CBC Radio: “Breakup – We’re done. Now, what about the kids?”

In early October 2018, CBC radio broadcast a one hour show about the effect of divorce on children. The broadcast is called “Breakup,” and you can listen to it on the CBC website. The show covered many deep concepts of what is involved in a healthy divorce, and I will blog about each of them later. The lawyer in me needs to stress that we all use the word “divorce” regardless of whether the couple was married.

The most important message of “Breakup” is that there can be healthy divorces with parenting plans that eliminate or minimize harm to children. The show uses interviews with adults who were children when their parents divorced, to illustrate how post-separation parenting plans have evolved in the past 50 years.

At the beginning of the show are interviews with individuals whose parents divorced 40 or 50 years ago. The trauma and pain they went through during their parents’ divorce is evident, and they discuss how it continues to affect them to this day. At the end of the show are interviews with much younger individuals, whose parents established parenting arrangements that were unorthodox for the time, but which allowed the children to “still be children,” and build a healthy relationship with both parents.

Two of the three hosts of “Breakup” are divorce lawyers who are members of Collaborative Practice Toronto. Throughout the show, collaborative divorce is compared with courtroom divorce. Parents using collaborative divorce often hire a family specialist to work with both parents to make a concrete parenting plan. The show contains an interview with a family specialist, who describes her work and why it is so hard for parents to work on a concrete parenting plan. It also contains an interview with an Ontario judge who gives us a reality check on the limits of what court is able to do for separating parents.

The third host is one of those individuals whose parents had a particularly unhealthy divorce 40 or 50 years ago. He describes his parents’ war over parenting arrangements, and how it still affects him to this day.

“Breakup” is not available as a downloadable podcast, so you will need to have an internet connection when you listen to it. It takes about an hour to listen to the entire show but will be time well spent.