I’ve had to tell my 7 year old his dad was dead. I know this will sound horrible but as I was his primary carer and he wasn’t used to seeing his dad daily, he was for want of a better word, fine. We’d had a very consistent weekly routine of contact for years but at the end of the day, kids are resilient especially when they have a safe and secure base with the parent they live with and that’s the parent doing all the day to day stuff.
Quoting a Daily Fail article here but from the lifestyle seen in the media, it’s probably not far from the truth
“…he tried to see Bear regularly, his unpredictable lifestyle frequently made this impossible. Instead, Cheryl was largely left to bring up the little boy alone with the help of her mother Joan…”
My son’s dad was his hero when he was 7 but over the years, he’s had to come to terms with understanding his dad’s lifestyle choices and drug use that caused his death. I’ve given him a very stable upbringing and he had lots of support in his bereavement. Cheryl will be able to access therapists and whatever help is needed
I will say that as a mum, my heart was literally broken for my little boy and even though his dad was my ex, I grieved for him for a very long time. It was the most traumatic experience of my life thus far.
I feel for Cheryl that the timeline of what she tells her son about his dad’s death will be influenced by the fact he was in the public eye and worry that he’ll hear things at school about his dad using drugs and other things a child that young won’t fully understand
don’t they have any empathy?
