This is a guest opinion column

When we were recently reminded that J.D. Vance included Vice President Kamala Harris among those he criticized for being “childless,” Kerstin Emhoff, ex-wife of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff, spoke up. “These are baseless attacks,” she wrote in a statement provided to the media. “For over 10 years, since Cole and Ella were teenagers, Kamala has been a co-parent with Doug and me. She is loving, nurturing, fiercely protective, and always present. I love our blended family and am grateful to have her in it.”

I have been a child and adolescent psychologist for 41 years. I cannot adequately express the extent to which Ms. Emhoff’s comments warmed my heart. During most of my career, I worked extensively with parents and stepparents. As an advocate for the mental health and well-being of children, few things made me angrier than divorced parents who could not put aside their differences, however bitter, in the interest of working together civilly and productively for the good of their shared children. Intelligent and generally well-meaning adults often behave as though they are incapable of the kind of speech and behavior which children must witness in order to do well under the unhappy circumstances of their parents’ divorces. I saw countless children upon whose backs warring ex-spouses and stepparents fought their battles. This is particularly tragic given the tendency of children to blame themselves for their parents’ unhappy marriages, subsequent divorces, and hostile post-divorce relationships. Particularly among younger children, who tend to idolize their parents, the logic goes like this: “Dad is great. Mom is great. Something is wrong here. It must be my fault.”

There is nothing in Ms. Emhoff’s remarks that would allow us to conclude there was no pain, no disagreements, and no hurt feelings among the three adults co-parenting the Emhoffs’ children. In fact, that the Emhoffs divorced is likely to be evidence that at least some of those were present. And yet, what appears clear is that they give parents a model of how to do better; namely, grow up, put aside or compartmentalize their feelings about their ex-spouses and their ex-spouses’ new partners, and do the right thing for their children.

Dale Wisely, Ph.D., is a past president of the Alabama Psychological Association, current member of the Alabama Board of Examiners in Psychology, and is currently Director of Parish Health at Prince of Peace Catholic Church