Everyone with an average family has sympathy for those children who grow up where life is far from average. Sometimes it is about children with severe disabilities, or with cancer, who suffer from their parents’ violence or drug addiction, or who are children burdened with caring for a parent who cannot care for herself or himself, such as those who care for a mother with MS or tumour on the brain.
1. Many children carry pain with ability
Each year in March “Ability Week” focuses on the abilities, achievements and talents of young people with disabilities rather than defining them by their disabilities. It’s the brainchild of the Northcott Disability Services (formerly known as the NSW Society for Children and Young Adults with Physical Disabilities, and originally named the NSW Society for Crippled Children). This organisation helps children with disabilities to develop their abilities and achieve their individual ambitions. Founded in 1929 by the Rotary Club of Sydney, Northcott Disability Services is strongly committed to independence and community involvement for young people with disabilities.
Ability Week shows the public the many types of accomplishments achieved by people with disabilities. There are 1.5 million people with disabilities in Australia, and 2,500 of them are NSW children and young people who live with disabilities. I am impressed by those people who in adult life have carried since childhood disabilities that would have crushed many of us. If we are impressed with adults who carry still the pain of childhood, we must also remember that in many families there are children who carry adult pain.
Those children who are different and disabled carry huge burdens of adult pain throughout their childhood. A series of studies on family life by Family First must include helping children bear adult pain.
I read “The Downing Street Years”, the memoir of Margaret Thatcher’s years as Prime Minister of Britain. Speaking of 1990, she writes: “I became increasingly convinced during the last two or three years of my time in office that, though there were crucially important limits to what politicians could do in this area, we could only get to the roots of crime and much else besides by concentrating on strengthening the traditional family. The statistics told their own story. One in four children were born to unmarried parents. No fewer than one in five children experienced a parental divorce before they were sixteen. Of course, family breakdown and single parenthood did not mean that juvenile delinquency would inevitably follow: grandparents, friends and neighbours can in some circumstances help lone mothers to cope quite well. But all the evidence – statistical and anecdotal – pointed to the breakdown of families as the starting point for a range of social ills of which getting into trouble with the police was only one. Boys who lack the guidance of a father are more likely to suffer social problems of all kinds. Single parents are more likely to live in relative poverty and poorer housing. Children can be traumatised by divorce far more than their parents realise. Children from unstable family backgrounds are more likely to have learning difficulties. They are at greater risk of abuse in the home from men who are not the real father. They are also more likely to run away to our cities and join the ranks of the young homeless where, in turn, they fall prey to all kinds of evil.”
Margaret Thatcher clearly indicates that children suffer the pain that adults cause in their inability to sustain a relationship, develop personal meaning and create an environment where children can be secure and wanted. The impact of adult actions can affect children over generations, and in turn can be carried on by the child into adult life where the problem continues.
That is co-dependency. Adults are walking round with an emptiness inside because of some problem and that emptiness translates to pain within their child. In turn that child lives with and passes on the emptiness. Many children carry such adult pain.
2. That pain is often intergenerational
Do you remember the old Star Trek TV series and Mr. Spock playing chess against the Enterprise computer? In one early episode, in a plot too long to relate, Spock saved the day by playing chess against the computer. Spock’s chessboard was a three-dimensional wonder: three clear, squared-off playing surfaces stacked one above the other. The pieces could move horizontally on any of the three surfaces, or vertically, from one level to another.
That illustrates the family of the child who carries adult pain. Co-dependency, as well as everything else in the family, is multigenerational. Let the top tier represent the grandparents. The middle playing surface is the parents, the children the bottom one. Any piece, any element of family life, in the upper two surfaces can be played to the child’s surface. Anything on the child’s surface can move about. The child, in short, is vulnerable.
Consider children caring for sick parents. Many children and young people who spend time caring for a chronically sick or disabled parent end up with life-long problems of their own due to having missed out on school with a resulting lack of skills, qualifications or job opportunities. It is not the fault of either the parent or the child, but the child also suffers.
UK research suggests that the kinds of difficulties young carers end up with include stress, depression and various behavioural disorders in addition to the limited opportunities to make friends and form relationships with their peer group.
Researchers at Loughborough University examined the ways that caring for their parents had influenced their education, training and employment and how it affected their transition into adult life. Their research showed that: The caring tasks carried out by young people ranged from domestic chores to emotional support and helping their parents with medication, mobility and personal, intimate care. Nearly all the young carers had parents receiving welfare or disability benefits. Half were living in lone parent families. Some interviewees described how long-term disability and reliance on benefits had led to extreme and enduring financial difficulties for their families.
A third of parents were receiving care from social or mental health services. But another third had no support at all. Half the young carers had missed some school and a quarter had no qualifications. Non-attendance was usually because of reluctance to leave sick parents alone, but sometimes because parents did not want them to go to school. In a few cases teachers and educational welfare staff had colluded in these absences – possibly because they mistakenly believed it was supportive of them to do so.
Only a quarter of those interviewed had paid jobs. Many were in further education, but caring in the home made it difficult to seek part-time work while studying, compounding their financial difficulties.
Leaving home was a problem for many young carers. Some had delayed moving out because of the need to continue caring for their parents. However, a few young people whose parents had severe mental health problems had left home prematurely – sometimes to be taken into care.
Community care policy assumes that family members will provide much of the care and support required by relatives, with the State stepping in to fill the gaps. Younger disabled or ill adults with dependent children often lack the necessary social care provision and financial resources; as a result their children sometimes take on caring for their parents.
This conflicts with a view of childhood as a distinct phase, protected by the Children Act (1989) and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. In recognition of this, there has been a growth in specialist support services for young carers in recent years. However, services that support disabled parents have not developed as extensively.
Most 16- and 17-year-olds are no longer eligible for benefits and 18- to 25-year-olds receive reduced benefit payments. Student grants have been eroded and loans and tuition fees introduced. With youth unemployment high, young people have become increasingly financially dependent on their families for longer periods of time.
In families where there is long-term illness or disability, poverty is common. Children may be required to provide care and support in the absence of adequate external support services. These young people may be increasingly financially reliant on families already living with poverty, ill health and social exclusion.
The study finds that young carers frequently had close, loving relationships with their parents and had tended to mature quickly, gaining practical skills that were useful for independence and adulthood. But these positive aspects of their lives had been outweighed by the loss of educational, social and employment opportunities as they grew up.
The report summarised, ‘children and young people who take on a significant and inappropriate burden of caring for their parents can not only be affected during childhood, but also when they start making their way in the adult world. A lack of positive, professional support for their families, combined with family poverty and poor qualifications caused by missed schooling, are major reasons why many young carers face continuing social exclusion and stress as young adults.’
The study concludes that the emphasis in policy and practice should be on preventing children from taking on inappropriate caring responsibilities in the first place and stopping these roles from becoming ‘institutionalised’ where they have already been allowed to do so.
3. Any family breakup hurts the children also
You can also see this intergenerational pain being transmitted in the children of divorcing parents. The separation and divorce of parents is not a single event in the lives of children; it is usually the start of a series of major changes to which they must adapt. One of the major consequences of divorce for many children is that they will live in a stepfamily if the custodial parent remarries or re-partners. Some children will experience further disruption if this second marriage also breaks down.
Modern children fear that their parents may separate. In the Institute Of Family Studies’ Children in Families study, almost half the younger children (aged 8 or 9 years) who lived with two parents, and a third of the older children (aged 15 or 16 years) feared that their parents might separate. They may not express it in words, but they fear their parents’ separation . There are 750,000 children in Australia who have seen their parents divorced. About 50,000 every year see their parents living through tension, anger and often violence. The adult pain is carried in the hearts of these children.
4. Any family violence hurts the children
One pain carried by children is the impact of domestic violence. We are only now beginning to realise that children are the forgotten victims of the violence which occurs between parents. While a great deal of attention has been directed to women as the primary victims of domestic violence – and quite rightly so – the effects on children have been overlooked. We have believed the myth that children are untouched by this adult pain.
Recent research says children are profoundly affected by domestic violence. Living in a home where domestic violence occurs frequently has been equated with living in a war zone or being involved in natural disasters such as bushfires, earthquakes or cyclones.
Children from violent homes exhibit the same post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms as child refugees from Iraq or Afghanistan. Family violence not only psychologically and sometimes physically harms the child victims, but is also likely to establish patterns of behaviour which may persist through generations. The reactions of children who have witnessed violence in the home range from psychosomatic symptoms to fear, anxiety, and aggressive behaviour and self-harm. These are similar to children who have witnessed traumatic events or who have themselves been abused.
Teenagers are the group most affected. Having lived with violence for a number of years, adolescents see their increasing independence as a means of escape from the family conflicts. Family conflict is a frequent cause of teenagers leaving home and, in some cases, leading a life on the streets.
The pent-up aggression and frustration of previous years often erupts in adolescence and may result in violently aggressive behaviour, particularly in boys who use their fathers as a role model. So begins ‘a cycle of violence’. Children repeatedly watching their parents in violent conflict will see this as an acceptable way of dealing with their own problems.
Boys model their own behaviour on that of their fathers and will use aggressive and violent behaviour as a source of controlling their future relationships. Girls may adopt the passive, submissive attitude of their mothers and learn to tolerate a degree of violence which would be unacceptable outside the home. Children who bear adult pain, pass their pain onto their own children.
Sometimes the children bear the pain of the sins of their parents. One of the great psychological insights of the Bible is that the sins of the fathers are passed on to their children and their children’s children. Generations have said that it was unfair, and sceptical people have said that it was improbable. But not today. We see only too frequently that the sins of the fathers are passed on to the children’s children.
How many women have gone into therapy in order to find out why their children’s behaviour was so bad and uncontrollable, only to be led by the therapist to examine their own behaviour? The women may then learn the root cause lay in the sin perpetrated against themselves during their own childhood. Incest, for example, often affects the behaviour of the abused child in such a way that it affects her own children later in life. So the cycles of despair, dependency, addiction, and abuse continue down the generations.
Observe the ‘sins of the parent’ in the pregnant woman who is smoking, drinking alcohol, subject to drug addiction or AIDS – her life-style is being transmitted to the baby in her womb with horrendous consequences. Jesus expressed his compassion for children and condemned the adult who caused them to suffer in Matthew 18:7, “Woe to the world because of the things that cause people to sin! Such things must come, but woe to the man through whom they come!” and Psalm 79:8 says: “Do not hold against us the sins of our fathers; may your mercy come quickly to meet us, for we are in desperate need.”
Sometimes children carry pain through no fault of their parents. Many parents blame themselves wrongly because their children suffer from haemophilia, muscular dystrophy or genetically transmitted diseases or conditions such as diabetes, deafness, or colour blindness. These diseased or disabled children, through no fault of their own or that of their parents, carry adult pain from early age.
Sometimes the family environment traps children into undeserved pain. Working as a Saturday volunteer in rebuilding the burnt out houses of Eveleigh Street in Redfern, my heart ached for the Aboriginal children there. Bright eyes, warm smiles, cheeky friendship, but each child locked in a cycle of community despair! How can they escape the patterns of poverty, alcoholism, despair, and unemployment into which their grandparents and parents were born? Is there any hope?
5. We must help children with pain make their own choices
We must not make self-fulfilling prophecies for our children. Not all children are doomed to repeat their parents’ errors and sins. Not all children subject to abuse or violence will grow up abusers and violent. Even children can make choices and we must support the child who carries adult pain in making positive and cycle breaking choices.
The psychiatrist Dr Victor Frankl realised that humans had the unique ability to choose how things would affect them, no matter what happened to them . Frankl made this discovery while a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp where he was starved and tortured, during a time where his parents, siblings and wife were all murdered.
He discovered that even in the worst of situations, some people kept control of their lives while others succumbed to the forces around them. The knowledge that he had both the freedom and power to choose his own response, no matter what atrocities his captors inflicted upon him, was a breakthrough which helped him and many others to survive the horrors of those times.
It was here that he developed the concept of pro-activity. Most human psychology this century has been deterministic. That is, our actions, characters and behaviour are seen to be determined by external factors: whether genetic (‘I can’t help it, that’s the way I was born’), environmental (‘my wife pushed me too far’) or psychological (‘it’s because my father was never there for me as a child’). In those scenarios there is little choice involved. Is there nothing we can do about our situation? These people are reacting to their situation.
Determinism has more validity for laboratory rats than people. Humans alone have the ability to choose a response to any given stimulus. We can be aware of our own responses, analyse them and exercise our will over them. We also have imagination, conscience, and religious faith that can give us power over our circumstances. These can take us outside and above our present circumstances and allow us to respond differently. This means we are pro-active.
People have responsibility for their own lives and what happens to them. This responsibility means, literally, the ability to respond as we choose. Truly proactive people embrace this responsibility. They never blame their situation, environment, conditioning or other people for their behaviour. They choose it themselves, based on their values and from their faith not their feelings.
People who are reactive elect to be reactive. If we are governed by colleagues and conditions it means we have, either consciously or by default, empowered those things to control our lives.
A reactive person will dwell on concerns outside their power to control. They increasingly complain, blame and feel victimised. They are negative people. Christians must positively take control of themselves and their circumstances by God’s power. God promises to empower you.
Hence Wesley Mission’s staff under my leadership for twenty seven years were trained to help children who are bearing adult pains to be pro-active not reactive. All the children’s centres, family counselling, work among the disabled, and in all other areas where people carry inherited pain, were conducted on a Christian basis. For it is by faith in Christ that we live. When we choose Him, we choose the way we shall live.
Hear the Good News! You do not have to live in a cycle of despair. You do not have to bear the burden of your parents’ sin. You do not have to be determined by your environment, genes or upbringing. You can be you. A new you! A reborn you! Jesus Christ gives you the power to overcome. You can be born a child of God. The cycle can be broken. No child of God need bear the pain of any adult. Instead you can be born again, a new you!
Rev the Hon. Dr Gordon Moyes AC MLC
References
Thatcher, Margaret The Downing Street Years HarperCollins Publishers Ltd, 1993
Hemfelt, Robert. Warren, Paul. Kids Who Carry Our Pain: Breaking the Cycle of Codependency for the Next Generation. Thomas Inc, 1990
http://www.jrf.org.uk/publications/young-carers-transitions-adulthood accessed 15 February 2010.
Family Matters AIFS Newsletter. Dec 1988, No. 22
Family Matters AIFS Newsletter. May 1993, No. 34
Frankl, Viktor E. Man’s Search for Meaning Revised, updated edition 1997