Children of Divorced Parents—The Limitations of One-Size-Fits-All Interventions

The political agenda of the Danish School Reform in 2014 provides a heightened awareness of pupils' mental health–including children of divorced parents. The primary focus is to support children's emotion management, and in that regard, conversation groups are offered to children experiencing divorce. The conversation groups are primarily built on manual-based and therapeutic concepts, rooted in well-intentioned care work. In service of good intentions, the metaphor of the lump is employed as a significant tool to describe children's difficult emotions. This can be linked to an overall therapeutic tendency that has developed within institutional arenas for children and adolescents. However, these understandings position children between normalization and problematization. In order to provide help and support for children living their everyday lives with divorce, professionals can (unintentionally) be the bearers of problematized understandings. However, the well-meaning intentions of care can paradoxically act as a ‘power of goodness’. This article stems from a qualitative research project involving 23 children and adolescents who participated in conversation groups at four Danish schools.