Part 20 – At Risk Parents, At Risk Children
Latest update: March 5th, 2012
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When parents come to talk to me about a troubled child or teenager, I often find it helpful to explore whether or not their marriage is causing at-risk issues in their home.
It’s no coincidence that difficult marriages create difficult children. Children and teenagers want their parents to be happy, and they want their parents to be together. When things are going wrong in the parents’ relationship, children are often the first to sense that Mommy and Daddy are not getting along. Even if parents say that they are only arguing behind closed doors, children can still sense that something may not be right.
How parents learn to manage disagreements between themselves can make a difference in their teenagers’ lives. Unresolved conflict has a tremendous negative impact. It directly affects the two parents involved, as they continue with their day-to-day routine. And when parents become preoccupied with their own marital discord, teenagers can feel rejected, depressed, and isolated.
Marital conflict affects teenagers in various ways. First, conflict between the parents tends to both change the mood of household interactions and shifts the parents’ attention to the negative behaviors of their children. Second, parental conflict leads to parents issuing confusing and threatening commands to their children. Third, children who are exposed to harsh discipline practices at home (which tend to coincide with a negative and hostile relationship between the parents) are more at risk for aggression, internalizing by withdrawing, and depressive symptoms.
In addition, I have found that when teenagers are exposed to high levels of conflict between their parents, they don’t get used to it. They become more sensitive and reactive to it, which causes many of the symptoms of at-risk behavior. Even moderate amounts of parental conflict can wreak havoc on the lives of children, disrupting their sleep and causing negative feelings in their day-to-day lives.
In many instances, parents are unaware that they might be using their children to channel the anger they feel toward their spouse. This phenomenon, called “triangling,” is a very dangerous pattern of behavior that can have serious implications for children and teenagers.
Here is how triangling works. Suppose a wife is angry with her husband for not being affectionate toward her. If she is unable to express her feelings to her husband in a direct way, she may unwittingly begin to use her children to communicate to her husband her feelings of displeasure and anger. For example, she may turn to her daughter in front of her husband and say, “Oh, Daddy seems very tense today and I guess he has no time for the family.” In this case, the parent is unable to negotiate her own needs and inappropriately begins to involve her child in a private marital issue.
The child who is caught in a triangle like this has become an inappropriate conduit for the expression of the mother’s anger towards her husband. When this happens, children can develop feelings of disillusionment, fear, insecurity, and vulnerability. They also may feel that they have to take sides because they can’t manage the internal tension and the anxiety by themselves. In these cases, they may see one parent as mostly bad and the other parent as mostly good. This is damaging to children because it reinforces an attitude by which they view the world in a “black and white,” or an “all or nothing” way, rather than with a more balanced view of good and bad in most people.
Here are some of the signs that you are engaged in triangling:
Do you want your child to talk to or do something to your spouse? Do you talk about your spouse to your child only in terms of the other’s negative qualities? Do you or your wife blame your children for your problems? Do your children tell you that they feel anxious around your spouse? Do you think your child can bring peace between members of your family?
Parental conflict affects children in varying ways, depending on their age. For example, teenagers around the age of 15 or 16 are most likely to involve themselves in their parents’ battles. Younger children may keep their feelings hidden and may only show signs of depression in late childhood or early adolescence. Other children may adapt to parental fighting by becoming “too good.” To stop the fighting, they try to become perfect children. These model children try to do everything right while walking on eggshells, fearing their family will collapse if they make a mistake.
Unfortunately, more and more children seem to be growing up in families with marital conflict: “…the number of divorced Americans rose from 4.3 million in 1970 to 18.3 million in 1996, and the trend is so well established that, 40 percent of all children born in the 1970s and 1980s — today’s teenagers and young adults — have experienced the breakup of their family through divorce.”* To this large number, add all the children whose parents are unhappy with each other but who don’t divorce. It’s not hard to see that a substantial segment of the population grows up in very unhappy homes.
Here are some effects that divorce may have on children and teenagers:
Children whose parents have divorced are increasingly the victims of abuse and neglect. They exhibit more health problems, as well as behavioral and emotional problems, are involved more frequently in crime and drug abuse, and have higher rates of suicide.
Children of divorced parents more frequently demonstrate a diminished learning capacity, performing more poorly than their peers from intact two-parent families in reading, spelling, and math. They also are more likely to repeat a grade and to have higher dropout rates and lower rates of college graduation.
Divorce generally reduces the income of the child’s primary household. For families that were not poor before the divorce, the drop in income can be as much as 50 percent. Moreover, decline in income is intergenerational, since children whose parents divorce are likely to earn less as adults than children raised in intact families.
Religious worship, which has been linked to health and happiness as well as longer marriages and better family life, is less prevalent in divorced families.
Parents usually experience a lot of pain when divorced, and the most common ways of handling that pain are either to withdraw from their children or to become overprotective. Children are sensitive to their parents’ feelings and have many ways of dealing with this problem, either internally or externally. Children may respond with depression or guilt, believing that somehow the pain is entirely their fault. Most children have a never-ending hope that their parents will reconcile, even after one or both parents have remarried. Therefore, a sense of abandonment by one or both parents is very common for such children and may contribute to at-risk behavior during adolescence.
Relationship Quiz
Assessing your Marriage
Parents of a teenager at risk need to ask themselves some very pointed questions to evaluate the quality of their marriage. Here are some questions:
Are you sensitive to your spouse’s needs? Do you argue in a fair manner? Do you resolve conflicts easily? When you talk to each other, do you feel you have been heard? If not, why not? Are you content with your emotional, social and physical intimacy? Do you have fun together? Do you joke about the bad times you may be having in a friendly way? Are you forgiving with each other? How do you handle the division of household responsibilities?
Spend a few minutes with your spouse, taking this quiz and evaluating how you are doing in your marriage. The first step you must take is acknowledging and accepting any trouble in your relationship. It is common for people to brush off an issue, expecting it will take care of itself and eventually go away. Nobody wants marital problems, but if you ignore them, you will only be giving them room to grow. Talk to your spouse about problems and work together for a solution with which you both agree and feel comfortable.
*Arlene F. Saluter and Terry A. Lugaila, “Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1996,” Population Division, U.S. Bureau of the Census, no. P20 496, March 1998, www.census.gov/prod/3/98pubs/p20-496.pdf.
Next week, Part 21, When to seek advice for marital issues
Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch, MA, is the Executive Director of Shalom Task Force and author of a “First Aid for Jewish Marriages.” To order a copy, visit www.JewishMarriageSupport.com. For more information about Shalom Task Force, please visit www.shalomtaskforce.org. You can e-mail questions to him at rabbischonbuch@yahoo.com.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Rabbi Daniel Schonbuch, MA, is an expert in marriage, pre-marriage education, and working with teenagers at risk. He is the executive director of Shalom Task Force and maintains a private practice in Brooklyn. For an appointment or to watch his free video series on marriage and parenting, visit www.JewishMarriageSupport.com call 646-428-4723 or email: rabbischonbuch@yahoo.com. For more information visit www.shalomtaskforce.org or call the hotline at 1-888-883-2323.
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