5 Fresh Tips: How to Talk to Your Children About Your Divorce with Therapist Oona Metz
In this episode of 5 Fresh Tips, therapist and author Oona Metz addresses one of the most stressful and emotionally loaded moments in the divorce process: talking to your kids about divorce when your partner is unwilling, avoidant, or refuses to participate. With nearly 30 years of clinical experience and over 15 years leading divorce support groups for women, Oona offers calm, expert guidance grounded in child development, emotional safety, and real-world parenting dynamics.
Oona shares practical, step-by-step divorce recovery tips for navigating this conversation solo, including how to explain divorce in age-appropriate language, what not to say, and how to respond when children ask hard questions. She explains why clarity and honesty—without oversharing—help children feel safer during family transitions, and how one emotionally grounded parent can stabilize kids even when co-parenting strategies aren’t aligned. This episode also covers emotional resilience for parents, especially single moms carrying the weight of both the logistics and the emotional labor of divorce.
The conversation draws on themes from Oona’s book, Unhitched: The Essential Divorce Guide for Women, which focuses on the emotional journey of divorce rather than legal tactics. Listeners will walk away with actionable tools, reassurance that they don’t need to “do this perfectly,” and a powerful mindset shift: protecting your children’s emotional wellbeing does not require mutual agreement—it requires presence, consistency, and care.