Creating a calm, happy life after divorce – For you and for your children
by Tamsin Caine
Divorce, even when it is cooperative and non-abusive, can feel like living inside a storm. Not the dramatic kind that everyone else can see – but a quieter, more relentless one. Decisions need to be made. However, you have the steady awareness that your children are watching, absorbing, and learning from how you respond.
If you are in the middle of divorce, or have only recently completed it, you may not be looking for reinvention. What you may be longing for instead is something far more modest – and far more profound, a calm, happy life. One that shows your children how stability can be rebuilt, even after change.
The kind of divorce that is hardest to explain
When there has been no abuse, whether one of you is shouldering the blame or not, divorce can feel especially confusing – both internally and externally.
You may hear:
- “At least it’s amicable.”
- “You’re lucky you can co-parent.”
- “Others have it much worse.”
While all of that may be true, it doesn’t remove the emotional weight of disentangling a shared life. Cooperative parenting requires a huge amount of effort. Fair outcomes still involve compromise on both sides. Protecting children from adult issues often means holding more than you show.
If this resonates, pause for a moment and ask yourself what are you actually trying to create now?
Children don’t need perfection – they need calm, safety and fun
Children do not require their parents to make flawless decisions. What they need is a sense of emotional and physical safety.
They notice how tense the house feels when conversations are mentioned, whether conflict leaks into handovers or routines and where one parent is visibly overwhelmed or resentful.
They also notice how you cope when things feel unfair, uncertain, or emotionally charged.
The life you are creating post-divorce is not just about logistics. It is a living demonstration of how to respond to change without losing yourself.
What would it mean to make calm your primary success measure?
In divorce, it is tempting to let decisions be driven by what feels fair now – emotionally, morally, or symbolically. However, short-term emotional decisions often create long-term tension.
A calm, happy post-divorce life usually rests on outcomes that are sustainable, clear and designed around the children’s lived experience. Fairness, in this sense, is not about winning or losing. It is about ensuring that both households can function without ongoing stress spilling over into family life.
When you are looking at how you respond to a divorce issue, it may help to consider whether this decision will make the next five years calmer or more complicated?
Protecting children from adult issues
Many parents try to shield their children by saying very little. That instinct comes from love but silence can also be heavy.
Protecting children does not mean suppressing all emotion or pretending everything is fine. It means choosing what is age-appropriate, avoiding blame or oversharing and keeping adult processing with adult support. Ensure your children are front and centre of your decision making, but are not put in the middle of disputes.
A calm household is not one where nothing is felt. It is one where feelings are handled in the right places.
Creating calm when the external storm is loud
Even cooperative divorces involve emails, forms, discussions, and decisions that can quickly pull you out of your centre. When the external noise increases, calm has to become an intentional practice.
“Circle of Control Reset”
An idea was suggested to me to help to calm yourself when you feel overwhelmed. It only takes 5 minutes.
- Draw two circles – one inside the other.
- In the inner circle, write what you can control today (your responses, tone, timing).
- In the outer circle, write what you cannot control (another person’s emotions, the pace of the process).
- Take one small action from the inner circle only.
This practice trains your nervous system to step out of reactivity and back into agency.
Modelling emotional maturity
One of the most powerful legacies you can give your children is not a perfect outcome, but a lived example of emotional maturity. Children learn from your behaviour. Try to take a pause instead of escalating into an argument.
Years from now, they may not remember the details of the process. But they will remember how safe it felt to be in your presence during uncertainty.
Ask yourself what you want your children to say about this period when they are adults.
A life built slowly is often the strongest
Your post-divorce life is not something you design in one moment. It emerges through hundreds of small, thoughtful decisions over many months, and probably years.
Calm is not passive but is built deliberately.
Calm decisions create financial clarity
Money decisions made during divorce often carry far more emotional weight than we realise. Fear, guilt, anger, and urgency can quietly drive choices that feel comforting in the short term, but unsettling later.
Calm decision-making does not mean detachment. It means creating enough emotional space to ask better questions. When financial decisions are grounded in calm, they tend to be clearer, fairer, and more sustainable. They allow you to plan not just for the end of the divorce process, but for the many years of family life that follow it.
Future planning is not about predicting everything perfectly. It is about understanding the implications of today’s choices, so you are less likely to feel trapped by them later.
Moving forward with intention
Divorce changes the shape of family life, but it does not have to diminish it. By choosing fairness over reactivity, calm over control, and long-term wellbeing over short-term emotion, you are already doing something special.
You are teaching your children how to create a happy life after change.
Not through words, but through the way you live it, every day.
Tamsin Caine
Tamsin is a Chartered Financial Planner with over 20 years experience. She works with couples and individuals who are at the end of a relationship and want agree how to divide their assets FAIRLY without a fight.
You can contact Tamsin at tamsin@smartdivorce.co.uk or arrange a free initial meeting using https://bit.ly/SmDiv15min. She is also part of the team running Facebook group Separation, Divorce and Dissolution UK
Tamsin Caine MSc., FPFS
Chartered Financial Planner
Smart Divorce Ltd
https://smartdivorce.co.uk
P.S. I am the co-author of “My Divorce Handbook – It’s What You Do Next That Counts”, written by divorce specialists and lawyers writing about their area of expertise to help walk you through the divorce process. You can buy it here https://yourdivorcehandbook.co.uk/buy-the-book