Telling the Kids We're Getting Divorced: Phrases to Use, and Phrases to Avoid

The two of you are sitting at the kitchen table after the kids are in bed. The silence is heavy, punctuated by the hum of the refrigerator. On the screen in front of you is a half-finished document, a script for the conversation you know you have to have. You’ve both agreed on the plan: united front, no blame, keep it simple. But as you read the words you’ve typed, a knot tightens in your stomach. You find yourself searching for phrases like “how to tell the kids we’re divorcing without hurting them,” knowing it’s an impossible request. The instinct is to soften, to reassure, to make it okay. And that instinct is about to lead you straight into a trap.

The reason this conversation feels impossible is that you’re trying to do two contradictory things at once: deliver destabilising news and create a feeling of stability. Your words are meant to inform them that their world is fundamentally changing, while your tone is trying to signal that everything will be fine. Children are experts at sensing this kind of mismatch. When what they hear doesn’t align with what they feel from the situation, they don’t default to trusting the reassuring words. They default to anxiety. They trust the tremor in your voice, not the script.

What’s Actually Going On Here

The central problem is a communication pattern called a mixed message. You are saying, “A category-five hurricane is coming,” while also saying, “But we’ll keep you safe and dry.” Both statements might be true from your perspective, but for a child, the second one feels like a lie in the face of the first. Their internal alarm system is screaming “HURRICANE!” and when you respond with “Don’t worry about the rain,” it doesn’t calm them. It makes them feel like you don’t see the same storm they do, which leaves them feeling utterly alone.

This is driven by your own desperate need to manage their pain. Seeing your child’s face crumble is unbearable. Your brain scrambles for a fix, a verbal bandage. So you offer broad, comforting promises. But a child’s world is built on concrete, predictable rules: we eat dinner at six, Mum picks me up from school, we all live in this house. When you break a foundational rule (“we all live in this house”), they don’t need an abstract concept like “we’ll always be a family.” They need to know what the new rules are. Vague reassurances create a vacuum of information that their anxious minds will fill with worst-case scenarios.

The family system itself reinforces this. In the moments leading up to the conversation, you and your co-parent are trying to perform “teamwork” one last time. You present a united front because you believe it’s what’s best for the children. But the very act of this conversation is proof that the team is dissolving in its current form. The kids see two people acting like a unit to deliver news that they are no longer a unit. This performance, meant to be comforting, feels profoundly unstable.

What People Usually Try (and Why It Backfires)

You’ve probably rehearsed these lines. They come from a good place, but they are built on the reassuring impulse that increases a child’s anxiety instead of anchoring them.

• The Move: Over-emphasising your love.

  • How it sounds: “You have to know, we both love you so, so much. More than anything.”
  • Why it backfires: This deflects from the actual news. The child’s unspoken question isn’t “Do you love me?” it’s “If you love me, why are you breaking up our home?” This phrase doesn’t answer their real fear; it just tries to talk over it.

• The Move: Trying to erase their self-blame with a generalisation.

  • How it sounds: “This has nothing to do with you. This is about adult things.”
  • Why it backfires: To a child, their parents’ relationship has everything to do with them. Their entire world is constructed around it. While the goal is to remove guilt, the effect is invalidating. It tells them their perception of the situation, that this is a seismic event in their life, is wrong.

• The Move: Offering an abstract, undefined future.

  • How it sounds: “Don’t worry, we will always be a family.”
  • Why it backfires: What does “family” mean now? Does it mean Dad still comes for movie night? Does it mean we all go on holiday? This phrase creates more stressful questions than it answers because it replaces a concrete reality (one home) with a vague, undefined concept.

• The Move: Making an impossible promise.

  • How it sounds: “Nothing is going to change for you. We’ll just live in two different houses.”
  • Why it backfires: This is a demonstrable lie, and kids know it. Everything is about to change: their routine, where they sleep, how they see their parents. When you make a promise that is so clearly untrue, you damage your credibility as a reliable source of information precisely when they need it most.

The Move That Actually Works

The counter-intuitive move is to stop trying to manage your child’s feelings and instead focus on being their anchor in reality. Your job is not to prevent their sadness, fear, or anger, those feelings are appropriate and necessary. Your job is to make those feelings survivable. You do this by proving you are a trustworthy narrator of this difficult new reality, even when the news is bad.

This means shifting your goal from reassurance to clarity. Instead of offering soft, vague comforts, you provide hard, concrete information. You are trading the short-term goal of “stop the crying” for the long-term goal of “build a foundation of trust for our new reality.” You are communicating, implicitly, “I can handle your big feelings. I am not scared of your sadness. I am strong enough to sit with you in this.”

This works because it aligns your words with the reality of the situation. There is no mixed message. You are delivering hard news, and your tone and language acknowledge that it’s hard. This makes you a credible source. The child learns that they can come to you with their fears and you won’t lie or deflect. You become the person who helps them make sense of the new world, not the person who pretends the old world isn’t gone.

What This Sounds Like

These aren’t magic words to be recited from a script. They are illustrations of the shift from abstract reassurance to concrete anchoring.

• Instead of: “This has nothing to do with you.”

  • Try: “This is a problem between me and your mum/dad. It is an adult problem. We tried hard to fix it, but we couldn’t. You did not do anything to cause this.”
  • Why it works: It’s specific. It defines the problem as belonging to the adults and explicitly states, “You are not the cause.” This is much more powerful than the vague “nothing to do with you.”

• Instead of: “Nothing is going to change.”

  • Try: “A lot of things are going to feel different now. Dad is going to be living in a new apartment, and we are working on a plan for when you will be there and when you will be here. What won’t change is that we are both your parents.”
  • Why it works: It validates the child’s perception that things are, in fact, changing. It replaces a huge, terrifying unknown with a few concrete (and still difficult) knowns. It names what will change and what will stay the same.

• Instead of: “We will always be a family.”

  • Try: “Our family is changing its shape. We won’t all live under one roof anymore. But you will always have two parents who love you, and we will both always be there for your school plays and football games.”
  • Why it works: The “changing shape” metaphor is concrete and understandable. It acknowledges the change directly while connecting the concept of “family” to specific, predictable future actions (attending events).

• When they ask “Why?”:

  • Avoid: Blame (“Your father wanted…”) or adult details (“We just grew apart.”).
  • Try: “We just couldn’t agree anymore on how to be married to each other. We can both be better parents to you living in different homes.”
  • Why it works: It’s an honest, simple explanation that closes the door on blame and focuses on the future function of parenting. It gives a reason without offering details a child can’t or shouldn’t have to process.