Last week saw the start of another television reality series, involving families in crisis and the specialist counsellor who gets parachuted in to save them. We’ve had fat families, floundering parents, sexually challenged couples — now it’s the turn of families on the verge of breaking up. How to Divorce Without Screwing up Your Children (yes, believe it) ticks all the right boxes — conflict, misery, wide age appeal — and its timing is bang on. Divorce statistics are always in the news, but the emotional consequences are back on the agenda in a way they haven’t been since Kramer vs Kramer. This year’s hot dinner-party topic film (even if it is early days to be voting) will be The Squid and the Whale, the movie that gets right to the haemorrhaging hearts of everyone involved in divorce, but mainly those of the kids. And it doesn’t pull any punches.

Divorce has been one of those issues we have tended to pussyfoot around (surely better for the children than living with unhappy parents and so on). But watch out, this is the year when the children will have their revenge and tell it like it really is.

Divorce happens. Some people do it better than others. Some families go on to join other families and be blissfully happy. But, if you are a child of divorcing parents, as The Squid and the Whale reminds us, the fact of your mother and father no longer loving each other (bad), no longer living together, with you (bad), putting their happiness first (they don’t see it like that, but you do), is only the beginning. Then you have to deal with them having sex with other people, and the idea of them being sexual beings, full stop, as opposed to your boring mum and dad. Following on from that is the possibility they might start another family (great! A new fresh one, different from the old tarnished one that you were part of).

And if they don’t go that far, they’re still going to get a different life, minus most of the adults that were part of yours, the children who came with them and all the places you used to go to. And your nice family house becomes two nothing-like-as-nice houses that you have to commute between. And your stuff is always in the wrong house. And your dad can’t cook or put on sticking plasters, and your mum won’t watch the football with you. And when it’s your Saturday to be with your mum or dad, and you want to go round to a friend’s, you can’t, because now they really need to see you because it is their Saturday, and it’s unfair on them if they don’t. And you have to do weird, quality-time things you never used to do before, because normal life is no longer enough to compensate for what they have done to you. We talk about the effect of divorce on children, but it turns out we don’t know the half of it.

Times recommends

• Live chat: Thrifty ways to update your winter wardrobe
• Is anybody out there really listening?
• Nutrition Q&A: Will eating late make me fat?