Social Work with Families

Readings in Social Work, Volume 1

Eileen Younghusband, Eileen Younghusband

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000438536
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Medicina
• Thema: Atención sanitaria

Originally published in 1965, this book gathers together some outstanding contributions to various aspects of social work with families. The subject was now more than ever of concern to social workers, as fresh knowledge added to their understanding of the dynamics of family life and interaction. The papers which compose the book were written by well-known authors from both sides of the Atlantic. They are arranged in three sections dealing with: normal and less normal families as a group; with particular crisis situations for children; and with some more theoretical concepts contributing to an understanding of family types.

This volume was the first in a series of Readings in Social Work designed to collect together significant articles on different aspects of social work.

1 The Normal Family—Myth and Reality*

E. M. Goldberg

As social workers we mostly meet families in trouble. Chronic illness may have disrupted their accustomed ways of living, delinquency, marital unhappiness and many other disturbances in personal relationships are rife among such families. When trying to help, consciously or unconsciously we carry in our mind some image, some ‘norm’ as to what ordinary healthy family life is or should be like. Without these implicit assumptions and rough guides, we could not make any assessments, or have a positive aim. Some colleagues will throw up their hands in horror at the suggestion that we have ‘norms’, values or a philosophy of life that inspires our work and gives it direction. They will say that it is our job to try to understand each family’s unique needs and difficulties in relation to their life experiences and their social setting as objectively as possible and that help will aim at solutions which are appropriate to the clients’ special situations; that our own values, judgment and ideals do not enter into the situation, and that we do not try to get our clients to conform to what we perceive to be the ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ life, but to the standards that are ‘good’ or ‘healthy’ for them. These colleagues will point out that the ‘moralistic’ kind of social work was done by our forebears whose religious and moral values permeated their activities and who had a clear vision of the good life which they helped their more unfortunate brethren and sisters to achieve; they sought to uplift them.

Sometimes I envy these early pioneers who carried their values and ideals openly and proudly, who knew where they wanted to go and where they wanted their clients to go. We, social workers of today, on the other hand, may or may not hold certain religious, moral and social values. At any rate we claim that we do not impose them on our clients, whose troubles we try to disentangle with them, leaving them free to choose the end to which they would put these insights. However, I suggest that in the last resort we have to make up our minds what we consider to be healthy or unhealthy, good or bad in family life and in social life generally. We now hide our value judgments behind such terms as ‘well-functioning’ and ‘poorly-functioning’ families, ‘mature’ and ‘immature’ individuals, and so on. But well-functioning and poorly-functioning, mature and immature by what standards? If we examine these concepts of social health and disease, we find that they are closely bound up with the social values of the society, the social class, the ‘sub culture’ to which we belong, and that what we call social or mental health is not based on objective universal or absolute criteria. It seems to me that the clinicians, the child guidance workers, the caseworkers have an ideal family in mind when they make their assessments, when they say that this mother is ‘over-protective’, and that father ‘authoritarian’. The ideal ‘child-guidance-social-casework, progressive-psychology’ kind of family is vividly described by Seeley, et al in their study of a Canadian middle class community, highly conscious of the need for ‘good mental health’, called Crestwood Heights.

^* Published in Social Work (London), Vol. XVI, No. i, January 1959.

‘ “Good” parents are emotionally secure, free from hyper-anxiety, and from covert or overt conflict with persons in their immediate environment . . .

‘The good mother must not be over-solicitous or over-protective. She must be undisturbed by worries about the future, confident in her status and in her acceptance by the community, and sure of her adequacy in the fulfilment of her maternal role. She should not find it necessary to translate any anxieties she may have into specific worries about the child’s health, safety, or ability to measure up to academic or social expectations, particularly in the school setting. The ideal mother is not “over-dominant”—an attitude manifested in nagging or “bossing” the child. She is neither over-permissive nor inconsistent in discipline; nor does she cater to the child’s every whim.

‘The good father also exhibits these characteristics (although most discussion of parental behaviour seems to refer to mothers). But in avoiding the Scylla of “authoritarianism”, the good father must not run against the Charybdis of “indulgence”. The Victorian father, patriarchal head of the family and owner of wife and progeny, is as frowned upon as the “over-dominant” and nagging mother . . .

‘ “Unconditional” parental affection and acceptance, where the child is concerned, has now become the central ideal . . .

‘Conflict between mother and son, mother and daughter, father and son, father and daughter, is regarded as a symptom of family malfunction . . .¹

Incidentally, the mental health of the Crestwood Heights children growing up in families inspired by these ideals of maturity, democracy, and integration of relationships, was no better, in fact possibly less good, than that of children growing up under what might be thought far less favourable conditions.

It seems desirable then to take a closer look at some of the rough working hypotheses on which consciously or unconsciously we base our evaluations and casework help.

I want to do this in two ways. First, I would like to refer briefly to recent family studies which have scrutinized carefully some common and fairly sweeping assumptions about the modern normal family. Secondly, I want to discuss in greater detail the family relationships among so-called normal families which I have come across.

One assumption which is repeatedly made is that the modern urban family is isolated, that is to say that they live far away from their extended kin, for instance from the husband’s and wife’s parents and from their brothers and sisters. It is often suggested that the modern young mother is lonely and receives no help from her relatives. Yet studies of working class families in two London boroughs, one East and one West² have shown in a vivid and convincing way that the three-generation family is still very much with us; that there is a close link, especially between married daughters and their mothers, but also between married men and their mothers. Grandmothers continue to be a great standby in crises of all kinds and in the daily round of living, particularly as regards the children. These are not impressions but facts which have been patiently collected from an unselected sample in a defined population. For instance 66 per cent of the men and 81 per cent of the women in the Bethnal Green sample, who had mothers alive, had seen them during the week preceding the interview. In these old-established working class areas the nuclear family, far from being isolated, is embedded in a close network of family and neighbourly relations, the ideal being that once married one should live near but not with one’s parents. It has also been shown that it is the housing policies of authorities, national and local, rather than changing social values in the local community itself which tend to break up these extended family ties. These studies which demonstrate the vital importance of the maternal grandmother in working class family life and in the upbringing of children, are of immediate relevance to family caseworkers who, largely under the influence of modern psychology, have concentrated perhaps too exclusively on the relationships within the nuclear family. However, Young, Wilmott and Shaw worked in homogeneous working class districts; what about the lower middle class or middle class families? Are they not isolated, as they have often moved around a good deal to better jobs for example, or to better neighbourhoods? Elizabeth Bott in her studies of ordinary families¹ which included a high proportion of middle class ones, has given some suggestive answers. The urban middle class families, were surrounded by what she called a ‘loosely knit network’ of relationships, relatives and friends who might be scattered and not know each other, rather than by a closely knit network like the families in Bethnal Green where relatives and friends all knew each other. Thus these urban families were not more isolated but more ‘individuated’ than families in relatively small closed communities.

¹ John R. Seeley, R. A. Sim and E. W. Looseley, Crestwood Heights, Constable & Co., London, 1956, pp. 165, 166. ² Michael Young and Peter Willmott, Family and Kinship in East London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1957.

L. A. Shaw, impressions of Family Life in a London Suburb’, Sociological Review, Vol. II, No. 2, 1954.

Elizabeth Bott has also thrown light on another assumption social workers often make in evaluating the stability or goodness of a marital relationship. We seem to suppose that the good and happy marriage is based on a close partnership in which interests are shared, problems discussed, and roles flexible and interchangeable. There is of course little doubt that generally speaking the emancipation of women has made marriage much more of an equal partnership. But how true is the assumption that the more joint and interchangeable the roles of husband and wife are and the more interests they share, the better for them and their children?

Both Bott and Young found that if husband and wife come from close knit family networks like those prevalent in Bethnal Green and if they can remain in touch with this network of kin and friends after marriage, then the marriage is superimposed on the previous relationships and each partner continues to be drawn into activities with outside people. ‘Each gets some satisfaction from these external relationships and demands correspondingly less from the spouse. Rigid segregation of conjugal roles is possible because each partner can get help from people outside, but if husband and wife come to marriage with loose knit networks, or if their networks become loose knit after marriage, they must seek in each other some of the emotional satisfaction and help with familiar tasks that couples in close knit networks can get from outsiders. Joint organization becomes more necessary for the success of the family as an enterprise.’¹ Both these investigators have shown us that marriages in which conjugal roles are segregated where the husband goes to the pub regularly, attends his clubs, goes fishing with his pals and where the wife does all the housework and the washing up goes round to mum’s frequently and maintains close relationships with female neighbours, are no less happy or conducive to bringing up happy children than those marriages with more joint activities and sharing of roles.

¹ Elizabeth Bott, Family and Social Network, Tavistock Publications, London, 1957.

I became acutely aware of my own false assumptions about joint partnership being the prerequisite to a happy family life when I found that among 64 couples of fairly ordinary families in a working class area, only a handful of wives shared their husband’s interests. The wives considered the husband’s hobbies and interests to belong to a separate male world rather like his occupation.

What matters most is probably whether the role assignments really suit both partners’ needs and conform to the social norms of their group. Indeed, research into the more psychological aspects of closely joint and segregated types of role relationships between parents, may indicate that it is easier for the child to identify with the parent of his own sex if the roles are clearly distinguishable and thus provide recognizable models.

Yet another assumption which is often made about family life is that families can only function well and children thrive if mothers stay at home and do not go out to work. Working mothers have been blamed for the rise in juvenile delinquency, for disturbed and backward children, and for unruly adolescents. It is a subject highly charged with emotion and peculiarly void of facts. Do we know from unbiased studies whether the children of women who go out to work are less healthy or more disturbed than those of mothers who stay at home? For instance comparisons could be made between groups of children whose mothers go out to work and those who stay at home, in terms of their health records, school achievements, absences from school, delinquency rates and general social adjustment. Do we know whether children living in extended families fare better when their mothers go out to work than children living in relatively isolated nuclear families? More intensive clinical studies could test the hypothesis that the consequences for the family, and for the children in particular, differ with the life experiences and motives that impel the mother to go out to work, as well as with the mother’s capacities to handle the double job and the support she gets from her husband. Some studies are now in progress. A follow up study of children from all parts of Great Britain and all social classes born in 1946 is being carried out and results have so far been published up to the age of five.¹ So far there are no differences between the children of working and non-working mothers as regards their heights, frequency of accidents and emotional disturbances, but the investigation continues and differences may yet emerge at a later stage of the children’s development. Another study was carried out by the London School of Economics in South London among mothers who do the ‘double job’ and those who stay at home. The findings did not suggest that mothers who go out to work neglect their families or that their homes and children suffered; on the contrary they were on the whole more capable mothers and housewives than their counterparts who did not go out to work.²

¹ Ibid., p. 60.

In my own work among one group of families containing a son with a psychosomatic illness and a group of ordinary families with a healthy son, there was a hint which gainsaid the assumption that it is harmful for mothers of young children to go out to work. The mothers of the healthy young men had gone out to work much more often during the first ten years of their son’s lives than the mothers of the sick sons. The mothers of the sons with the psychosomatic illness were as a rule capable, intelligent women full of energy and drive who had followed their consciences to stay at home and be ‘good mothers’ and at times they appeared to have looked after their children almost too well. The mothers of the healthy young men on the other hand had been more easy going and possibly less conscientious in the care of their children but they had been more flexible with more diverse interests that took them outside their homes and enabled them to combine work with family life and consequently to make fewer emotional demands on their children.

It is all the more important to find out what the effect of mothers working is on family life for as the Manchester Guardian reminded us some time ago (January 13, 1958) the spinster, the unmarried professional woman who has manned the nursing, social and teaching services will be fast disappearing. The Report of the Royal Commission on Population, calculated that by 1962 there will be equal numbers of men and women and by 1972 there will be a small excess of men.¹ Unless we can think of the normal family as one in which mothers go out to work when their children begin to grow up, we may see many of the traditional women’s occupations denuded of personnel unless of course the ‘surplus’ bachelors were to take over. Myrdal and Klein² have pointed out that before the industrial revolution removed many of the economic functions of the family into factories, women were always used to a double role, that of home maker and worker, but with the important difference that the work was carried on at home.

¹ J. W. B. Douglas and J. H. Blomfield, Children Under Five, Allen & Unwin, London 1958. ² Pearl Jephcott (with Nancy Seear and John H. Smith), Married Women Working, Allen & Unwin, London, 1962.

Finally I want to compare the implicit assumptions we make about normal family life with a few examples of so-called normal families I have come across. These normal families are part of a control group in a study concerned with psychosomatic illness. They were drawn from the register of a general practitioner. Readers will ask, did not these ordinary families resent this intrusion? Did they talk frankly to you? Can you really expect them to reveal anything about themselves if they have not asked for any help? These are important questions which I have considered in other contexts.³ Here I can only mention briefly that in this study, as in others, the assumption that British people in contrast to Americans are reticent and will not talk about themselves has been proved wrong. Three-quarters of the families approached co-operated straight away. There were refusals of course and these are of great interest. For, again contrary to the common assumption that it is the odd people who co-operate and like to display themselves and the normal ones who refuse, it appeared that the unco-operative families had more serious problems than the families who did co-operate. It seemed that families need to feel a certain amount of confidence in their ability to cope with life reasonably well and in their own ‘goodness’ before they can entrust their experiences to the scrutiny of a stranger, however understanding.

Thirty-two normal families were studied by interviews at home and at the research unit, and in this article I can only touch on the kind of psychological and social adjustments found in some marital relationships. The most striking impression I carried away with me from the investigation was the great variety of ways in which people can relate to one another and be reasonably happy, and how unlike the child guidance stereotype of the well-adjusted family these adaptations really were.

¹ Report of the Royal Commission on Population, H.M.S.O. London, 1949. ² A. Myrdal and V. Klein, Women’s Two Roles: Home and Work, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1956. ³ E. M. Goldberg, ‘Experiences of Families of Young Men with Duodenal Ulcer’ and ‘ “Normal” Control Families: Some Problems of Approach and Method’, British Journal of Medical Psychology, Vol. XXVI, Pts. 3 and 4, 1953. Family Influences and Psychosomatic Illness, Tavistock Publications, London, 1958.

Mr and Mrs Hodges were a striking example of a couple who had assumed roles that fitted in with their mutual needs although these roles were not modelled on the conventional notions of the man doing the work outside and the wife keeping the home.

The wife, a very intelligent, capable, and somewhat excitable woman, was the daughter of a strict Victorian widow. During her childhood she had had to work hard scrubbing and sewing while her mother and younger brother went out to enjoy themselves. When her brother was killed in World War I, her mother said, ‘Why couldn’t it have been you?’ Mr Hodges was a highly intelligent, sensitive, contemplative type of man of considerable maturity. His wife ‘played him up terrifically’ during their courtship because she said she could not believe that anyone wanted her for herself. She refused to marry until Mr Hodges could offer her a home, as she did not want him to live in her mother’s house. (This behaviour may have indicated a fear that the situation would be re-created in which the maternal grandmother would prefer the man in the house, and put Mrs Hodges into an inferior position.) In her marriage she took over the leadership, if only by virtue of her tremendous energy and vitality, which at times seemed inexhaustible to Mr Hodges. She seemed unable to relax and at the age of fifty was doing a full-time job, as well as a considerable amount of private dressmaking, and her home always looked neat and tidy. It seemed as though her unremitting activity still represented an unconscious response to her mother’s admonition to work hard.

Mr Hodges, on the other hand, was a quiet person who could relax easily and who liked the peace and quiet of the countryside. Although he often discussed the futility of her continual drive an...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Preface
• Table of Contents
• 1. The Normal Family—Myth and Reality
• 2. Concepts Relevant to Helping the Family as a Group
• 3. The Nature of Marital Interaction
• 4. Treatment in the Home
• 5. Children’s Play as a Concern of Family Caseworkers
• 6. David and His Mother
• 7. Chronic Sorrow: A Response to Having a Mentally Defective Child
• 8. Children at Risk
• 9. Helping a Child Adapt to Stress: The use of Ego Psychology in Casework
• 10. Notes on the Role Concept in Casework with Mothers of Burned Children
• 11. Social Determinants of Family Behaviour
• 12. A Family Diagnosis Model
• 13. Family Diagnosis: Trends in Theory and Practice
• 14. Applying Family Diagnosis in Practice
• 15. Designing an Instrument to Assess Parental Coping Mechanisms