72 DIVorCe wItH DeCenCY
and hasn’t got a good job. Worse still, he may be having a difficult
time establishing workable visitation and communication with
his kids. If, as is often the case, his kids were extremely young
when the divorce occurred, there may never have been a suf-
ficient opportunity to put together the kind of strong relation-
ship between child and father that would otherwise have already
developed had the divorce taken place later.
Young dads missing young kids. If the divorce occurred when
the child was old enough to have developed a close and verbally
communicative relationship with the dad prior to the parents
separating (i.e., any age beyond about six to eight), the likeli-
hood is increased that a strong father-child relationship can be
maintained. If not, then these young men may well suffer the
twin trauma of being divorced from their kids as well as their
spouses.
The structure of the child visitation framework is more dif-
ficult and unsatisfactory for young guys in this situation since
the really positive part of a young father’s continuing pride in
being a dad may never have quite gotten off the ground. Again,
perhaps this was due to the young age of the children at the time
of divorce, or maybe it was deliberately forced onto the back
burner by the exiting wife who may have intended the divorce
to be a complete break (perhaps based on the unfortunate, but
not uncommon, theory that since the kids are still young they
probably won’t remember much anyway). Instead, the dad is left
feeling like an automatic cash machine spitting out child-support
payments for out-of-sight and out-of-mind, absentee kids. This,
in turn, becomes a factor that puts still more pressure (economic
and otherwise) on trying to maintain a successful second mar-
riage. All in all, a pretty bleak picture emerges for this cross sec-
tion of young divorcing males.
Unhappy campers. The preceding section obviously consists
of some overbroad and imprecise generalizations—but suffice
it to say, these young divorced guys who have been reluctantly
wrenched away from their wives and kids are among the least
happy campers of all my clients.
One plus, however, is that for young men emerging from a
recent divorce, one of the trickier tasks they finally get to (are