Divorce and selling house

[AnnaRLN]

Hi,

DC is 18 is to university this year.

My partner and I divorcing with the house to be sold.

While obviously - it is nothing to do with the child, there would be not enough equity to afford 2 houses and the is not going to be a child's bedroom anymore, but more a spare room to stay when you are around.

Nobody can afford to have a bigger place due to age/mortgage amount required.

I don't want the child to feel pushed out but the reality will be that is exactly how it would feel.

We obviously going to talk and explain but what can we do to soften the blow?

While DC knows things not good, I don't think there is a realisation how bad things are and no expectation that the house will be sold.

Thanks

I don't have enough bedrooms for all of ours, we have 2 decent foldaway beds on the rare occasion everyone is home

Just tell them the truth. You will be buying your own places and they will be welcome to stay there during their holidays and if they ever need to stay. It will be unsettling but growing up and finding your independence is unsettling. It’s a transition from dependence to independence and part of our development. It was going to happen some time.

I think you can broach it with DC openly at their age: running two homes is going to be more expensive than one and now that they’re going to be away at university for most of the year, it’s also a natural progression for what was “their” room to have another purpose for the majority of the year when it will be empty. You can e.g. ask them what sort of bed they’d have a preference for, and keep some of their old things on display, but I don’t think it’s terribly unusual even in homes with two parents who are together for children’s bedrooms to not remain children’s bedrooms once the children are adults: when I went away to university my parents swapped bedrooms around so that my then 8-year-old brother whose bedroom was the tiny box room had my old room, whilst I had the box room for when I was around for the summer holidays, and I thought that was perfectly fair.