One. This is not personal.
It is only natural that interested parties will read this with heightened attention. Somebody who has accumulated respectable service as a divorcee. Somebody in the middle of a separation. Somebody who knows a good friend who divorced a month ago.
To all of them I say: set your personal case aside. The real subject of this piece is those who cannot yet read it — small children. Their welfare depends on a combination of many factors whose balance changes from case to case, and so what follows is a simplifying generalisation at best. I do not intend to rule on your case. I do not know it.
Two. Ideologues of every flag — please leave the room.
It is one thing for people to arrive with a psychological agenda, holding a firm conception of the correct development of the human mind. But abandoning the discussion that will determine children's fates to whoever wants to settle a score with an entire sex? We have been carried away.
A reminder: all those absent fathers and all those bloodsucking mothers are known to their children by a different name — mum and dad.
Three. The children are not the message.
Whatever you need to communicate to your former partner, it does not travel through a child. Not as a question, not as an aside, and not as a comment made in their hearing on the assumption that they are not listening. They are always listening.
Four. Preserve their picture of the other parent.
This is the hardest instruction on the list and the most important. A child's sense of their own worth is built substantially from their parents, both of them — which means that demolishing the other parent in their eyes does not damage your ex. It damages the child's account of where they came from, permanently.
Five. Predictability beats generosity.
Turning up when you said you would, at the times you said, matters more to a child than anything you do while you are there. Inconsistency is experienced not as inconvenience but as evidence about their importance.
Six. Two households may have different rules. They may not have different affection.
Children adapt to different regimes remarkably well. What they cannot adapt to is warmth that fluctuates according to the state of the adults' negotiations.
Seven. Your own recovery is part of their care.
A parent who is functioning, sleeping and not consumed by the conflict is providing something no arrangement can substitute for. Looking after yourself here is not a competing priority. It is the same priority.