I'm about to give away a trade secret about my professional work. It may mean that some parents who might have consulted with me about problems with their children won't now do so. But it could also mean that those parents who do come to me will have a better chance of helping their children.
My secret? I assume the problems are with the parents, especially in their marriage or post-divorce relationship, and not with the child. A child's psychological problems are in most cases a reflection of the parents' problems.
I was director of a family counseling agency in Helena for about three and one half years. We counseled parents who were having discipline problems with their children. About half of the families we saw were divorced, never married or stepfamilies. In the intact families, most parents displayed chronic, unresolved marital problems that were reflected in the child's acting out behavior.
I remember one case of a chronically strained marriage in which the parents could not even agree on a bedtime for the child. One said 8 P.M., while the other insisted on 9 P.M., and I could not get them to compromise on an 8:30 bedtime. If they couldn't agree on rules and consequences for the child, couldn't present a united front, there was no way that discipline would be effective with their child.
But there's something deeper going on when a child's behavior problems are a reflection of the parents' problems, something I suspect is unconscious to the child. The mental health of the parents, and the state of their relationship, whether married or divorced, sets the tone for how the family functions. These factors provide emotional security for the children. If Mom and Dad are unhappy or fighting too much, their children will worry about them.
That worry will then translate into misbehavior. Kids can't talk about their emotions the way adults can, so they act them out in misbehavior. And the behavior usually sends this message: "Help! My parents are hurting."
Children will also draw attention to themselves by misbehaving to stop their parents' fighting. Again I don't believe kids do this consciously, but it is as if they say to their parents, "Quit fighting and pay attention to me."
Drs. Robert Hemfelt and Paul Warren express my treatment philosophy very nicely in their book, Kids Who Carry Our Pain, which I would like to paraphrase. Parents' priorities when they bring their children for counseling are:
- Fix the kid who has a problem.
- Well, OK, if you want to tinker around with our relationship a little, we suppose it won't hurt. Might do some good.
- Fix us? We don't need fixing. It's the kid.
And absolutely without exception, according to Hemfelt and Warren, the reverse is the correct order of priorities:
- Parents, heal yourselves.
- Work on your relationship with each other.
- Now help your children resolve their own problems without pressure from above.
There are exceptions, of course. Some children are hyperactive for biological reasons or difficult to raise because of inborn temperament. Others have been abused or traumatized outside the family.
But for most of us, our children serve as a barometer of how we're doing. If they're acting out, they're asking for help for themselves and for us. If we pay attention to that message and do something about it, they could be doing us a favor by pushing us towards greater mental health.
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