Parenting, (a high-impact low-noticeability activity) is, obviously, crucial to managing change within the family.
After all, if we are parents, it is we who started the family in the first place!
It is we who choose to have children and then decide what way to rear them. We will decide on the importance or otherwise of formal education, sports, music, etc. the nature of conflict resolution, emotional expression, what subjects are not spoken about and what ones are.
The mixing of the two cultures of our families of origin means that the result (the output – I suppose), in the best case scenario – incorporates the best of both cultures.
But oftentimes, despite our best efforts, some negative elements of our families’ cultures also filter in and are propagated downwards to our new family. With interfering parents or other relatives in our extended family, pressure can come on us (particularly if we are young parents) to comply with family practices and norms even though we might have started out with different aims for our new family. Sometimes we are consciously aware of this pressure – sometimes not.
All the above efforts to change (or to prevent it – which is a kind of negative change) result from downward causation.
Children going to school cause more changes in our family. For example, we cannot go on holidays anytime we like. Also, money might need to be reoriented to pay for school expenses that were previously available for luxuries. This is a kind of downward causation also because it is external but there are elements of upward causation because the change is brought about by factors internal to our family, i.e. our children’s needs.
But the real upward causation happens because our children will have unique individual characteristics and they will manifest, as they grow, in a way that we, their parents, might not predict or, indeed, be ready for.
We will almost always adjust our values, thoughts, feelings, norms and behaviour in the light of the challenges that children are throwing up. Once again, these changes have a high emotional component.
And we may resist them because we have been conditioned from a young age to believe in one way knowledge flow – i.e. adults know best and children learn from parents and not the other way around. This is understandable because in life in general we are so accustomed to the top down paradigm that we very often don’t think of any other one.
However, if we are wise we will realise that children carry an inherent wisdom and clarity of thought that we can learn a lot from – if we are open to learning!