How to navigate the complex emotions of separation from a child’s perspective

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 (1998) and Masoom (1983) were her go-to films to explain the complicated emotions of parental conflict even from a child’s perspective.

Sometime in June 2025, during her summer break, when we were in Goa, Meera asked me about the changing family dynamics—“Why don’t we live together?”, “Why doesn’t he (my husband) stay with us?”, “Why don’t we holiday together as a family?”

At this point, I must reiterate that my husband is a responsible, strong coparent who spends time with Meera. Though we are both yet to sit down and explain separation to Meera, it’s to his credit, and the building of a strong foundation with her that Meera’s fears, even if not completely gone, are (hopefully) diminished.

Becoming a mother, literally, overnight to a five-and-a-half-year-old in my 40s was a difficult transition, and given Meera’s anxiety and abandonment issues, parenthood has been a tightrope to walk. Which is why I’m glad, I could rely on my friends during the initial part of this complicated journey of motherhood. Be it clothes, toys, books, conversations, I could lean on them. It taught me my first important lesson as an adoptive parent— build an army of supporters who will have your back through this complicated journey. It helped to turn to How to Talk so Kids Will Listen & Listen so Kids Will Talk, a set of books by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish that’s considered a bible of parenting ever since it released in the 1980s. Relevant even today with examples of the parents’ dilemma when children face difficult emotions, the books came alive when I joined an online parenting workshop by Mumbai-based parenting coach Kruti Desai Khaitan, who did a deep dive into these books, offering me guidance to answer some of the big questions that were on Meera’s mind. From doing the “daily mom-and-child 20-minute playdate” to “ripping anger into rough paper” and “screaming sadness into the pillows”, these became tools to guide us as a team.

Canadian author Gabor Mate’s books, particularly, gave me a sense of how and why children had nervous energy emerging out of anxiety and abandonment issues that often resulted in loud voices, “destructive hands” (where you had the urge to keep the hands busy not realising that you were damaging things), all of these made worse when parents separated. Reading Mate’s books, including Scattered Minds: The Origins and Healing of Attention Deficit Disorder, gave an insight into what happens to children’s minds when they watch their parents going through a separation. I turned to clinical psychologist Shefali Tsabary’s The Parenting Map, which talks about the urgency of ending our own childhood fears as adults to parent our children better.

While parents can learn from an array of books and podcasts, there are books written from the point of view of children as well. The List of Things That Will Not Change by Rebecca Stead, for instance, looks at the journey of an eight-year-old who meticulously maintains a diary of things that she’s sure won’t change despite her parents undergoing a separation.

Books such as Bigger Happy Family by Tanuj Khosla; Sometimes Mama, Sometimes Papa by Nandini Nayar and Aditya and The Divorce Fairy by Dr Suchitra (who uses only one name) are relatable in that they’re set in an Indian context—be it the story of Ruhi, a little girl who is learning to accept a new definition of family after her parents decide to end their marriage, be it a 10-year-old boy who’s visited by a “divorce fairy” guiding him gently to accept and move on amidst the huge changes… “I also feel like this at times,” is what Meera says when we’re reading or watching some of this material together. That’s a huge win. Sometimes, just knowing that we aren’t alone in navigating a treacherous journey is comforting.

Abhilasha Ojha is a Delhi-based art and culture writer.