Helping children through their parents' separation

Books, films, and friends can help deal with the sense of anxiety children feel when their adoptive parents separate

- Abhilasha Ojha

Films, books and podcasts can make conversations around separation relatable.

In the past year, I have struggled to explain the concept of “separation” to my eight-year-old daughter Meera, who already experiences anxiety, having been adopted at the age of five-and-a-half. She was found abandoned at the age of three-and-a-half at a railway station, taken to a police station and eventually sent to an adoption centre. According to Meera, she was left on the road by her mother who said she would come to fetch her but didn’t.

There are so many threads to unravel by way of understanding adoption and adoptive parents, particularly when children are older, but that's a story to be written for another time. For now, I'll stick to the aspect of separation, and how films, books and podcasts can sometimes make it easy for us to create a toolkit to make the conversation around separation relatable.

In the spirit of slowing down during the festive season, particularly the Christmas-to-New Year week, Meera and I watched That Christmas (2024), Simon Otto’s directorial debut that revolves around a 10-year-old boy and his single mother who works as a professional caregiver. The film peels back many layers, touching poignantly on the theme of loneliness (a teacher who lives alone after losing her husband in the war), but gently explaining the changes to help children know that they're not alone. Ditto with films such as How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000), The Christmas Chronicles (2018), among others. In fact, a friend mentioned how in the 1980s and 1990s, films such as Zakhm