Answer

What Happens to My Children’s Sealing If We Divorce?

If you and your former spouse were sealed and you have children, you may worry about them more than about yourself. Did the divorce affect their sealing. What happens if one of you remarries. Have the choices the two of you made damaged their eternal family. Those questions are heavy because you cannot protect your children from every consequence of what happened.

Children born in the covenant or sealed to their parents do not lose those blessings because their parents later divorce. Your changing marital circumstances do not put your children outside God’s covenant purposes or make them less His.

Eternal Truths

The sealing power exists to bind generations, and it is not fragile. In the Kirtland Temple, Elijah restored the keys connected with turning the hearts of parents and children to one another (Doctrine and Covenants 110:13-16). That authority was given to hold families together across generations, not to be undone by a mortal difficulty.

Trusting God with the arrangement is part of the doctrine. President Henry B. Eyring described his own concern about eternal family relationships in “The Hope of Eternal Family Love”. He learned to live worthy of the celestial kingdom and to trust that the Lord could arrange family relationships more wonderfully than he could presently understand. That matters when you know the doctrine but cannot see how every piece will fit.

What Can Make This Confusing?

Family life after divorce really is complicated. Children divide time between homes, form relationships with stepparents, grieve what changed, and often love both parents while feeling caught between them. Parents have sincere questions about future sealings that do not have immediate answers. Complexity starts to feel like hopelessness, and that is also the point at which children get drawn into adult disputes or made to feel they must choose a side.

What Research Shows

In a study of 944 divorced families, researchers including BYU family-life professor Spencer James compared patterns of parenting after divorce (Reconsidering the “Good Divorce”). Children whose parents cooperated in parenting had fewer behaviour problems and closer relationships with their fathers than children in other post-divorce arrangements. Cooperative coparenting did not erase every difference the researchers found, which is an honest reminder that divorce stays hard for children even when parents handle it well. What it shows is that you still have real influence over the family environment your children live in now.

Questions to Think About

• Do my children feel free to love both parents?
• Am I asking them to carry concerns that belong to adults?
• What does each child need from me this week specifically?

What You Can Do

Spend individual time with each child this week, remove them from one conflict they should not be managing, and tell them plainly that Heavenly Father knows their family completely. Take the sealing questions you cannot answer to your bishop rather than carrying them alone. The essay on temple sealings after divorce goes further.

Jesus Christ can help you build security and love in the family you have now while trusting Him with the eternal relationships you cannot yet see.