The disturbances in August 2011 give us all pause for thought but how we make sense of the outbreak of violence and lawlessness depends on our perspective and where we locate ourselves in a society that now has, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation reported in 2007, record levels of inequality.The report found that households in already-wealthy areas have tended to become disproportionately wealthier and that many rich people live in areas segregated from the rest of society. What impact does that have for those struggling with limited means and limited opportunities?Have we created a society that displays wealth but doesn’t share it? And does this display provoke enormous envy in those who have no access to wealth? In good times jealousy can be a creative spur to compete; in bad times could it be the spur to envious rage and the wholesale violence and robbery we saw in August of this year? Whilst it is now clear is that the majority of rioters were not making a coherent political protest against issues such as the loss of the educational maintenance allowance, growing youth unemployment or even the alleged brutality of the police, it is also clear that some form of protest was being made.Rebelliousness in the form of gang culture and other forms of deviancy is a protest: a protest against the authority of the establishment and of parental figures.And protest can be a healthy response to unfairness and disadvantage but it can also come in a form which is highly self- destructive and harmful to others.This damaging kind of protest is what took place this summer.
A relevant question therefore, is not only why these young people are so angry and aggressive but also why have they so little capacity to channel this anger productively?As a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and Chief Executive of The Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships, I am liable to have a particular point of view and I make no apology for this.No single analysis can provide a satisfactory explanation for the riots and so in this article, I will simply try and shine a light onto a particular area - an area which often remains dark and unexplored.
“A commonly held belief, supported by therapists’ experience, theories of psychopathology, and systematic research, is that without intervention, troubling or negative intergenerational patterns will be repeated in the next generation. Couple relationships play a central role in maintaining or breaking intergenerational cycles. Furthermore, preventive interventions focused on strengthening the couple relationships of parents of young children have the potential to affect the parents’ relationship quality and their children’s social, emotional, and academic development.”
Carolyn Pape Cowan and Philip Cowan, University of California, Berkeley (2005)
Whilst journalists and some politicians talk about “feral children” and lawless families, little light in these tirades is shone into the private world of the family. Notions of neglect, immorality and fecklessness pervade the debate about the riots, vilifying these young people and their parents, leaving little room for compassion or understanding. As a clinician working with families, I am very fortunate to be allowed into this private world.
Bob and Paulina have 3 children. They first separated when their youngest was 3, following a period where Bob had been unemployed and was heavily using drugs and alcohol.Despite their “separation” the couple found it very difficult to stay apart and continued to have a relationship which was fractious, uncertain and often highly conflicted.For many years, Bob would stay with Paulina and the children at the weekends, leaving on Monday mornings for his job as a residential social worker.Sometimes Bob would sleep on the living room sofa, sometimes he would sleep in Paulina’s bed; things were up and down and never settled.
Bob and Paulina came to TCCR’s Parenting Together service for help with their eldest two children, who were then in their teens.Kristin, 14 and Jacob, 16 were presenting their parents with considerable challenges who were finding it impossible to agree on a strategy and a plan of action for responding to these difficulties.The couple were currently living apart and seemed to have very different attitudes and ideas about what was best for their children.
In their sessions, Bob would complain that Paulina was over controlling and that both Kristin and Jacob wanted to live with him because they hated the way Paulina tried to run their lives.Paulina treated Bob with utter contempt in the consulting room, asserting that he was a useless “waste of space father.” She maintained that the children agreed with her on this and that even their youngest Tommy wanted nothing more to do with him.
The therapists worked hard to help the couple focus on their children’s needs, paying particular attention to Kristin who had developed an eating disorder and to Jacob who was using cannabis and had dropped out of school following devastating GCSE results.
The links between the wellbeing of children and their environment have been long established but what family factors really affect children?Whilst recognition that economic strain, parental mental ill–health and critical and neglectful parenting have all been cited as primary causes of poor outcomes, less has been said about inter-parental conflict and its crucial impact on the lives of children.
Over the last two decades, convincing evidence has been gathered that shows that inter-parental conflict adversely influences children's psychological development, social competence and academic achievement (Cummings et al, 2000; Harold et al, 2004).Indeed, it is also clear that sustained inter-parental conflict increases risk of anxiety and depression, aggression, hostility and anti-social behaviour in children (Cummings and Davies, 2002; Harold, Shelton, Goeke-Morey and Cummings, 2004).And it is not rocket science to understand that this type of unhappiness is likely to spill over into a couple’s capacity to parent, with hostile couples being typically more hostile and aggressive towards their children. (Erel and Berman, 1995; Harold, Fincham, Osborne & Conger, 1997).
Whilst family breakdown is often cited as a key driver of societal problems, the quality of the parental relationship is less to the fore.Children clearly find the dissolution of their parents’ relationship painful, but it seems that it is often the many consequences that flow from this life event that are most problematic.
Parents often find their post-separation relationship difficult and whilst adults may have ways to tolerate this, children find it extremely challenging.Evidence suggests that conflict that occurs before, during and after divorce may explain more about children’s adaptation to their new circumstances, than the actual event of divorce per se (Kelly, 2000).
Professor Gordon Harold, now at the University of Leicester and a Senior Fellow at TCCR has shown how inter-parental conflict serves as a primer for children’s perceptions of other relationships. Similarly TCCR’s psychoanalytic methodology also places the parental couple as a prime influence of future relating. If couples are hostile to each other, children may take this way of relating as a template, making conflict resolution difficult in other parts of their life.Feeling threatened by heightened conflict at home, one could say that children learn to fight fire with fire.
Anger and conflict in itself is an inevitable part of human relationships but it is how anger and conflict is managed that is crucial.The creative use of anger and the resolution of conflict allows family life and relationships to thrive and grow, and gives children a model that they can use in their future life at work, study or in their personal relationships. Where conflict is poorly resolved and anger flourishes, children do not learn to manage their dissatisfactions, resentments and disappointments and are more likely to channel these feelings into destructive anti-social behaviour.Our experience of working with families shows us this kind of inter-generational transmission is central to the difficulties couple’s face and to the difficulties their children often then display.
In their 5th session of therapy, Bob talked about his own experience as a child.Reflecting his and Paulina’s experience, his own parents had separated when he was 3.He did not see his father again and his mother re-partnered soon after.He said he had hated his step-father who had beaten and abused him and his mother through his childhood. He said he also understood how Jacob was feeling because he had felt the same way himself at 16, hating authority and school. Paulina said she couldn’t really remember anything about her childhood, since she was sent to Birmingham from St Lucia to live with her aunt at the age of 9.She did not feel her aunt wanted her and meeting Bob at 19 had been the first time she had felt “at home” since she had left the Caribbean as a child.
The therapist wondered whether these experiences of catastrophic loss on the one hand and conflict and abuse on the other, were central to the difficulties that they and their children were now struggling with.
Given all this evidence, one might expect that support for couples would be central to those policies aimed at children’s welfare and to the practice of those working with parents and children - yet this is not the case. Whilst there has been considerable provision in the form of parenting programmes to train parents to be better carers of their children, provision to strengthen the couple relationship and recognise its impact on children’s lives has lagged a long way behind.Some might say that interventions aimed at supporting and strengthening parenting may have little real impact, if the fundamental context in which this parenting takes place is one of conflict or hostility, yet we continue to largely ignore this issue.
Evidence of this blind spot was found in the survey undertaken by the Children’s Society in 2009, which asked 30,000 respondents to agree or disagree with the statement – “Parents getting on well is one of the most important factors in raising happy children”.Of the 20,000 children asked, 70% of them agreed.Of the 10,000 adults surveyed only 30% of them felt this to be crucial to children’s happiness.
Parents, governments, social workers, teachers and therapists frequently share this blind spot, avoiding the painful truth that the adult relationship is central to most children’s wellbeing. Painful because the issue often feels so personal and focussing on it can engender great shame and powerlessness in us, as we all struggle with our messy complex personal lives.
There is no doubt in my admittedly partial mind, that the high levels of relationship distress and post-separation conflict that are common in the UK, are part the reason why our children are unhappy and angry. And I believe that the conversion of this unhappiness and anger, fuelled by poverty and lack of opportunity into violent destructiveness is a sign that we are not helping our young people to develop creative ways of protesting and managing their anger and disappointment.Indeed we are teaching them the very opposite.
At TCCR we believe that supporting the adult relationship has the potential to make a real difference to children’s’ life chances, to social justice and to the emotional and economic well being of the UK.If children’s beliefs about relationships are largely derived from their parents’ relationship then supporting “parenting” won’t be enough to change children’s lives. We need to support couples to develop a positive “model” of relating for themselves and crucially for their children. Resolving conflict creatively not only ensures family stability, it also gives children a confidence and belief in a world and a society that is just and fair. And when the world isn’t fair it importantly gives children the capacity to protest in ways that can be heard and understood by us all.
