LixyChick.....you've hit on something I think.

The one thing I remember from my childhood, as a 'normal' child from a broken home, was that it was always very awkward and uncomfortable coming home from a weekend at my Dad's house.

My Mother would often comment that my sister and I were really difficult to deal with after being at my Dad's house and it was often the time we would have arguments with her.

One of the things I remember being particularly difficult was that if we came back on a Sunday night from my Dad's having had a great weekend my Mum would make us feel bad for having enjoyed ourselves (e.g.'yeah yeah, your father does one little thing and he thinks that's enough, I do all the rest of the stuff and no-one ever appreciates it'). But if we came back having had a bad weekend, or we tried to play down when something good happened we would get my Mum ranting and raving that my Father was so bad and never did anything with us etc.

As children, we learnt very quickly therefore to come in on a Sunday night, go straight upstairs and not communicate with our Mum or Stepdad at all that night. As you can imagine that too, went down badly with my Mum but it seemed to us to be the only thing we could do.

As Lixy says, perhaps your grandson's behaviour is something along these lines..... a way to deal with the strange transitional period between being at one family's house and then being at the other.

Adults often don't realise how difficult it can be for children to have to fit in naturally to two different households where often the rules are all very different and the children are expected to act equally at home in each house.

In these situations, often the only constant is in fact the child's siblings (they are there in both houses and are having the same family experience) so I'd suggest it's also possible that your grandson could be picking up on tension from his elder brother.

People seem to forget that siblings play as much of a role in the upbringing of a child as the parents do, and, dare I say it, in divorced families sometimes more. If I were you I'd be talking to the nine year old about what it's like going to his Dad's, what things are different, how it makes him feel when he comes back, and you'll get an inkling as to what might also be going on deep inside the youngest's head. I know I wish someone had asked those questions to me when I was that age, but they were all too busy trying to get through their own problems and hang-ups to think about the little things that make a difference to children's lives like how the dishwasher is stacked differently in one house to the other and how in one house you're expected to do chores, and how you're not in the other.......those everyday things make a difference to kids.

Oops, I think this has turned into a bit of a rant about how divorced can mess with children's heads! Sorry.

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