DAY 1
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GREG DERR photos/The Patriot Ledger
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| Mary Quinn lost her two-bedroom Braintree apartment after her husband left and ended up homeless. She now lives in this rent-subsidized home in Quincy. |
Psychologists: Kids bear the brunt of money fights
The Patriot Ledger
When Kayleigh Quinn was 3, she would curl up in bed with a small photo album filled with every picture she could find of her father cuddling her as a baby.
It was a reminder that her father, who abandoned the family when Kayleigh was an infant, really cared about her, at least when she was first born.
“She felt that he loved her, and she could see it in the pictures,” Kayleigh’s mother, Mary Quinn, of Quincy, said.
Now 14, Kayleigh is considerably more bitter, angered by child support checks her father never wrote, by the E-mails he never returned, by the fact that she has not seen him since he left when she was 5 months old.
“I don’t trust my father to do the things he says he’s going to do,” Kayleigh said. “I’ve decided I’m not going to chase him around anymore. I give up, basically.”
When deadbeats don’t pay child support, there is also a good chance they don’t have a close relationship with their children, experts say. Whether the missing money is the reason for the rift is irrelevant to children. All they know is that their dads - and in some cases their moms - are not there. The emotional turmoil can lead to behavior problems during childhood or adolescence. Some kids end up in therapy, blaming themselves because their parents don’t visit.
“If a parent disappears without much communication, a child will try to search for things they did wrong to make the parent leave,” said Alan Jacobson, a psychologist and director of Bayview Associates in Quincy.
Even if the deadbeat remains in the picture, children feel the tension if parents are struggling over money.
“Kids don’t understand the impact of money the way adults do,” Jacobson said. “All they end up hearing is that their parents aren’t getting along, and it’s very scary and confusing.”
Psychologists recommend that parents keep any discussion about child support far from their kids’ ears.
“Financial issues should be something the adults take care of and don’t talk to their kids about,” Jennifer LaPointe, a Quincy social worker, said.
But even if parents think they are careful not to involve children in fights about money, kids are bound to pick up more than the adults realize.
“They tend to be very alert to listening in on conversations, looking at written correspondence,” Jacobson said. “They want to fish to see how their parents are getting along.”
John Zola, a father from Easton, has caught himself complaining to another adult about the child support he pays - and then discovering his teenage daughter within earshot.
“Sometimes, you vent a little bit, but you have to be careful,” he said. “You have to remember that the child does love both parents.”
Virginia Daniels’ oldest son, Timmy, has trouble feeling love for his father. Timmy was 8 and the oldest of five children when his dad left the family. He seemed to take it the hardest.
“He was very angry, and he showed it. He banged things,” Daniels, of Halifax, said.
Timmy went to counseling for about a year. Today, he outwardly shrugs off his father’s absence, but it is obvious that more than a flicker of anger remains.
“I don’t want anything to do with him,” Timmy, now 23, said. “If I saw him, I know he’s bigger than me, but I’d still like to lay him out.”
Mary Quinn struggled to ease the burden on her own two kids by making a conscious decision to shake off her resentment toward her ex-husband about a year after he left.
“I stayed mad for a good year, but then I chose not to be angry anymore because it was making me miserable,” she said. “I decided I didn’t want my kids to grow up with a mother who was angry and resentful.”
But she still feels a sense of loss for her children. “When they were babies, I would walk them down by the beach and see the fathers with their kids and be so jealous that my kids wouldn’t have that,” she said.
Now Quinn is juggling the opposite emotions of her two children: Kayleigh, who is angry and has given up on her father, and Danny, 13, who remains hopeful that he will build a relationship with his dad - even though they have never met.
The children’s father, Everett Glenn, has made sporadic child support payments in the past 13 years. - His contact with his children has been just as touch-and-go. He has called or E-mailed a few times, but after a while, he disappears again, mostly because his congestive heart failure, diabetes and Hepatitis C have prevented him from staying in touch, he said.
But Glenn claims he would like to have a relationship with his kids, to see them one day. “God knows I’ve been nothing but a burden to these children, making them wonder what they did wrong - and they did nothing wrong except fall into an accident of biology,” he said as he began to cry. “I want my kids to know I care. They’re my children, and I don’t even know them.”
Dina Gerdeman may be reached by clicking here.
