2.2.3 Why The Family?

The family seems to be the vehicle through which we wish to procreate our species and ensure that it thrives and evolves.  I’m not sure why this is, but communal ways of bringing up children don’t seem to be that popular.

The communal way was in all probability the way that prevailed ten thousand years ago or more but it must be remembered that in the vast majority of human societies we evolved into the nuclear family, which I will, from now on, simply call the family.

The vast majority of families still are of the traditional variety, that is, Mammy, Daddy and children. However there are nowadays many families who are headed by single parents, and there are also, of course, families where parents are of same sex. When I talk about families I am referring to all the above!

And the family is what, (in what it must be assumed was an environment with relative freedom), emerged as our most favourable choice for rearing children.

Now, some anthropologists argue that, for children, the communal way of nomadic tribes is superior for child-rearing in terms of growth and maturity and I will explore this in more detail in the Chapter on Anthropology later in the website.

But even though there are small populations of humans where children are reared in a communal way, the family has gained virtual total dominance all over the world.

And, as an aside, while the title of the website is The Natural World of Child Protection, it is important that we are aware that children are not always the most vulnerable people in a family!

In Ireland, a person becomes an adult at 18 years of age.  This is a totally arbitrary age – it simply reflects the reality that young people generally finish school and/or get jobs, want to be independent etc. at or around 18.  It does not mean, however, that all their vulnerabilities magically disappear on their 18^th birthday.  A family may have a 19 year old who is at high risk of, for example, self-harm, addiction or involvement in criminality, whereas his younger brother aged 17 (still a child in the eyes of the law) is happy and contented. This is why the website also focuses on protection of other vulnerable family members who are affected by imprisonment.

I have often wondered why the family gained total dominance.

The advent of farming 10,000 years ago meant that we began to own property, and as we began to own property perhaps our sense of our own importance grew. Did we begin to think of ourselves as individuals who wanted to make a lasting impression – i.e. who wanted to be remembered?

And what better way to do this in a male dominated society than to own a wife who would have our children who will carry on our traits as well as inherit the wealth/property that we have amassed and look back appreciatively at our achievements.

So I am sure that our increasing tendency to possess property and wealth, and then hand it on to someone, is one reason why the family trumped communal living.

And I’m also pretty sure that the more radical socialist-type thinking that parents shouldn’t be allowed bequeath their children property or money because it perpetuates privilege and wealth in society would not gain much support in any culture in the world!

Another plus for the family is that in a one-mate-for-life scenario, there is a higher chance that, when selecting a mate, people will not be related. This, apparently, optimises the health of children born as a result of the union.

But I believe that there were other, emotional, factors too.

All living things are programmed to pass on their best genes to optimise the thriving of their species and perhaps the mixture of logic/rationality and emotion/irrationality that characterises humans is best propagated within a closed group, i.e. the family.

What I mean is, we may need a mixture of privacy and intimacy that’s deeper than that which we experience in communal living.

Privacy and intimacy gives us permission to be ourselves, be unreasonable, irrational, etc. and behave in a manner that doesn’t require explanation.  People can say ‘sure that’s just the way he is’ – so we can do what would be unacceptable in community life or in society at large and, kind of, get away with it.  And, of course, we can also use the family to express intimate love, compassion and forgiveness that might have to be explained or rationalised in the communal world.

I’m not sure of the above – I’m only speculating. I just think that there may have been deeper reasons than the perpetuation of power, wealth and status, and production of healthy children.

The ideal family has iconic status in most countries (in the Western World anyway). All the images we see of families promote two parents, happiness, monogamy, a (nowadays small) number of children, and lifelong commitment. And we also afford a kind of special status to non-humans who mate-for-life, e.g. swans!

In our own country, the huge success of The Voyage (a song by Johnny Duhan made famous by Christy Moore) is proof that in our modern world we still idealise the qualities of patience and long-lasting relationship that is family. (One line in Johnny’s song states about the parental relationship that we’ve built it with care to last the whole trip).

Later I discuss the importance of the family in respect of what I term our emotional gravity. I believe that as our culture changed over hundreds if not thousands of years, and – in the project of raising children and passing on our values to the next generation – the status of the family became unassailable, we became more and more dependent on our family of origin for our emotional nurture.

Therefore, lasting the whole trip became more and more important to us. And if the marriage didn’t, (last the whole trip – that is) our cultural expectation that it would was so pervasive that we convinced ourselves (and often pretended to outsiders) that it did.

And so did the State!

Countries whose traditions and norms are rooted in Christianity gave high status in law, succession rights etc. to one-mate-for-life-with-children type marriage, and the ending of the arrangement (divorce) was illegal up to quite recently in some countries. In fact, an old word for marriage was wedlock – the lock implying that it was something that one cannot get out of!

Now one aspect of the family, in contrast to any institution that I’ve ever known, is that it rarely if ever becomes bland.

There is usually something stimulating, different or surprising happening and in that way the family always has a certain level of excitement. (I will devote some time to the role of excitement in our lives in the Chapter on Energy in Section Three).

The excitement in a family comes from the diversity of personalities and what they do and don’t do, and from the way (mentioned above) that the family is a place where views are often uncensored and people are free to express emotions and be themselves whereas in the outside world they may not do that to the same extent.

In the majority of families this is, most of the time, healthy excitement, though in some families in what I will describe as the Focus Group it may be unhealthy.

Healthy or unhealthy – excitement certainly keeps us interested and involved.

Now there are a few downsides to the family.

One is, of course, that people can be under pressure to conform to what the strongest member of the family thinks is right, or should be done. In this, there may be different pressures in the hothouse of family living than there are in what might be a more liberal communal living.

Also, most families are places where secrets are held.  Sometimes these are good secrets but sometimes they are bad secrets which hide abuse, harm children’s development, and inhibit democracy, fairness and justice in the family in general.

But the biggest downside of the family is that it is an ideal framework, or vehicle, to promote the notion of despotic power through blind obedience to the head of the family.

I come back to that downside again when I get to the Chapter on Power and Control in Society – because I believe it is important enough to be worthy of careful consideration.

I propose that there is a strong link between our labels of behaviours and conditions – for example, depression, schizophrenia, bi-polar etc. – (the descriptions of the behaviours that we refer to as mental illness), and our belief that the family is the entity that is responsible for our healthy growth and emotional well-being.

Perhaps a reason for the labelling is our reluctance to consider mental illness to be rooted in emotional distress. Would a connection between the two introduce the possibility of the appalling vista [1] that somehow or another our family of origin might not have done its job properly?

An aspect of the family that many of you may have noticed is that members are almost always quite open talking about physical illness but what people call mental illness is sometimes hidden, and rarely talked about openly.

We might use expressions like ‘he’s taken to the bed’ or ‘her nerves are at her’, or not talk about it at all.  This may be changing slowly in recent decades but it is still prevalent enough.

And why is mental illness, and all that goes with it, hard to talk about?

Mental illness invariably brings distress to a family, and may cause embarrassment, because people who are mentally ill often behave in ways that ordinary people are suspicious of, fearful of, look down on, or think is strange.

There are very powerful forces operating in society that compel us to conform to certain norms, and people who are deemed to be mentally ill (or even eccentric) may do things that challenge these forces.

And if we consider behaviour that causes distress to self and others to be an illness we can get someone else to diagnose what that illness is and then treat it, handing over responsibility for getting better to an expert practitioner. This, usually, avoids any examination into the dynamics of our family that might have contributed to the condition in the first place.

Perhaps, in Ireland, where, in the middle of the last century, we had a higher number of people in mental asylums per head of population than in the Soviet Union, there is particular shame attached to the topic because of the high esteem we hold the family and its status in society.

Another aspect of mental illness is that, unlike physical illness which can usually be treated and cured, mental illness seems to go on forever [2].

I don’t believe that this is confined to modern thinking.

People throughout history, (in the Western World anyway) who displayed behaviours other than those acceptable to the majority of the population were usually thought either to be mad or bad, and had to be fixed, derided as idiots, or thought to be evil and punished severely.  (If you know of societies where such people were considered by the mainstream to be in emotional pain and were offered love and understanding I’d be very interested to hear of them).

Even the slang term for psychiatrist (the person responsible for the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness), shrink, implies that the process that one undertakes to become mentally well isn’t going to be expansive, creative or nurturing!

It is probable that research has been done on the links between anti-social behaviour in youth and mental illness in adulthood.

From my own experience I would say that there is a very strong link.  I know many adults who engaged in anti-social behaviour in their youth who now, as adults, trail from doctors to health centres to psychiatric hospitals to out-patient clinics back to doctors, living lives of total dependence on either the State or their family or a mixture of both and all the time under (sometimes quite heavy) medication. Many have spent time in prison.  This cannot be a coincidence.

(And when I think of all that, I wonder what the pharmaceutical industry would do if we all suddenly started taking responsibility for healing our emotional distress into our own hands)?

Getting back to our description of acute distress, Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) may come a little closer than the professionals, calling alcoholism (and addiction in general) a family disease.  Using the word disease [dis-ease], and linking it with family, implies that the members of the family might not be at ease with each other.

I consider the term family dis-ease an interesting description as I believe that the hallmark of a good enough family, through all the ups and downs and emotional roller-coaster that is family life, is that members can be, in general, at ease (i.e. forgiving, tolerant, compassionate and accessible) towards each other, and with each other.

While AA is very strong on personal responsibility, it does not imply that one member has an illness as such. And is it not also interesting that AA, imperfect as many people claim it is, has a strong belief in peer support and is largely run by ordinary people and not health professionals?

I will be mentioning the differences between our approaches to healing physical illness and healing mental illness in various parts of the website.  (And just to mention, in this website, mental illness will generally be termed emotional distress, for reasons that will become clear as you read on).

[1]. This expression was used by the late Judge Lord Denning in England during the trial of the Birmingham Six, when it was suggested that they were innocent.  If they were innocent, it threw up the appalling vista that the police had told lies.

[2]. As far as I am aware, in many countries, once a person is diagnosed with a mental illness the medical profession state that they have it for life.

As outlined in a previous post, for better or worse, we deem the family to be a corner-stone of society – and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future!

What is it about families anyway that we think that the best way of preventing crime and subsequent imprisonment (and all the trauma, powerlessness, and heartache that it brings) is to protect young children growing up in them?

While I try not to assume anything there is overwhelming evidence (in our culture at least) that a unit consisting of two prospective parents who get on well, love and respect each other, intend to stay together for a long time, and are capable and willing to take responsibility for their emotions, is a good enough environment for children to be born into and grow up in.

If these two prospective parents come from families where the tradition of fixing emotional problems rather than letting them spiral out of control has been the norm, then the chances of establishing a relatively stable foundation for children to thrive as they grow are optimised. 

Attachment Theory (described in the Chapter on Trauma and Related Topics in Section Three), implies that inculcating a sense of belonging is a necessary component for building trusting and positive relationships.  I am taking it as a given that sustaining these over the long time necessary for the child to grow is also best done within the family unit.

Mostly, in the good enough family, problems are solved in real-time, or as near to real time as is practicable.  I believe that this is most important in the healthy functioning of the family.  In families that do not function that well however, problems are allowed fester, so they then bubble up at inappropriate times and places.

If the problem involves a member being angry, and it is not resolved, (for example, if the environment is not safe enough to resolve it) the anger will often be directed towards a weaker member of the family thereby causing hurt to someone who is not the person to whom the anger should be directed at all.

For example, a very controlling man might hurt his wife, but it is not safe for her to express her anger to him at how she was hurt, and solve the problem in real time.  She then takes out (or picks out, to use a common expression) her anger on one of the children.

(This is a bit stereotypical so I need to stress that it could equally be a very controlling woman who causes pain to her husband or an out-of-control teenage son or daughter who hurts his/her parent or siblings).

Many people will recognise these scenarios.  (Of course like many things that happen in the family, this is often replicated in society at large).

When we consider how problems (and particularly those that involve strong emotional expression) are solved in organisations that are set up to help people in distress, we note that it is rarely done in real time.  Rather than problems being solved at, (let us call it) a primary level, they are often solved at a secondary level.

I will explain what I mean here.

Say there is a support group offered to people in distress and the group is following a type of self-development programme.  Now let us say that a member of the group is obviously not concentrating and is constantly disruptive because she is in far too much distress to follow the programme.  What happens is that her issues bubble up every week.  In such a case facilitators have two options.

They can deal with the problem in real time, addressing the issues, using the wisdom and innate skills of the group members to encourage, feed-back, and advise the person who is often in distress.  Such an approach, in addition to addressing the problem at primary level, will raise the self-confidence of the other members of the group as they feel that their presence and opinions are valued.  The down side of it is that the formal part of the self-development programme might not be completed in the number of weeks allotted!

So another way of dealing with it is to (usually very gently but firmly) exclude the needy person from the group and refer her for one to one counselling until the problem or issue that is bubbling up is dealt with and then admit the person to the group again.  This I will call dealing with the problem at a secondary level.

At the secondary level, the facilitators and group are insulated from the suffering of the person who is needy (and the discomfort of experiencing the emotional distress) while the cognitive learning in the programme proceeds.

Now I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with the latter approach (solving the problem at the secondary level) but to be honest I’d be of the view that, while causing discomfort to facilitators, the learning may be enriched for all if we choose to deal with issues at primary level – just like we’d do in the good enough family – if that is at all possible.

And anyway, I believe that someone who dissents, or disrupts is potentially bringing us a gift!  The family is a place where eccentricity and/or irrational behaviour are allowed.  It’s the one place where people can be unreasonable, where rules can be broken, and where it’s safe to show parts of ourselves that we don’t show anywhere else.

Now if we allowed a teeny bit of that in our organisations we might be surprised at the results it would bring!

Recently I considered doing an estimate on how much time two paid staff members would have to spend offering comprehensive support that would be long lasting and effective, to one extended family involved in drugs, serious crime, imprisonment, etc. – a family in the Focus Group – with the aim of moving the family from a state of dependency to full autonomy.

You will probably gather from reading the website that I believe that to optimise success, in particular in respect of children, [1] support would need to be offered over quite a long time.  It would be very difficult to estimate this accurately as the support offered may be very intensive initially, and then after a few years may reduce in intensity, (all going well) and, as the family gained more confidence and autonomy, reduce further in time and energy.

And the end-point (that is, the point at which the family would have normalised to the extent that they would not need support anymore) would be very difficult to estimate.

Having considered all the above I formed the opinion that a very good option might be to support someone in the family, or someone in the community that was trusted by the family, that was concerned, insightful, ambitious, energetic, measured, balanced, etc. in a way that would firstly respect their journey (they would often be a responsible worrier in their family) and secondly honour their ambition to help others in their community.

(This opinion is affirmed by research which I will be referencing in a later post which found that when parents look for advice about parenting, the majority seek support from family, extended family, or friends/neighbours, rather than professional practitioners.  And it’s a similar story with children).

But apart from the research, I also formed this opinion because it has been done in Bedford Row Family Project – an organisation that I very deep knowledge of – since its very early days. Results have not been perfect, but they have been good enough to continue its development!

It is important to state that I have observed many people who have the above characteristics (concern, insight, ambition etc.) in every community that I have been in – and beyond.  They will often be those that people in the community turn to for a listening ear, for support, sympathetic counsel, perhaps even for advice on how to bail someone out of trouble.

Sometimes, however, their efforts to help people live healthier lives, and effect true change may be hampered by their perception that they are fighting an uphill battle, meeting crisis after crisis, and having unrealistic hopes dashed over many years or indeed decades.

I said in a previous post that it is good if practitioners are part of the process, and it is, but it is bad if practitioners are so much part of the process that they are immersed in it totally.  To put it simply, they are too close to the action [2].

Thus, in offering opportunities for support (and indeed training or education) cognisance needs to be taken of this fact.  (This will be covered in more depth in Section Five in the Chapter on Training).

Remember that we do not really need to encourage people to do something, as they are doing it already! Rather it is altering their response so that it not only becomes more effective but also begins the process of the multiplier effect in the community in which they live.

This is truly a win-win situation, as it builds confidence, encourages responsibility, models, is gender balanced (the concerned people are not always women), educates workers, is sustaining, has longevity, (if done properly), spreads skills, encourages others with similar ambitions, and above all frees up a wealth of creativity, intelligence, and resolve that may be buried under generations of fear, distrust, and isolation.

[1]. Aha, and what is success?  Department of Children and Youth Affairs Better Outcomes Brighter Futures, National Policy Framework for Children and Young People 2014-2020 policy document identifies five outcomes for children including the aspirations that children are active and healthy; that children are achieving in all areas of learning and development; that children are safe and protected from harm; that children have economic security and opportunity and that children are connected, respected and contributing to society.  (That’s good enough for me – though if I was writing it I’d have mentioned something about having opportunities for free play – surely a fundamental characteristic of childhood)!

I might also define success as the family members being at ease with each other, members engaging in life affirming and self-fulfilling pursuits, and all children thriving and reaching their potential as they grow from childhood to their mid-twenties.

[2]. The technical term for this in Gestalt Psychotherapy is confluence where the practitioner finds it difficult to separate him/herself from the client at an emotional level.