Empowerment for recently split parents

Navigating life as a divorced, single parent is never easy, but the challenges are compounded when one is part of the Orthodox Jewish community in part because of the community’s strong family focus and many traditions. 

While friends and family will likely rally around the divorced parent, helping with carpools or inviting them for a Shabbat meal, the parent and children are likely to still experience loneliness, sadness and frustration. Often families receive support when they are going through the initial stages of separation and divorce, but many find that people pull away over time.

In a bid to provide newly divorced individuals with tools to help themselves and their children, Clinical Psychologist Dr. Barbara Lauer-Listhaus and Mrs. Rena Kutner, who herself was a young divorced (and recently remarried) mother, teamed up to create a workshop titled “Accepting Your New Normal: Rebuilding a Better You and Helping Your Children in the Process.”

More than 30 women from across New Jersey attended the first workshop, at Congregation Rinat Yisrael in Teaneck. A second session was held at the JCC in Cedarhurst and was equally well attended.

“We want to empower parents and their children to face their peers, their extended family and the community with strength and determination to improve their life,” says Lauer-Listhaus, who has spent 20 years helping people renegotiate their roles as parents while dealing with their own emotional adjustment to the changes in lifestyle that occur following divorce.

Orthodox families dealing with a divorce have unique concerns that aren’t necessarily faced by others, says Lauer-Listhaus. “These young parents have to handle the expenses of yeshiva education often on a single salary. They have to help their children transition between two homes, which may have different levels of religious observance. Many single parents spend the Yamim Tovim alone without their children.”