The Switchboard

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in January 2006.

My good friend Charlice Gillespie often recounted wonderful tales of growing up in the small town of Inverness in the 1920's. One of her stories had to do with the local telephone switchboard operator. To make a phone call back then, everyone had to go through the switchboard operator, who as you can guess possessed a wealth of information. Charlice says that the operator would often inform people of each other’s whereabouts. She recounts attempting to call her friend and the operator informed her the friend had gone to lunch and she would need to call back later. Another time she tried to call home from college at night, and the operator told her that it was too late to be calling her parents because they might be asleep and to call back in the morning.

Obviously, we don’t have or need switchboards of that kind today in our world of cell phones with instant and direct communication. In fact, a young person might not even know what one is. The closest semblance might be automated voice mail. Telephone switchboards with human operators are a thing of the past. But families often have a semblance of the old telephone switchboard operating in their relationships. By this I mean that one member of the family, usually a mother or a grandmother, acts as the switchboard operator. This person receives all the information and then distributes it to other family members, including spouse, children, or extended relatives. This can be a great position for the person who operates the switchboard, for she is “in the know” and gets to relate to all the members. But it can be detrimental to other relationships in the family – the reason being that they do not have their own relationship with each person.

While it is natural for a mother or grandmother to be the switchboard operator in their families, for women by nature are keepers of relationships, I would encourage these carriers of information to widen their circle. The reason is that it promotes healthier families for each member to have their own access to other members. This does not take away from the person at the switchboard having full, rich relationships with anyone. I encourage that. But it allows for more security and connection for all members. Then if the switchboard operator is not there one day, the family won’t drift apart, as some do, nor will they have to struggle so hard to re-negotiate their relationships.

When I discovered this principle, I found myself operating the switchboard in my family, as my mother before me had done. I recall my mother relaying to me what my dad thought or said. Looking back I wish I had known him more intimately myself. I then began to encourage my family members to establish their own connections with each other. My husband now phones our grown children and initiates outings with them. Sometimes the children call me and sometimes they call him. My children each stay in contact with each other. I don’t always get all the information, but I have the assurance that they all care for each other and would be all right should something happen to me. I encourage you to promote these healthy connections in your family as well. Do so by making the position of the switchboard operator obsolete in your family just as it is in today’s world.

What Is Your Parenting Style?

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in March 2005.

There are basically three types of parenting styles – permissive, authoritarian, and authoritative. Depending on which one a parent may practice may have a significant outcome on their child’s character development. As I will explain, the permissive parent and the authoritarian parent both get out of balance – the permissive parent in love and the authoritarian parent in rules, whereas the authoritative parent strikes the right balance between the two.

Permissiveness is a style of parenting which does not impose age appropriate limits on a child’s behavior. It is usually rooted in the parent’s inability to tolerate their child’s anger or unhappiness. One root of the problem is the parent’s need for a child’s closeness or affection to meet their own unmet needs. The child is unwittingly used to bring warmth and love to the parent. This is the reverse of what parenting should be: the parent should give love and affection to the child with no return expectations. Making the child responsible for the parent’s happiness is a huge responsibility. The child will do it because children come into this world hungry for relationship.

Another underlying reason for permissiveness is the parent’s over-identification with the child’s pain, fear or loneliness because they confuse their own painful feelings with their child’s. For example, a mother who was abandoned emotionally as a child might interpret her child’s protest at leaving on a date night with her husband as abandoning her child. The difference is – her child has not been abandoned but is doing what children are supposed to do – protest if they don’t like something. Regardless of the source of the problem, the permissive parent has trouble saying no to their child’s protests or steps in to rescue them from suffering. These parents think love means rotating their lives around their children. Like helicopters, they hover over their children and rescue them whenever trouble arises. While these parents think they are easing their children’s paths to adulthood, these children are usually unequipped for life.

The other unbalanced style of parenting is authoritarianism. These parents are like drill sergeants. They also love their children and are determined to show it by disciplining them. Their words are filled with anger, put downs, commands, and I-told-you-so’s. “If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times!” or “Shut up and go to your room!” they may bark. The underlying message they send their kids is that they’re dumb and cannot think for themselves. When small children rebel, drill sergeant parents can quash a rebellion with a stern order or punishment. But when adolescents rebel, parental orders become unenforceable. Anytime a parent explodes in anger when a child does something wrong (e.g, loses book, makes a bad grade), the child learns their behavior makes an adult mad. The child gets angry in return, rather than learning from the experience. These children do not learn to think and are as dependent on their parents as the helicopter kids.

The preferred style of parenting – the authoritative style – strikes the right balance by giving the child the understanding he or she needs while at the same time enforcing the limit. This type of parent can tolerate their child’s protests without reacting emotionally themselves. They stay calm and contain their child’s protests by offering empathy. Empathy is the ability to “feel with” or identify their child’s emotions, validating that it is all right their child expresses anger or fear or pain. Yet the parent stays calm, sets the limit and offers a choice to the child. This is the right kind of love because it fills up a child inside and meets their relational needs. Yet it also teaches their child about reality. For example, a parent may say to a toddler who tries to hit them with a ball, “People are not for hitting. You may hit the tree, or I will play catch with you.” The emotions are removed while the child is forced to think. Or a parent might say to a teen who fails a test, “I’m so sorry. I hate it when I do badly myself. What are you going to do about it?” This again forces the child to think and solve his own problem.

The authoritative parent stays calm but firm. The child learns to grieve their loss and move on. They learn the valuable lesson they cannot make reality change, but at the same time they are satisfied with their parent’s loving understanding. This style of parenting teaches toleration of frustration and is a valuable way to instill character in a child.

How Close is Too Close?

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in December 2004.

You may be wondering to what type of closeness I am referring. Specifically, it is closeness in relationships, especially in families. In other words, can you possibly love someone too much? I say you can. I would like to explain this because it is one of the main problems that I see in families who present for counseling. Often the parents bring a child or teenager who is having trouble fitting in at school or is unhappy. Of course, there are other reasons for these symptoms, such as trauma or abuse or illness. But generally, if these problems are not present, I begin to suspect what is called enmeshment – a therapeutic term for “too close” relationships.

The problem of enmeshment is difficult to explain because a parent is usually defensive of their close relationship with their child. And enmeshed systems appear so great because they offer a heightened sense of mutual support. Parents are loving and considerate. They spend a lot of time with their children and do a lot for them. However, children enmeshed with their parents can become dependent. The children become less comfortable by themselves and may have trouble relating to people outside the family. A test often comes when the child attempts to leave home to go to college and cannot adjust well. The opposite of enmeshment is disengagement, in which families are too independent and are not available to each other for warmth, affection and nurture. These families foster independent children but the children often lack the support and guidance they need. As you can perhaps guess, the balance lies somewhere between these two scenarios.

In enmeshed families, boundaries are diffuse and family members overreact and become intrusively involved with one another. The emotional world of one person becomes tied to the emotional world of the other. That is, your child’s bad day becomes your bad day, rather than your empathizing with your child about their feelings and helping them deal with them. Or worse, your child feels responsible for your feelings and for making you happy.

Enmeshed parents create difficulties by hindering the development of more mature forms of behavior in their children and by interfering with their abilities to solve their own problems. An example would be a father who jumps in to settle minor arguments between his two sons so the children won’t learn to fight their own battles. And a frequently encountered problem in the middle class family is the enmeshed mother/disengaged father, in which a mother’s closeness to her children substitutes for closeness in the marriage.

Ideally when children enter the family, the spouse subsystem should have a boundary that separates it from the children. A clear boundary enables the children to interact with their parents but excludes them from some activities. Parents and children can eat together, play together, and share much of each others’ lives. But the more that husband and wife are sustained as a loving couple, they are enhanced as parents. They need some time alone to talk, to go to dinner together, to fight, and to make love. Unhappily the demands of small children make it hard for parents to maintain a boundary around their relationship. And unfortunately, in our child-centered culture, the boundary separating parents and children is often extremely diffuse.

I encourage you to examine the nature of your family’s relationships. In a two-parent family, examine if there is time to cultivate the marriage as well as spend time with the children. In a divorced family, parents need to be extremely careful they do not depend on the children to meet their emotional needs. Watch for signs in your children of their not getting along with their peers or becoming depressed. Be aware that if you offer too much attention to your children that you may not be allowing them the room they need to become independent, even though this seems to be such a loving to do.

Navigating the Family Cycle

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in October 2004.

The family life cycle has been categorized by family therapists as the normative stages through which most families pass. These stages bring inevitable changes which often involve grief and loss. Yet how well a family navigates through these sometimes stormy waters of life may be a sign of their flexibility. And usually, given time and the family’s resources and coping skills, the changes are accommodated with new adaptive growth responses. In fact, the ability to change is a sign of good mental health.

It is good to be aware, however, that families are their most vulnerable during the transition times. Some of the normative stages of family development with their tasks and vulnerabilities include the following:

1. Between families: the unattached young adult. Young adults must differentiate from their family of origin, establish their own personal system of values and beliefs, develop intimate peer relationships, and choose and establish a career. If they remain overly dependent on their parents, they may have difficulty with this stage.

2. The joining of families through marriage: the new couple. The newly married couple must form a marital unit and realign with their families of origin. This process tends to result in difficulties and differences being ignored, usually due to the covering over by romantic feelings, only to resurface later. Also, couples may marry in order to escape problems in their original families, only to bring them to the new system.

3. The family with young children. The family who has children, by choice or not, must make space for the children and take on new responsible parental roles, often in already busy lives. As the social lives of children expand, the family must be prepared for contact with other families.

4. The family with adolescents. This stage usually brings a jolt to families who like the sometimes comfortable and more carefree prior stage. Parents must permit the adolescent to move in and out of the family system and must allow more freedom along with increasing responsibility. This stage and the next require the couple to reinvest in one another and may be a time of increased vulnerability to extramarital affairs and divorce.

5. Launching children and moving on. The marital couple must renegotiate their relationship and develop an adult-to-adult relationship with their children. This is a time of rapidly changing roles, as children may marry and themselves become parents. Also, there may be a accumulation of unresolved issues from the previous stages that now may lead to divorce, a sense of overwhelming loss (empty nest syndrome) and general disintegration of health. Some families embrace their new freedoms and opportunities. Others experience only transient disruptions. And a few develop symptoms in an unconscious effort to cling to the last child. This phase is also a time in which many couples must deal with aging or dying grandparents and parents.

6. The family in later life. This is the stage in which couples provide support for the middle generation; face retirement; deal with the loss of spouse, siblings, and peers; and prepare for their own deaths.

The above stages are classified as normative events. Paranormative events are those which occur frequently but not universally, to which families must also adapt and change. Examples include miscarriage, infertility, marital separation, divorce, illness, disability, relocation of households, and changes in socioeconomic status. When these events occur close together, a family can experience what is called “cluster stress” and be especially vulnerable. I encourage people to assess where they are in their life cycle as well as any paranormative events that are adding stress in order to be prepared and to seek outside help if they feel overwhelmed. Remember, the stormy waters of transition are inevitable but you can choose whether you take the course of growth or that of dysfunction.

Redefining Love

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in December 2003.

I have talked a lot in recent articles about the importance of love in both marriages and parent-child relationships. In this article I want to explore more what I mean by love and possibly redefine what it means to many people. Many of the pre-conceived notions and personal opinions that people have about love are erroneous and are instead just a guise for selfishness and manipulation.

First of all, if you feel loved, you know it! Just because someone says they love you or even does sacrificial things for you, that does not necessarily come across to you as love. In fact, an indication of a possible glitch in the relationship is a sense of feeling “icky” around someone. The reason is that if you are loved the way you need to be, you feel a sense of safety and acceptance and approachability with that person.

When my daughter got married three years ago, my toast at the rehearsal dinner to the young couple was this: “As a marriage counselor there is a lot of advice I could and would like to give you, but since I will be a mother-in-law I will refrain from doing so. However, there is one thing I would like to say to you as you begin your marriage – remember that true love is not given the way you would like to receive it yourself, but true love is given the way the other person needs it.”

As I counsel married couples, I urge them to become students of each other. Find out what the other likes and become creative and sacrificial in fulfilling those preferences. This is the norm for dating relationships but somehow often gets brushed aside in marriage. Gary Chapman’s book The Five Love Languages gives some good examples of ways couples can show their love to their partners.

To parents I give similar advice – become a student of your child. Many know the Proverb “Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Often they interpret it to mean that if they instruct and discipline their child properly, then the child, even if he strays for a while, will return to the teachings of his parents. But a different translation of that verse may be to train a child “according to his way.” This implies respect for his individuality and abilities and is not about his self will. The stress is on parental opportunity and duty. Often parents bring an unruly or depressed teen to therapy. It is obvious they care about their child and have not neglected their parental responsibilities, but the child, born with an internal sensor, just does not respond to life positively and joyfully. Often the parents have regarded the child a reflection of themselves and want the child to fulfill their own unfulfilled desires and expectations. As a result, parents may inadvertently cause damage. Instead, if they would regard each child as a unique gift from God, given to them for a period of time to help shape and develop, then the child will usually be set on a good path for the rest of his or her life.

In summary, a good way of redefining love is to have a profound concern for the welfare of another without any desire to control that other or to expect something in return. This is the kind of love that just feels right.

The Family As a Social System

Note: This article was first published in Life in the Delta in September 2003.

As I begin this new column on marriages and families, my desire is not only to educate the readers on many important aspects of these, our most vital relationships, but also to help people who are hurting discover new ways to interact in order to promote healthier marriages and families. It does not take an expert to tell you that our families are in crisis today. With a 50% divorce rate for first time marriages and an 80% rate for second marriages, it’s worth struggling to set things as aright as possible wherever we find ourselves at the moment. Many have the idea that if they just get a fresh start, things will be better, only to find themselves repeating the same scenario, only under different circumstances. Plus throw in the “ex’s” and the “step’s” and relationships become more complicated than ever.

Families are what I call a social system. There are many other social systems, such as schools and churches, but the family is the most basic unit of society. Furthermore, each family is its own social system. The first thing I like to do when counseling a family is to assure them that they are not weird, or different, but instead they are unique. There are no set rules for having a great family, for there are all sorts of ways for families to organize to promote growth and well being. Therefore, I generally spend a lot of time getting to know a family or a couple before I pass judgment. All behavior, even maladaptive behavior, makes sense at one time, especially as a way to cope with extenuating circumstances. However, the behavior can become entrenched, even beyond its necessity. Part of my job is then to help people see things differently and encourage them to promote change. Often when relationships are not working, people tend to do what they’ve been doing, only do more of it! What is needed instead is to introduce change.

What I would like to share in this column are some general precepts that I believe do promote healthy families, as opposed to those that cause damage. I believe that God not only designed us to be relational beings but also gave us a blueprint, one with lots of space for liberties, for a way to live in those relationships. My favorite definition of wisdom is that given by one of my seminary professors: “Wisdom is living God’s way in God’s world.” If we do not know how to function properly in relationships, or worse, if we refuse to function properly, our greatest suffering can come from our closest relationships.

I do not particularly want to give you a how-to list, but I would like to start a conversation over the coming months delineating some general guidelines for having good relationships, as well as some warnings about things that deter them. I would like to begin with the following concept: I believe all marriages and families should provide safe, caring connections for their members. One of the purposes for homes and families is to provide a “secure base” for sending its members out into the world, and a “safe haven” from which its members can retreat. I would like to challenge you: How inviting are you to your spouse or children? Can they be assured, by your loving words and your affectionate touch, that they are accepted and safe in your presence? Or do you generally tend to be blaming and accusatory or walled off? I encourage you to become an outside observer of yourself and assess how you think you come across to your loved ones.