Parent's responsible for children?

KYLady says:

There’s never a dull moment in our house – we have twin daughters soon turning 16 years old. Fortunately, we learned a lot from raising their older sisters. I like your metaphor of walking the tightrope – that’s exactly what it’s like. Too far one way and we are tyrants, too far the other way and we’re accused of being uncaring. For sure, what works with one does not work with the other. I believe parents are responsible for their teens, but if they haven’t parented with clear expectations and firm guidelines in their childrens’ earlier years, it’s going to be a lot harder to influence them as they become more independent. Parenting teens is not easy, not even with good kids!
(end quote)



I would agree with your point that what happened in the parenting of the child effects what happens in the parenting of a teenager. Also that parenting styles with teenagers vary from one to another. This would also be true in childhood but I think it is more pronounced in adolescence.

I find your comment

I believe parents are responsible for their teens

an interesting one.

I know what you are saying but I don’t agree with it, sort of.



I don’t see myself or other parents as responsible for their teenagers. I provide a boundary for teenagers such that they are allowed to do A & B but not C & D. However I would not see myself as responsible for their actions nor their internal emotions. As I write this I am not too sure what I am saying.

I have a belief system in my head that I assume is communicated to my children that they are responsible for their behaviour and emotions and thoughts. I also know that when they are children they do not understand the world enough in order to survive or just operate successfully. That is where I come in and provide boundaries, make suggestions and make decisions for them.



I decide for them that eating a large block of chocolate all at once is a very bad idea and so I stop them but that does not make me responsible for them. All I am doing is controlling a piece of behaviour.

I retreat to my dictionary and discover that responsibility is defined as:

The state or fact of having control over someone

It appears that I am incorrect in my understanding of the term because I do have control over their eating of the chocolate. So according to this definition I am responsible for my children as KYLady originally proposed.

So what am I trying to say here?

As I think here I discover I have a belief and an expectation about my children. You are responsible for yourself and what happens to you in life. There are going to be plenty of times when I am not around and then you are responsible and even when I am around you are also still responsible for what you say and do, etc.

As I write this I am thinking, “OMG, I hope this is an OK thing!!”. I was not aware of this expectation I had of them until now.



Whilst I cannot recall myself saying such things often and openly I am sure this belief was communicated subliminally to them.

I will do all the appropriate things to control their behaviour, such as with the chocolate but at the same time there is this expectation or belief about responsibility that is communicated to them as well.

This is a little bit of a light globe turning on moment as I write this. I rarely if ever said the belief I had about responsibility to them instead it was an unstated expectation of them.

So back to KYLady’s comment about parents being responsible for their children. With the dictionary saying what it said I have to agree in one way but I disagree in another way.

Graffiti

Games children play

For the love or money


This is an associated game of Stupid and is sometimes called the game of Spoilt Child. Here love and money get mixed up. The parents believe they can express their love to a child by giving it things. They may even end up saying to the child, “Of course I love you look at all the things I have given (done) for you”.

The parent is for what ever reason unable to express feelings of love or affection to the child. (Their parents may have done the same to them, they have a “Don’t show your feelings” injunction, they may have their own closeness issues, they may equate affection feelings with sexual feelings and that scares them, they may just be self centred and have little interest in giving affection to the child because they want it themselves, and so on).



So the parents give things instead showing love or affection. A prime example can be boarding school in some instances. “I have sent my daughter to a very expensive boarding school so she gets the best education”, (and by the way it also gets her out of the way so I can go and do all my things).

In this game, over time the child’s bedroom begins to start looking like a shop of “Toys-r-us”. The child gets a never ending series of toys and things with which it can play or be entertained by. Computers, computer games, bikes, flat screen TV, pets, DVD player, CD player, overseas holidays, swimming pool, and so on endlessly. (This is of course encouraged along the way by all the marketing which often portrays the line that if you buy this gift for your child then he/she will feel loved by you.)




The problem with this game is that it half ‘hits the spot’. And that can trick both parties’ Child ego states. They think they are being shown love when in fact they are not. All humans have a need for love. That need can only be fully met when:

It is shown to the person first hand (so not mother telling the child that father loves her)
Is face to face (so not via email or even the phone to some extent)
Has emotion involved
Has some form of physical contact.

If these conditions happen then the Free Child need of the person for love is met and satisfied. Indeed the child will feel loved by its mother or father if the love is expressed to the child in ways like this.





I sometimes hear clients say; “I know my father loved me, even though he never told me that”, or “I used to over hear my father tell others how much he loved me but he never actually told me”. Unfortunately these only half meet that Free Child need for love.

Societies will even formalise times when the Free Child need for love is meant to be met. In our country it is often birthdays, and the birthday gift is meant to be an expression of love for the other person. But the physical gift is only a symbol of that love and to the Free Child that does not mean much.

This is summed up well by Coleman & White (1988), “To clarify this point, consider the example of a parent and child playing a game of cards. We would invite such a parent to consider the following question : Are you playing cards with your child, or are you playing with your child and that just happens to be cards at the moment? Toys, games and play activities can provide an effective way of avoiding contact with a child. They can allow the parent and child to become side-tracked into the activity and avoid closeness, contact or openness with each other. Parents who provide children with expensive toys particularly need to consider how they play with their children.”(P13).




In the wall of trivia ‘things’ get in the way of the two parties actually getting close and having intimacy. The Free Child to Free Child transactions get blocked. Indeed in some marital counselling, the counselling can become a thing that gets in the way as well. It gives both parties a ‘thing’ to talk about other than themselves and their feelings for the other party.

A derivative of the game, “for the love or money” is the game of “Childhood obesity”. In this game love does not get mixed up with an expensive gift but instead love gets mixed up with food. The parent has the mistaken belief that it can express its love to a child by providing it with food and the child begins to take this on and when it feels full it feels loved. So it is provided with lots of food and it eats the food in its desire to feel loved. Again this only half “hits the spot”. For a brief while the Free Child need for love is met when it eats but it does not last because the need is not really getting met in the way I described above. (Note there are many other reasons as well for the over weight child).



The other derivative of the game, “for the love or money” is the game of “Higher, faster, longer”. In this instance love gets mixed up with achievement in the child’s mind. “If I can jump higher, swim faster or run longer then mum will love me”. “If I can win the gold medal then dad will finally notice me” The child believes that if it can achieve success in sport, business, education and so on then the parental love that it craves will finally be given. I would suggest that many high achievers are of this ilk. Again, it works for a little while, and the parents may in fact provide the contact with the child when it does achieve. The problem is there is always another race, there is always more that could be achieved. So the child never gets to the end and often high achievers are left with a hollow feeling as they look at their trophy cabinet, investment portfolio or degrees hanging on the wall.

Graffiti

The therapeutic relationship with the teenage client

Sometimes when you run a workshop you end up leaving with more questions than answers. This happened to me recently at a workshop on “Counselling with teenagers” in Belgrade. Here is a picture of me with the group.

Sometimes I get a question or group discussion where I don’t have a response and it sparks some more thinking and research on the topic for me.

At one point in this workshop I was asked about my approach to the counselling of teenagers and did I come from a parent position. That is do I see my self in a parent type role with the teenager. This did not mean necessarily in a Critical Parent type of role but overall do I feel like a parent type person when working with the teenager.

As I thought about the answer I found this question perplexed me. I obviously had not thought about the topic in detail before. My initial response to the question was yes and no. Which obviously is not a clear answer because I did not have a clear answer. As I thought about it at the time the ‘yes & no’ answer was right for me but I did not answer the question to my satisfaction (or the participants I would imagine).

How do I relate to the younger client?

As the discussion continued someone then said that as I did not see myself in a clear parent position then did I relate to the teenagers in a sort of peer role. Like a friend to the teenager. My answer to this was with a more definite, “No”.

Then it was stated that if I did not come from a parent type role or a friend type role what was my role? My answer to this was, I don’t know.

Travelling to Serbia and Croatia from Australia means I am on the road for about 24 hours (well more in the air than the road). I find this very useful time in that I can do precisely what I did in this instance. On the trip back I basically sought to answer the question that was asked and could not answer for the group.

The time allowed me to make many notes and formulate my thinking on the question of the therapeutic relationship with the teenage client. I now have a much fuller answer to the question should I ever be asked it again.

I understand now why I was perplexed with the question and did not have a clear answer. After much deliberation on the subject my answer involves articulating a complex set of relationships which I will do in the near future.

It seems I got something out of the workshop as well!

Graffiti

Should children go to funerals?

Over the years I have been asked this from time to time and it has always struck me as an odd question. My answer has always been, “Why the heck not”. Of course the parents of such a child are fearful that being at a funeral might somehow psychologically damage the child. That wont happen given that other circumstances are OK.

Obviously a child can only go to a funeral if the cultural rituals allow for it. I would also recommend that a child not go if there was the potential for some major calamity or highly emotional event. If someone was going to angrily attack another person there or if someone was going to throw them self in the grave and start tearing at their skin whilst screaming. Baring such unusual events I would recommend that they do go as the child could psychologically benefit from it.

There probably is one other thing to keep in mind. When a child and a parent are placed into a sudden unpredictable high stress event such as a car accident or a bomb goes off near by the first thing a child will do is to look at the parent and try and read them. As the event is highly unusual the child will not know how to react so they will look to the parent for ‘guidance’ in this way. Does mother get angry, collapse in shock, get calm and problem solving and so forth? The child will take the cues from how mother reacts and then react in its own way which most often (but not always) will be similar to mother’s reaction or some derivative of it depending on its own natural temperament. Either way it will be heavily influenced by mother’s emotional reaction to this unpredictable event.

If at a funeral mother is really, really going to loose it emotionally then it might be a good idea to have someone else looking after the child whilst there. There is nothing wrong, in fact it is psychologically good for a child to see mother cry at a funeral and even sob at a funeral if someone is nearby reassuring the child that mummy is OK. Which of course mummy is. Mummy will start sobbing and then mummy will stop sobbing and then life goes on. There is no way a child will be psychologically damaged by viewing such an event.

When my two sons were about 4 and 6 years old their grandfather (my father) died from an illness. At the chapel we had a viewing of him in his coffin and I took my children up to him and we said a few words and each touched him in turn. I never have understood what’s the big deal. People live and people die. When people die you say your goodbyes, you take time to grieve and life goes on.

In the previous post on preverbal thinking about death I talked with Kahless about different ways of knowing things in your Adult and Child ego states. This diagram sums it up. When a loved one dies we will know in our Adult ego state that the person is dead. We have an intellectual understanding of it.

This is quite different from the Child ego state feeling, knowing and believing the person is deceased. We all have a 4 year old inside us who will be there until the day we die. So we all have the ability to think and feel quite irrational things like a 4 year old can. Accepting that a loved is deceased can be one of those occasions where the Child in us will think in a prelogical way and not accept the death in some way.

Funerals in this way can be very helpful. If the cultural rituals allow it I always suggest that there be a viewing of the body where the bereaved go and stand close to the body and touch it. The touching part in particular will let the 4 year old inside of us get some comprehension that the person is dead and gone. Often this can be quite powerful psychologically. And of course there is no reason why children cannot do the same.

Graffiti

Prelogical thinking about death

I had a client say something today that was just very clear. You don’t tend to get such clear statements of this. She was reciting a situation when she was seven years old. She lived in a house with her parents and siblings and her aunt also lived there. Her aunt had an accident and died suddenly. She stated (This is pretty much as she said it):

“My aunt died and my parents did not want to tell me. I over heard them talking and they said that they were going to tell me that she had gone away to the country. But this was not a shock to me because I thought that dead people could come back”.

Not only did the parents little scam of not telling the child the truth not work as they were overheard, but the child would not have been distressed anyway because of her undeveloped understanding of the concept of death due to her age.

The truth?

It is sometimes noted that about the age of 8 years a child can get what is sometimes called “8-year anxiety” where they develop a pronounced fear of death. As Piaget has shown prior to age 8 the child is egocentric with magical thinking that involves prelogical thought. As a result of this children under 8 often think that death is reversible or that the dead can still see, hear and feel. At about age 8 the child’s thinking matures enough to allow it to understand that death is not reversible and thus it can hit that stage of “8-year anxiety” when it realises what is going to happen one day when it dies and when mummy and daddy die. In essence the child has an ‘existential crisis’ and has to come to terms with its own mortality for the first time at the tender age of 8 years which must be fairly hard for the little ones to do.

This woman’s statement was just so clear of this psychological phenomena that I noted it down and it does highlight one of the possible causes of childhood and adolescent suicide. The person at the point of making the suicidal act does not truly comprehend the consequences of what they are doing. In fact what they believe is going to happen maybe quite a distortion of the truth, such that death is reversible.

This is one of the four particular suicidal groups and I have called it the naive suicide group. Of course all adults also have a Child ego state. That is there is a four or five year old in all of us that remains until the day we die. For some people it can be quite pronounced and thus as an adult they can actually feel, behave and think in quite a child like manner. Thus part of them can believe at the age of 30 that death is reversible because they have a strong immature part where the Child ego state is quite influential. Such a person’s Adult ego state would know the facts about death but they also have a child feeling or understanding about it as well that is contradictory to the Adult facts.

Teenagers are in that twilight zone between

strong adult thinking and child like prelogical thinking.

At times they will oscillate between the two.

This phenomena is also particularly evident for some suicidal teenagers which makes suicide risk prediction particularly difficult for this group. The teenager may not show many of the usual indicators of suicide risk, especially the presence of the suicidal decision, the “Don’t exist” injunction, but still be at quite a high risk because of the reason I am just discussing as was highlighted by the woman’s comment. In suicide risk assessment I always feel much less sure when working with a teenager than working with an adult.

Graffiti

Group therapy with children

In the previous post I mentioned how I originally trained in group therapy with children. Historically play therapy rooms have been set up with a whole array of apparatus that allows a child to express itself. For instance there can be drawing equipment, a sand tray, clay, paint, water play area and so forth.

The theory behind this is that the child through the use of such expressive opportunities will begin to display their internal conflicts or emotional distress. For instance with drawing the child can draw conflicts in the family or between its own internal ego states. This allows for the therapist to begin to understand what the child’s internal conflict and emotional state is like.

Some then hypothesise that as the child displays its angst through play that will allow it to express them and thus they will reduce. This is typical of the theory behind art therapy and some psychoanalytic perspectives. Alternatively those who follow more of the Carl Rogers approach see play as a means by which the child can express itself in the presence of a therapist. That therapist provides an environment that is safe, empathetic and unconditionally accepting of the child. It is the theorised that the child in such an environment will naturally begin to grow and develop towards health.

The woman whom I did my first two years of play therapy group training with was quite psychoanalytic in her perspective. The psychoanalytic, art therapy and Rogerian perspectives described above to me certainly hold merit. When running play therapy groups I use those approaches.

After I finished my training in play therapy I went out on my own and ran groups. Over time I noticed that they changed from the style of my original training. As I worked with children I found myself moving onto other techniques that seemed to have a result. This was not a cognitive process on my behalf but more of an intuitive process that just evolved over time

Three techniques that developed over time.

1. The approaches described above one could call quite passive approaches. The child is simply left to its own devices and would proceed and progress at its own pace with little direction from the therapist. That is indeed why Rogerian therapy is sometimes called non-directive therapy. Over time I found myself becoming more action oriented with the children which more suited my personality as a therapist. Instead of just letting a child express itself through drawing or clay I would be much more interactive in my questioning and comments with the child as he played. Asking what this and that was, requesting that they draw word bubbles for the people they were drawing, asking them to write what the various parts or people were thinking and feeling. Getting them to include pets and various other people and objects in the drawings or plasticine.

This allowed for more diagnosis and also I was getting the child to identify its internal conflicts and to basically do two chair. Offering them the opportunity to expressed the unexpressed feeling or thought or need.

2. Whilst the techniques being employed tended to be more action oriented so was the relational. The therapeutic relationship between the child and myself moved away from the passive “blank screen” therapist that one would find in the psychoanalytic and Rogerian approaches. When a child made some kind response to me directly I would seize upon it and use it to some therapeutic advantage.

For instance if an anxious child with a high Conforming Child ego state said or did something a bit rebellious to me I might highlight it and request that she do it again or some other derivative of it to me directly. Alternatively if there was another child in the group who expressed some defiance of me I might ask the conforming child to see if she could say the same thing to me. Once done she gets to experience the new behaviour and sees that my response back to her is not catastrophic or demeaning and so forth.

The relational contact between the child and the therapist became very interactive and goal oriented with myself manipulating it in various ways for various means. Over time this became a point of significant departure from how I was originally trained.

Again this was not a conscious goal of mine but it just evolved over time. As I became more adept and confident in working with children in the group therapy setting I think I just allowed my own natural personality to come out in that forum. This is certainly what I say to trainee therapists. Initially you begin as a technique based therapist. What you do with the client is based on what techniques you have learnt in your training. As one gets more confident then you the therapist as a person enters into your therapeutic style. One transforms from being a therapist named ‘Tony’ to being “Tony’ who happens to be a therapist. Hence the client will experience you as a person who also happens to be a therapist rather than the other way around.

3. Finally there was the development of romp play. By far the most common approach in play therapy with children is as I described before. A low key, meditative, self explorative type of approach. Over time I developed this thing called romp play which is a far more cathartic approach. It is high energy, boisterous, jumping, rough and tumble, very interactional type of play. From what I have seen of the literature this is quite unusual. Whilst some other approaches do have some cathartic methods they are nothing like the romp play described here.

Originally it evolved as a method for children to develop their own internal Parent ego state controls. It is structured such that the group proceeds with - romp play on, romp play off, romp play on, romp play off and so forth.

Romp play is high energy Free Child behaviour. Whilst that is all good and well the problem with high Free Child is people can end up getting hurt physically and emotionally. Unrestrained Free Child can be dangerous. One needs to develop a Parent ego state that can control it when necessary. In the group any child could put a stop to the romp play at any time by using a prearranged word and all the romp play would stop. Those children who found it hard to stop would be stopped by the therapist. This allowed the children to begin incorporating this into their own Parent ego state. They learnt how to be Free Child and how to contain it when necessary. They were learning the internal controls to do that by their own Parent ego state.

However I think there is more to romp play than just this, although it is hard for me to articulate what that actually is. I could just recite the theory and say that the Free Child is that natural part in all of us and thus when expressed we are being our natural selves in this way. One can assume that when such expression is achieved this will be therapeutic in itself. This is probably all true but there is something that nags in the back of my mind about this. There is something more to this romp type of play for children that I feel the theory is yet to enunciate. When children have an opportunity to do a very free type of play and relating there is some kind of therapeutic effect on them that I cannot yet describe.

Graffiti