Your parents are getting divorced. Here is what nobody has told you.
Most of what is written about this is written for the grown-ups. This is not. It is about what is actually happening, what is not your job, and the short list of things you are allowed to ask for.
This page is for you. It is not for your parents. There is a different part of this site written for them, and this is not it. Nobody is told that you read this, and nothing on this page asks you for your name, your age, or anything else.
First, in case you need it right now. If you are not safe, or someone is hurting you, or you are thinking about hurting yourself — that is more important than the rest of this page and you do not have to read any further.
- 988 — call or text 988. The Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Any hour. You do not have to be thinking about suicide to use it.
- 800.422.4453 — call, or text GO to the same number. The Childhelp National Child Abuse Hotline. Any hour. Use it if someone at home is hurting you or frightening you.
- Text HOME to 741741 — Crisis Text Line, if talking out loud is not possible.
- 1-866-488-7386, or text START to 678-678 — The Trevor Project, for LGBTQ young people. TTY 1-866-803-3699.
And one that is not a phone number. A school counselor, a school nurse, or a teacher you already trust can start this for you, and they know how. You do not need to have the words ready first.
It is not your fault, and that is not just a thing people say
You have probably already been told this. It may have sounded like the kind of thing adults say because they are supposed to. So here is the actual reason it is true.
Two adults decided they could not be married to each other. That is a decision about them. Nothing you did, did not do, said, forgot, broke or got wrong caused it, and nothing you do now will undo it. Being better behaved will not fix it. Being worse will not either, though it might get you more attention for a while, which is not the same thing.
If you have a specific thing in your head — a fight they had about you, a thing you heard through a door — that is worth saying out loud to one of them. Not to get reassured. To get the actual answer, because the version in your head is usually worse than the real one.
You are going to be asked to carry messages. You can say no.
It will not sound like a big deal. It will sound like can you ask your dad whether or tell your mom that. It might happen several times a week.
That is not your job, and you are allowed to hand it back. A sentence that works: “I don’t want to be the one who tells them that.” You do not have to explain it, and you do not have to be angry about it. Most parents, when a kid says this plainly, stop — a lot of them had not noticed they were doing it.
If they keep asking anyway, you can just not do it. Nothing bad happens to you for not passing on a message you were never supposed to be carrying.
Things that are not your job
Not yours
- Carrying messages between them
- Cheering one of them up when they are sad about the other one
- Keeping a secret from one for the other
- Deciding who you live with. Adults decide that. If somebody asks your opinion, an opinion is not the same as the decision
- Reporting on what happens at the other house
- Being fine. You do not owe anybody a performance of being fine
- Fixing it. There is no version of you that fixes this
Yours, and reasonable to ask for
- Knowing where you are sleeping this week and next week
- Your actual stuff in both places — a charger, clothes, the thing you sleep with even if you are too old for it
- Not hearing about the other parent’s faults. You can ask for this: “I don’t want to hear that about her” is a complete sentence
- Your friends, your team, your club — these should survive the schedule, and if they are not surviving it, say so
- One grown-up who is not either of them. An aunt, a grandparent, a coach, a school counselor. Someone you can be honest with who is not in the middle of it
- Being told things that affect you, before they happen rather than after
Keeping score is normal. It will not make anything fair.
At some point you will start counting. Nights at each house. Who came to the thing. Who bought the better present. Who has the better rules.
Almost everybody your age does this, and it is not a character flaw. It is what you do when two people you depend on have stopped agreeing and you are trying to work out whether you are being treated properly.
The part worth knowing: the counting will not come out even, and making it come out even would not actually help. Two houses are not going to be the same. One will have more space, or better food, or fewer rules, or more of your friends nearby. That is not a measurement of who loves you. Sometimes it is a measurement of who has more money, and that is a boring answer to a question that felt important.
If one of them starts competing — suddenly no bedtime, suddenly bigger presents — you are allowed to notice that and you are allowed to not enjoy it.
If someone from the court wants to talk to you
It might happen. The person could be called a guardian ad litem, or an evaluator, or a family court counselor. Sometimes it is the judge, usually in an office rather than a courtroom. Their job is to work out what arrangement will actually work.
Things worth knowing before it happens:
- It is not a test and there is no right answer. You cannot fail it.
- Nothing you say decides it on its own. Adults decide. That is not them ignoring you; it is them not putting it on you.
- They will probably ask about ordinary things — school, dinner, bedtime, who drives you where. Not who you love more.
- You are allowed to say you do not want to answer something. Out loud, in those words. That is a real option and it is not rude.
- You can say if you are scared of somebody. This is the one thing on this page worth saying even if it is hard.
If one of your parents tells you what to say, you are in a difficult spot and it is not your fault you are in it. The people who do these interviews have done hundreds and can usually tell when a young person is repeating an adult. You do not have to confront your parent about it. You are just allowed to answer the questions the way things actually are.
We are not going to tell you what to say, and you should be suspicious of any website that does.
If one of them says bad things about the other
This happens a lot and it is one of the worst parts, because you cannot agree and you cannot disagree without it turning into something.
What usually works is refusing the topic rather than the person. “I don’t want to talk about Dad right now” is not taking sides. If it keeps happening, saying it once more, calmly, at a time when nobody is already upset, works better than saying it in the middle.
What you should not do is decide which of them is the bad one based on who talks to you about it most. The one who complains more is not automatically the one who was wronged more. Sometimes it is just the one who is worse at keeping it to themselves.
Some things you cannot control, and the short list you can
The honest version, because pretending otherwise would be insulting.
You cannot control: whether they get divorced, how they behave, whether they say unfair things, where you live, how much money there is, whether either of them gets a new partner, or how long any of this takes.
You can control: whether you carry messages. Whether you keep secrets for them. Whether you agree that one of them is the villain. Whether you tell one grown-up the truth about how it actually is. Whether you keep doing the things that are yours — the friends, the sport, the game, the thing you are good at.
That second list is shorter and it is not nothing. It is most of what makes the difference in how this goes for you.
One last thing
You will read, somewhere, that children of divorce turn out worse. You should know that this is much less certain than the people saying it make it sound, and that the thing researchers keep finding matters most is not the divorce — it is how much fighting a kid gets put in the middle of.
Which is about them. Not about you. And it is the one part of this where staying out of the middle is something you are genuinely allowed to do.
The other pages for you
Three of them, by age. They overlap, so read whichever one sounds more like your life rather than whichever one matches your birthday.
If you have a brother or sister, this might be worth sending them. They are probably working through the same thing on their own.
The phone numbers above were read from each organization’s own website on 13 September 2026 — 988lifeline.org, childhelphotline.org, crisistextline.org and thetrevorproject.org. If one of them has changed and we have not caught it, that is on us, and it goes on our corrections page with the date.
We are not going to tell you that you are damaged. People write that a lot and the research is much less certain than they make it sound. What it does keep finding is that the fighting between parents matters more than the divorce itself — which is about them, not about you. We do not print a percentage, because the numbers move enormously depending on how the question was asked.
This page collects nothing. No name, no age, no email, nothing. Nobody is told you were here.