Building Children's Resilience in the Face of Parental Mental Illness

Conversations with Children, Parents and Professionals

Alan Cooklin, Gill Gorell Barnes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429593932
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Mental illness in a parent presents children with multiple challenges, including stigma, self-doubt and self-blame, ongoing anxiety and depression, that are rarely discussed in the public domain. This important new book, written by young people who have lived through these experiences, as well as professionals working alongside their families, highlights the relationships between children, parents and professionals, and the emotional issues they all face.

A key focus of the book is the relationships in all combinations between the children, parents and professionals, as well as the responses to each other illustrated throughout. It will be ideal for all those working in the health, social and educational professions, as well as parents and children themselves.

Chapter 1

Mental health, mental illness, the family and others
How do we think about them together?
Alan Cooklin

This chapter is about young people, their parents and others in their families, talking with each other about mental illness in the family, as well as talking with the professionals from different agencies and disciplines who may work with them. Part 1 discusses families, and family life, in general. Part 2 reconsiders family life in the context of mental illness in the family.

Part 1: what is a family?

In general people live in, or have lived in and left, some form of family. In my experience there are five questions which are useful to consider:

• What is a family?
• What factors in family life can help the family to become a place of safety, intimacy and care, as well as freedom?
• What factors in family life can have the opposite effect?
• What can parents, young people themselves and professionals do to improve the positive qualities of family life for the benefit of children and young people?
• What might all this have to do with mental health, mental illness and its treatment and prevention?

People commonly talk about ‘the family’ as though we all know what they mean, when in reality each person may mean something different. The word ‘family’ can stir up so many images, thoughts and feelings, which can be different for each person. Also for a particular person some of these images, thoughts and feelings may contradict each other. For example, one father told me that he grew up in a ‘very close’ family. However, he rarely saw his own father who worked away, he was often bullied at school, and he had never told either parent about this ‘so as not to upset them’. So he was trying to keep alive the idea of a very close family, but in fact had not felt free to share his own distressing emotional experiences with either parent.

In the United Kingdom there used to be a kind of image of an ‘ideal’ family – a time when the census identified the ‘average’ family as having two parents and 2.4 children – and often represented in the 1950s and 1960s in the Ladybird books for children rather like an old-fashioned picture post card, with a mother in an apron baking cakes, a father smoking a pipe and two or three well behaved children, of course all white, middle class and fully conventional to the expectations of those times. We now know that currently over 40% of marriages end in divorce in the United Kingdom, that over 17% of stable parental couples are not married, that 22% of children are brought up by lone parents.¹ In particular boroughs the percentages may vary widely, so that in some London Boroughs the percentage of lone parents may be more than double that figure. What other research has shown is that children born into or adopted by gay couples do as well as those brought up by heterosexual couples. In addition, the multiple cultures which make up the United Kingdom now all have different perspectives on the family, on the extended family and different expectations about children’s behaviour. Despite this, in some people’s minds that old fashioned image of the ‘ideal’ family lives on, even though it is now no longer the reality of how the majority of families live, nor is it necessarily how most people want to live their lives.

So, what is a family? A family is most commonly one or more parents with one or more children, who may or may not be the biological children of either or both parents. The children, may have been born from natural sexual reproduction by both or one of the parents, by assisted reproduction with the eggs and/or sperm from themselves or from donors, or the children may have been ‘carried’ by, that is developed inside the body of, a surrogate mother. Alternatively the children may have been fostered or adopted by one or both parents (if there are two), or they may be part of a step-family including children from both parents, separately or together, or even from other partners with earlier partners of either or both parents…or the family may be any combination of any of these and more ‘structures’ or organisations. The parents may be of similar or different religions, races, cultures and they may be of the same or different genders. So from this rich variety of choices what can we take it that the word ‘family’ means? After all, when we say the word family we will expect the other person to know what we mean. So here are two possibilities:

1. A social group where some or all of the adults are committed to care for the emotional and physical needs of the children while they are growing up.
2. A group of adults only, in which some may or may not have been the children of (or children cared for by) one or more of the adults in the same group. They may share mutual giving and taking of care for some or all of their lifetimes.

Different structures and functions of a family – good and bad? An outline for parents and young people

In the first group of families mentioned earlier, there is an obvious job to be done: look after the children in the best way you can, till they grow up into adults. That includes encouraging ‘Attachment’ relationships – encouraging children to learn to be connected to an adult or adults they can trust, helping them to learn to manage their emotions as they discover and find out about them, as well as someone who can ‘keep it together’, keep routines going and create a sense of safety and stability. However, although we may hope that all of those things may happen, in the interests of the children’s development, it is rare for couples to ‘plan’ like that when they say ‘let’s start a family’. They tend to have an image – a dream – of a child they want, and only when the child arrives do they begin to think about the child’s own emotional and developmental needs, and the fact that even very young children may have thoughts and feelings which the parents do not expect or welcome.

The degree to which parents can respond to the young child’s independent thoughts and feelings will of course vary a great deal. In many cases, especially if the parents have had a good experience of a safe and emotionally warm family themselves, they may respond in similar positive ways without really thinking – at least until some problem arises, when they may be forced to think out their response as well as what is happening to their child. If one or other of the parents has not had a good experience of growing up themselves, they may want to try very hard to do things differently. This will involve them in having to think out carefully what they think their child needs, and whether they feel they can respond in the way the child needs, as they may have had no good experiences of their own to refer to.

Whether a parent can put into practice what he or she thinks their child needs may also depend on whether the parent has an emotionally supportive and understanding partner. So, for this first group there is a clear job and parents could if they wish ‘learn’ how to do it by going to what are often called ‘parenting’ classes or reading a manual on child care, although the emotional part of doing the job is less easy to learn, and will also depend on the emotional supports that parent has for him/herself.

In the second family group there is no clear job, because they are living together as adults. However, there is often an expectation that the family members will all care for each other in some way and to varying degrees. That model of family could follow on from the first kind of family if, for example, the children never leave home when they become adults. This could happen for financial reasons, such as if the young adults cannot afford anywhere else to live, or for more emotional reasons: they like to have their washing, cooking and ‘home making’ done for them, or fear loneliness away from home. Alternatively one of the original ‘parents’ may expect or demand that he or she receives ongoing life care and companionship from one or more of the children. As a result one or more of the children – most often daughters in times past – may feel they should not or even cannot leave. This can also represent a complex and mutual holding together of parent and child.1

Safety and danger in the family

If we think that the threads, bonds and connections which hold people living together are mostly based on love and care then we have also to think what we really mean by these words. One common assumption is that being in a family protects us from loneliness. On the other hand some people might describe being in the family as also potentially being very lonely. Another idea is that the family is a ‘safe’ place. However, there may be times when a particular family does not feel safe, or even feels dangerous, emotionally or physically to some in the family. Some people will say that they can only really ‘be themselves’ without any pretenses or ‘acting’ when they are home in the family, while some people may feel they are forever having to play a part to fit in with what is expected of them by their family.

A couple –Obviously the forces which brought the parents together in the first place are likely to be different from the shared bonds which continue to hold a family together when children are born. For the couple it may have been sexual attraction, love or a conscious choice to want to start a family. Sadly, what brings a couple together in the first place may later sometimes become very painful to them or even emotionally or physically destructive, although they may nevertheless stay together. We also know that different people use the word ‘love’ to mean very different things. So, for the purposes of this chapter I will define love as a mutual feeling, freely given by both sides and relatively free from domination or power of one over the other – that is that both ‘lovers’ are relatively free from domination by the other. When that happens then both people are likely to feel free to have and express their own opinions. Of course, as they will have to share many decisions about life and living, they will also have to keep a reasonable balance between them in making decisions, and trust each other to make some decisions on their own.

The family – When those positive ingredients remain in the couple’s relationship, then it is also more likely that family life can be a source of both safety and freedom for the children. When the children are young then those ingredients, as well as some intimate attachments to one or both of the parents, will satisfy most of their needs. It is later that one has to consider what the forces are that keep people together in families.

So those possible experiences described earlier can be the result of the family being organized positively as a protection against loneliness, providing some sense of security of the base where one lives, and meeting a need to feel part of a group; all positive forces which keep people together. Alternatively – as described earlier – if the family has just become their ‘default’ base, which avoids the fear of exploring more unknown contexts outside, they can also be forces which can lead a young adult to feel trapped. In turn this can be part of the process which sometimes ‘holds’ adults in their parental home.

Shaping of relationships by different cultural, social and religious beliefs

The picture of mutual affection, and equality in taking decisions, is not how the UK family has always been, nor how it still actually is in some families or even how in some cultures and religions it is believed it should be. Cultural, religious and personality factors may lead some people in families to accept that some people, genders and age groups have more rights to their own opinions and thoughts than others. Cultural traditions need respect, and can be forces for good, in that they can increase the children’s sense of belonging, as well as offering a sense of security, even in an insecure environment – such as a hostile immigration environment, when a family emigrates into an unwelcoming country. However, cultural beliefs and practices have to be reconciled with what is in the best interests of the children in a family as these are defined by the laws of the land in a particular country. In the United Kingdom the laws protecting children, as well as professional ethics, require that the best interests of the children come first, wherever the courts or professional workers have to be involved about family decisions. So some beliefs, particularly promoted by extreme religious sects, or other closed groups, whether religious or secular, as well as cultural traditions which discourage mixing with other children, may inevitably limit the children’s access to outside activities and positive relationships. This can then act as a constraint on their building resilience to problems in the family. While many children in regular family circumstances will have the resilience to manage different restrictions related to closed family groups, when there is mental illness in the family the restrictions may well act against the best interests of the development of the children. This is ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of contributors
• Forewords
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mental health, mental illness, the family and others: how do we think about them together?
• 2 Parental commentary on Chapter 1
• 3 Comment by Juliet Brown (Lara’s daughter) on Lara Brown’s commentary
• 4 Parental mental illness: the worst hurdles and what helped
• 5 From child of a parent with mental illness to becoming a therapist: what made a difference along the route
• 6 Commentary on a young adult’s chapter
• 7 Breaking out of the trap of constricting loyalty
• 8 Parental mental illness and extra difficulties for children when parents divorce
• 9 Notes from the edge: supporting parents with mental health problems
• 10 Storytelling & drama: telling our stories, building resilience – Drama processes and techniques for empowerment
• 11 The journey from young carer to doctor: reflections on how the two roles informed each other
• 12 Keeping it together: championing young carers’ rights and raising family and public awareness
• 13 A parental commentary on Ambeya Begum’s and Georgia Irwin-Ryan’s chapters
• 14 Not a framework, but a way to be: reflections of a school nurse
• 15 School-based support for young people affected by parental mental illness
• 16 London calling – experiences with the Kidstime model in Germany
• 17 Kidstime experience in Spain
• 18 Some combined tips for parents, children and the professionals who work with them
• Index