Max Sindell was 14 when he first thought about becoming an expert on divorce.
“I always felt that I had a different perspective on divorce. It was one of the best things that happened to me,” he says from his home in Brooklyn.
Now 22 and a graduate of Johns Hopkins University with a degree in creative writing, Mr. Sindell wrote The Bright Side: Surviving Your Parents' Divorce while he was a student. Published last August, it has spawned a website, Survivingyourparentsdivorce.com, and several speaking engagements.
Divorce is a transition parents tend to own as part of their identity. It's a state of being, at least socially.
But the children? It's not often you hear them describe the challenges, difficulties and, yes, merits of their parents' breakup. Their voices are often marginalized, if not silent, overwhelmed by not just parents but also many psychologists who dwell on negative effects of divorce and predict gloomy outcomes for children, whose homes are described, ominously, as broken.
But with children of the boomer divorce trend coming of age, that may be changing.
“Divorce is far more normalized in my generation and in the culture than it was previously,” Mr. Sindell explains.
He felt it was time to empower other children of divorce and help them see that it could be a positive experience.
He was 6 when his parents divorced, setting off a series of upheavals. Upon divorcing his mother, his father, who had three children from a first marriage, moved to another state and remarried, only to divorce again. He has since remarried for the fourth time. Mr. Sindell's mother remarried 12 years ago and moved several times.
For his book, Mr. Sindell devised the Divorced Kids' Bill of Rights, which includes, among other things, an entitlement to awareness, to be heard and to be neutral. “It's about no secrets, no surprises,” he says. “If parents are thinking about moving somewhere or having you change schools, or having a new partner move into the house, those are big life-altering decisions that have to be discussed with children.”
He has a close relationship with both parents, he says, which he attributes partly to the divorce process. “You start to see your parents as people rather than as top-down authority figures,” he says. Even at 6, he could see they were unhappy together. When they announced the split, “my initial reaction was one of relief.”
His advice is that children should embrace divorce as the opportunity to mature. “You can prove to your parents that you can have the responsibility, that they can trust you, and that, in turn, gives you more freedom,” he says. He volunteered to be an intermediary between his parents when he was 8, not to take one person's side, but to ease their communication.
When he was 11, he asked his parents and step-parents, all of whom were living in the same city at the time, to sit down with him and his school counsellor, who had become a confidant, to work out a better visiting schedule.
But such forced maturity is the very thing that psychologists diagnose as unhealthy. “You don't want to overburden children with making decisions,” says Richard Warshak, an expert on children and divorce who has written extensively about the subject. “Age is not a factor,” he adds. “Even teenagers need structure.”
Mr. Sindell is not out to glorify divorce, however. He understands the difficulties and warns of the pitfalls. He identifies the trauma to children when parents criticize each other. “The worst is when you say to them, ‘I don't want to hear that stuff,' and they keep doing it.”
