviour is laughable.

It is also a heinous injustice for children to be made aware, either explicitly or unconsciously, that their parents are staying in a state of loveless misery “for their sake”. As though the burden of responsibility is yours; that if you weren’t around, these two people would have gone their merry ways years ago.

Luckily, my parents were so unmistakably incompatible that I never fell for this lie. I knew, for as long as I can remember, that they were caught in a web of fear, laziness and lust that had nothing to do with me. So when, during one of their separations, I was reassured by kindly adults — a teacher, a friend’s parent — that this wasn’t my fault, my answer was always: “I know. It’s theirs.”

The UCL study, published in the journal Social Science and Medicine, also reported that, on average, mothers experienced more mental health problems if they separated when children were older. This is, in part, because the financial impact of divorce is more severe for a woman the later it happens in a marriage — ie once your income, investments and belongings are as intertwined as a hedge full of bindweed.

What this says to me is that if we really wanted what was best for our children then we would all, men and women, strive for an end to the gender pay gap, regulation of private landlords, free childcare — all the things that keep many couples stuck in loveless marriages and many children, like me, living in homes damaged by them.

‘The idea you are protecting your children is laughable’