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Renewing contact with children
If you haven’t seen your children for a long time, there’s no way of knowing how they’ll react on seeing you again. They may feel resentful or they may jump at the chance. There may be all sorts of reasons why you lost touch and there also may be some issues that you need to address about your feelings, priorities or lifestyle to help restore contact. Get back in touch and talk things through with your ex and the children first. The sooner you do so, the sooner you can start to rebuild contact.
Building bridges
Once you have made the decision to renew contact it may not be an easy path to build a relationship with your children. Children can feel torn between wanting to get to know you better, whilst remaining loyal to the parent who has raised them. On the other hand, you need to prepare yourself for your child not wanting contact with you at first. If you want to change the situation, don't let things drift anymore. You can talk to one of our Family Support Workers via our helpline, live chat or email to help you build bridges and confidence with your children and your ex. You may have to approach your ex partner first to discuss the situation and what is the best way forward. If relatiionships are frayed perhaps there are family members that can help by acting as mediators. It is important to be prepared for difficult and challenging questions and it is important to be honest with your responses. In a situation like this, tiny steps are important to help build bridges and it may take some time, patience and consistency.
Making arrangements
Consider finding a halfway spot you can meet at for the handover to cut down on travel costs for both of you. It’s a good idea to give your children a calendar, marked with the dates when you’ll be seeing each other. Send texts and make video calls so they can have lots of reminders that you love them and are thinking of them inbetween contact. Be careful to stick to the arrangements you made and make every effort not to cancel or change them as this is really disappointing for the children. It’s not just parents and children who hurt when contact arrangements fall down. It is important to work with the other parent and a co-parenting plan may help you both to make positive arrangments that you are both happy with. Our advice on creating a co-parenting plan is a useful resource. We also have a free online parenting course on co-parenting that can help you further develop those necessary skills to help you work with the other parent to put your children's best interests first.
Involving other family members
The stability offered by grandparents and other relatives, such as aunts and uncles, can be such a help to children when their family changes, but it can make the situation even more difficult if they hear hostility or criticism when what they need is unreserved love and support. Grandparents and other relatives may find it difficult to stand back and not get involved with family arguments over separation, but it’s essential that they do. Nothing is more devastating than losing contact with your grandchildren completely. If you are a grandparent in this situation, consider contacting your son- or daughter-in-law to say that you are sorry for any past arguments and would just like to see your grandchildren.
Further resources
If you would like further support and advice, call our helpline on 0808 800 2222 or email us at askus@familylives.org.uk. You can talk to us online via our live chat service or message us via WhatsApp on 07441 444125 to connect with experienced professional family support workers and highly-trained volunteers. You may find it helps to find out how other parents and carers have coped with this on our online forums. We also have a range of free self-guided online parenting courses that can help through the ages and stages of parenting.
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