A: Everyone knows what a traumatic experience divorce is. In fact, next to the death of a child or someone extremely close, it is often the most traumatic experience that a person can go through in his or her life. If this is true for you, it is certainly true for your children. They can not possibly understand what is happening to them. Nor are their emotional defenses sufficiently developed for them adequately to deal with it. Your divorce is therefore going to be difficult for them, whatever you do. However, going to war over your divorce will not make it easier for them. It will only make it more difficult. When all of what you are now going through is done and over, it is essential that the two of you are able to deal effectively together, at least where your children are concerned. Your marriage, and your relationship to one another, may be over. But your relationship with your children as their common parents is not. All of the studies on the effects of divorce on children have come to the same conclusion. It is not the fact of your divorce that will do permanent damage to your children. It is how you go about it. Did the two of you sit down in a common effort to address the issues that your divorce left you with and to make as much sense of it as you could? Or did you go to war over it, your and your attorney's only object being to get as much as you could and to give as little as you have to? Yes, you owe it to your children not to go to war. You also owe it to yourselves. After all, you are someone else's children as well.