When did divorcing parents become so toxic?

Spectator

22-06-2025

A friend remembers how, growing up in Ceausescu's Romania, she and her classmates were encouraged by teachers to spy on their parents for dissenting opinions or unpatriotic behaviour. Such monstrous behaviour would never be countenanced here, right?
Wrong. In the poisonous atmosphere of the family courts, quarrelling parents are known to plant devices on their children to covertly record their rows to then put before a judge as evidence. The practice has become so routine it prompted the Family Justice Council to issue guidance against it last month.
The majority of divorcing rows focus on money
The phenomenon of parents using children as pawns in divorce proceedings is neither new nor rare: In 2023, there were 80,000 children caught up in family court proceedings, according to court statistics. Although fewer couples are divorcing, more of them are having to go through the courts to sort out their acrimonious split.
Divorce is widely recognised as an adverse childhood experience (ACE), which is why recent findings about almost half (45 per cent) of teenagers living with one parent alarmed children's charities. Some of those teens will have witnessed a civilised separation, but too many will now suffer through their parents' bitter divorce: analysis by the Ministry of Justice found that 10,300 financial remedy orders were contested in the family courts last year – a 66 per cent rise over two years.
Julia Margo, director at the domestic violence advocacy group Fair Hearing, has mentored more than 100 mothers through their family court hearings. 'Family court' sounds like a kind and gentle annexe of our justice system, where benevolent magistrates dot the i's and cross the t's of domestic arrangements. In reality these courts are battlegrounds where warring parents tear strips off each other, usually about who will have care of the children and sometimes who can have any contact with them. Julia herself was dragged through the courts 37 times by her ex-partner who, despite being a convicted paedophile, sought unsupervised contact with their children. She warns:
Even when there are no allegations of domestic abuse, many parents now struggle to negotiate separation and co-parenting without a court order: in the UK, more than 10 per cent of separating families end up in the family courts, far higher than in previous decades.
The acrimony she has found in court exposed couples incapable of conflict resolution, emotional articulacy, or just plain respect. This has no resemblance to the 'conscious uncoupling' of Gwyneth Paltrow – whose friendly take on separation strikes one as the wisdom of Solomon by contrast.
The majority of divorcing rows focus on money. But new ingredients – online pornography addiction, cost of living stress, surging infertility – also risk fraying relationships in an unprecedented way. Our 'selfie' culture has infected too many parents, who regrettably share their psychodramas on X, Instagram and TikTok.
Once it goes public, it goes nuclear, with families torn apart and children (even grown up ones) traumatised. Worse, they risk re-enacting the relational model they grew up with.
Families function as petri dishes where children first experiment with relationships. They learn whether their tears bring parents rushing over to comfort them or have no impact on the grown-up glued to their phones. They learn, too, whether screaming obscenities at each other over an unpaid bill or coming to blows over an affair is the best way to resolve an argument.
Children's copy-cat behaviour makes the latest Office for National Statistics figures – one in four women and one in five men have been subject to domestic abuse – truly alarming: how many of the younger generation will abuse their partners? Or, as one senior judge explains, anyone who has sat as a judge for more than 20 years will find themselves at some point face-to-face in court with a domestic abuse perpetrator whom they recognise from years before: the child of an abusive parent, taken into care.
Carey Philpott, CEO of the Kent-based charity SATEDA, says that 'Breaking these cycles is a key focus for our specialist interventions'. The SATEDA programme is one-on-one, or in small groups, offered in schools, to pupils referred to the charity by parents, teachers or specialist organisations. Julia argues:
Given parents' inability to forge healthy relationships and the detrimental impact this has on children, instilling relationship skills in the next generation feels like a national priority.
This chimes with young people's own wishes. When the Children's Commissioner ran her recent 'Big Ask' national survey of children and young people 4 to 17, they put 'family' as their number one priority and poor family relationships as the root of their unhappiness.
Parents' separation too often exposes villains and victims – and those victims too often are their children. Even when they are not tasked with spying on a parent, children risk an emotional tug of war that for some casts a long shadow over their lives.
No one would wish to return to the days when two people would stay locked in a bitter, sometimes abusive, relationship. 'For the sake of the children' is no reason to stay bound to a vicious spouse or partner, but those children's welfare should be at the heart of family relationships – when they break down as well as when they stay strong. Those who ask a child to spy on their other parent seem to forget this. We are not living in the era of Nicolae Ceausescu, thank goodness, so let's not adopt any of that dictator's strategies.