Family Matters

Image by Richie D   Originally posted in April 2008, this topic is one that still seems to generate strong feelings.

In the last post we saw examples of intergenerational relationships that reduced bullying behaviors. But bullying behaviors can be perpetuated from one generation to another as well.

In "The Bully in the Family: Family Influences on Bullying," from Bullying: Implications for the Classroom, James R. Holmes examines the existing research into this antisocial behavior, explaining that many factors contribute to producing it. However, most of these factors have their origins in the family. Whether genetic components are considered: which would include temperament, intelligence (or lack thereof) and attention problems; or environmental components such as family influences, behaviors that occur between parents and children, and family management skills; a child's central relationships are most likely to affect whether or not he or she will bully others.

According to the studies reviewed by Holmes, "Bullying is associated with families in which people do not treat each other with respect or families in which children are not taught to respect the rights of others."

He also notes that "[British Criminologist David P.] Farrington assessed intergenerational transmission of bullying behavior specifically and found that there was a relationship. In other words, boys who bullied others as adolescents were more likely in their 30's to have children who were bullies."

But it isn't only parents who have a strong influence in this regard. Says Holmes, "The intergenerational effects of poor family management and discipline can also extend to grandparents. Having antisocial parents and grandparents is even more predictive of antisocial behavior in adolescence."

How important are positive family relationships to a safe and successful community? As we continue to discover, everything we can hope to be as human beings begins and ends with the effort we put into family relationships.

Although the U.S. Centers for Disease Control (CDC) notes that rates of violent behavior among U.S. teens have been generally on the decrease since 1991, homicide is still the second leading cause of death among teens 15-19 years of age. The U.K., on the other hand, reports a rise in homicides among 10-19-year-olds in 2007 and 2008. Such mixed news begs important questions for parents: How many violent children are too many? Ten children? One child? Perhaps there are no guarantees, but researchers who focus on the interplay between biological and environmental influences on behavior have uncovered several factors associated with youth violence, which are outlined in a recent article titled "Who Am I? The Question of Youth Violence."

The American Psychological Association’s Web site notes that there’s no gene for violence. Research indicates that even when there are biological factors, these can very often be mitigated by environmental factors: particularly through the efforts of family and community. Violence, generally speaking, is a learned behavior.

While the media may certainly be a force for modeling violence to teens, parents must take ultimate responsibility for teaching children what to emulate and supplying them with appropriate models. Unfortunately, parents themselves sometimes model violence—and children may be exposed to violence within their communities as well. In addition to these two important influences, other factors thought to contribute to aggression include poor family, peer and community relationships in general and lower levels of moral and abstract reasoning and problem-solving skills. And of course, mental disorders and biological factors (including brain damage and other abnormalities) also come into play.

However, even though large numbers of teens are exposed to various combinations of any or all of the risk factors for violence, plainly they do not all become violent. The difference between those who do and those who don't seems to boil down to the degree of resilience children have at their disposal.

How can parents build the kind of resilience in their children that can help protect them from responding to others with violence? Research can be distilled to roughly five essential life skills that support resilience: skills best taught by adults with whom children have secure emotional connections.

In other words, the engaged and supportive family relationships that instill a positive identity in children are of critical importance in youth violence prevention.

Image courtesy Soa2002

Research published in the November 2009 issue of the APS journal Psychological Science may finally reconcile the long-standing debate over whether clear-view or rose-tinted glasses contribute more to happy marriages.

"For a long time, this basic question has been framed in an either-or fashion," note researchers Shanhong Luo and Anthony Snider, both of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. 

Although they add that recent research has begun to reconcile the contradictions in these ostensibly opposite approaches, Luo and Snider see their study as "the first to examine accuracy, positivity bias, and similarity bias in the same study and to show that they all make independent contributions to predicting husbands' and wives' satisfaction, and particularly to predicting perceivers' own satisfaction."

For instance, accuracy proved important when spouses gave feedback, because the individuals in the study functioned better when received feedback was consistent with self-assessments. Similarity bias proved important as well: individual function was higher when spouses overestimated how much they had in common. Positivity bias was neither destructive nor constructive at the newlywed stage, although the researchers speculated that its beneficial effects would be more likely to show up later in a marriage.

One particularly interesting finding in this study was that wives tended to score higher across most domains for all three of the perceptual indices. To the researchers, this indicated that "wives tended to be both more accurate and more biased in their perceptions of their spouses than husbands were."

Photo courtesy Sam at Photos8.com

"Contrary to popular conceptions of what it means for a 5-year-old to be ready for kindergarten," says New America Foundation blogger Lisa Guernsey, "most kindergarten teachers are not wishing for rooms full of children who can already identify the letters of the alphabet. What they want instead are children who have learned how to regulate their impulses, follow through on a difficult task and have the self-control to listen to the teacher's directions for a few minutes."

How are skills like self-regulation and self-control learned? 

"Research on the importance of building self-regulation skills in young children has been accumulating over the past few years, and some of it is starting to zoom in on the significance of playtime, particularly pretend play scenarios that are child-led but feature teacher input," notes Guernsey.

Just for a moment, however, let's assume parents are as important as teachers in building these necessary skills in children. Could parental input guide the play of children at home, from birth until school age (and beyond)?

A radical idea, perhaps. But it may be just crazy enough to work . . .

In a new four-part documentary titled Divorced Kid, Minnesota Public Radio's Sasha Aslanian reports on lessons learned from the divorce boom of the 1970s. A child of divorce herself, Aslanian admits that she felt as though "the sky was falling" during her parents' breakup. Nevertheless, she once bristled at hints that she came from a "broken home," and undertook her massive research project five years ago in order to prove once and for all that "divorced kids" aren't "all messed up." What she says she found instead was, "how deep this stuff cuts. The past stays with us as a cautionary tale."

While noting that some pop psychologists in the 70s believed that "staying together" for the sake of the kids was more harmful than walking away from an unsatisfying marriage, Aslanian counters, "We know more now."

Following is a brief excerpt from her in-depth coverage. However, it's well worth taking the time to visit the MPR News Web site to read more:

Nick Wolfinger is a demographer from the University of Utah who pores over giant data sets from the National Survey of Families and Households, tracking children of divorce.

"The bad news is that you really are much more likely to get divorced as an adult if your parents divorced, and parental divorce really does affect almost every aspect of your behavior in your own relationships," said Wolfinger.

Wolfinger's academic book has the ominous title: Understanding the Divorce Cycle: The Children of Divorce in their Own Marriages. It's like reading a mathematical proof that you're doomed.

"This is why I'm so much fun at weddings," Wolfinger quipped.

When people ask what the bride and groom's chances are, Wolfinger said he cherrypicks the most optimistic data for the happy couple. He does have some advice for the rest of us.

"If you want to stay married, marry someone just like you. Except if you're from a divorced family, marry someone from an intact family," said Wolfinger.

That's because Wolfinger found when either the husband or wife was a child of divorce, those marriages were almost twice as likely to dissolve as marriages where neither spouse came from a divorced family.

Marriages between two spouses from divorced families were more than three times as likely to fail. Wolfinger finds children of divorce are more likely to cut and run.

"If you experience relationships as transitory while growing up, that's what you'll do as an adult," he said.

Wolfinger finds children of divorce are about 50 percent more likely to end their own marriages. He breaks down the risk factors that many children of divorce bring into their marriages—marrying young, not finishing their education, living together first.

The age the child experiences divorce also matters. Wolfinger gives an example of a 4-year-old whose parents divorce.

"Most people remarry, so a couple years later that kid is going to pick up a stepparent," said Wolfinger. "And as you probably know, second marriages have even higher rates of divorce than first marriages, so that kid may experience a second divorce."

By contrast, if a 17-year-old's parents divorce, chances are by the time there's a remarriage, the child is out of the house.

"The age the child initially experiences divorce simply determines exposure to additional family structure transitions," Wolfinger concluded.

But Divorced Kid offers more than simple statistics: it's the personal stories that make the greatest impact. Aslanian's full documentary can be downloaded from the MPR News site.

Image Courtesy Stuart Pilbrow

A common theme of this blog is that much of who we are and what we do can be traced back to the quality of our family relationships. Positive, supportive family relationships contribute to our well-being in countless ways—while negative, abusive ones can be deadly.

Most parents would love to give their children the best possible environment in which to develop physically and emotionally: they understand that it's not only the immediate well-being of children that is at stake, but their future well-being—and that of the wider community as well.

But however ardently parents may hope to ensure that positive environment, it isn't always easy for them to do so. In Western society it is increasingly necessary for families to have two wage earners, and school, extracurricular activities and other obligations also encroach. Could there be an effect on family interaction as a result? If so, how? This was essentially the question explored by Rena Repetti and her colleagues at the University of California, Los Angeles, in a peer reviewed study published in the April 2009 issue of Current Directions in Psychological Science. 

"The family is popularly imagined as a stable haven, a place where individuals come together to recuperate from the ups and downs of the outside world," wrote the researchers. "But the family has ups and downs of its own; it is a dynamic system, not impermeable to outside influences but porous and continually in flux. For example, parents' job schedules and children's homework shape family time, activities, and routines. Other effects of work and school on the family are less overt." 

Certainly, as the researchers explain, we may continue to react to a particular stressor long after the event has occurred. As a result, we may continue to nurse our wounds after returning home. How does the fallout affect our family relationships?

"We have found that, following more stressful days at work, spouses and parents adjust their social behavior at home in two ways. One common pattern is an overall reduction in social engagement and expression of emotion," says the report. In a series of studies, Repetti and her colleagues found that mothers as well as fathers withdrew emotionally and disengaged socially from their children after stressful or exceptionally demanding work days, and spouses "were more distracted and less responsive" toward one another. Children also showed lingering reactions to school stress. Both elementary-school-age children and teens initiated more conflict with other family members after a day characterized by problems in academics or with peers.

"A second short-term response to job stress resembles the stereotypic image of an agitated employee kicking his dog after an argument with his boss," write the researchers. This plays out as "an increase in irritability and displays of anger with both spouse and children."  Ripetti and her colleagues note that this second pattern usually occurs in a particular subset of people: particularly those with a history of psychological distress.

How harmful is all this take-home stress in the long run? It depends. If the short-term effects are allowed to build up over time, there may be more lasting effects. Especially within families with high levels of conflict, or where one or more family members have a history of depression and anxiety.

We do know from other studies explored in this blog that family support and parental engagement are crucial to the well-being of children, so if our coping style in reaction to stress at work involves withdrawing from our families at home, it can't be good over the long haul. As difficult as it may be to push ourselves out of our comfort zone, resilience experts suggest that connecting rather than withdrawing is our best bet for handling stress. Rapetti's research is fascinating and important in several respects: but perhaps the most important thing parents can take home from this study is a new awareness of what they may be bringing home to their children at the end of their work day.