I’m looking for stories of how your children experienced their parents separating?
Both early teens, one asd. Separation hasn’t happened yet, but seems likely for many complex reasons, partly due to his lack of parenting skills.
Due to his disengagement from being a parent, the children won’t ask for help from him. For example, dd couldn’t open a carton of apple juice at lunch and despite sitting opposite her dad, she called me from another room to help. Ds wanted a password to get on the computer to play minecraft, and when I didn’t know it he decided to do something else despite knowing that he could have just asked his dad (who knows the password). Both kids sit in their rooms (they’re young teens, so pretty standard) more when they sense their dad is annoyed with any mess they’ve made downstairs (ie going in and out the back door!) as they get a quieter life. They prefer travelling in my car (old) to his (new, hardly used) as I don’t mind about marks on the seats, crumbs from snacks, finger prints on windows or a bit of mud from muddy boots from a fun walk in the woods.
Do any of you have similar experiences? How does it pan out when it’s just the kids and their dad, without you as a first port of call, or ‘buffer’?
Fwiw he’s a loving, caring dad, but has massively unrealistically high expectations of child behaviour. Well, actually of human behaviour in general 🤣 Which my NT child alone would probably deal with ok, but their asc sibling is hard work at times and my husband just doesn’t understand that he can’t parent asc child the same way as nt child. Which impacts them both.