A counsellor recently told me a story about working with a refugee family. He was trying to empathize with them and to understand what it must be like to have no permanent home. One of the children piped up, ‘Oh, we’ve got a home, we’ve just got nowhere to put it yet.’
I was moved when I heard this remark. It sums up how the love and care between family members can be a safety net, which is something we all need. So, how can we take steps to ensure the relationships that make up being a family feel like a sanctuary? This is what I will be looking at in this section: how to build a family environment where your children will thrive.
You and whoever you live with is your children’s environment. A large part of how your children go on to feel about themselves and how they interact with others will form in relationship to you and the small circle around you. That’s your co-parent, if you have one, siblings, grandparents, paid help and close friends.
It is important to have awareness about how we behave in these relationships. For example, do we bring our appreciation to the people close to us or do we dump our anger on to them? These familial relationships are influential in determining how a child’s personality and mental health develop. Children are individuals, but they are part of a whole system too. As well as close family relationships, a child’s system also includes school, their own friendships and the wider culture. It makes sense to look at that system and do what you can to make it the best possible environment for you and for your child. It doesn’t have to be perfect – perfect doesn’t exist.
It’s not the structure of the family that matters, which is good news if you’re not in a nuclear family. The arrangements can be as conventional or as unconventional as you like; parents can live apart, or together, in a commune or a ménage à trois, they can be gay, straight or bisexual – it doesn’t matter. Research has shown that family structure itself has little effect on children’s cognitive or emotional development and, in fact, over 25 per cent of children are brought up in single-parent families in the UK, with around half of these single parents having been in a partnership at the time of the birth of their child, and they do no better or worse than children from a more conventional set-up, once factors such as their financial situation and parental education are taken into consideration.
The people in a child’s life comprise that child’s world. It can be one of richness and love but it can also be a battleground. It matters more than most adults think that family life does not veer too far towards the battleground end of the scale. If children are preoccupied, if they are worried about their security, their safety and how they belong, they are not free to be curious about the wider world. Not being curious impacts negatively upon how they concentrate and learn.
In one survey, teenagers and parents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: ‘Parents getting on well is one of the most important factors in raising happy children.’ Seventy per cent of teenagers agreed compared to only 33 per cent of parents.
This could be because the emotional distress children go through when their parents’ and carers’ relationships aren’t functional isn’t visible to the grown-ups. You may know how hard it is for you, as a parent, to look at your child’s pain. And, therefore, it’s really hard to look at how your own actions may have contributed to that pain.
You may feel justified in acting the way you do, or helpless at the idea of changing your behaviour. It may feel daunting or even overwhelming for you to look at how you interact with your co-parent and other close members of your family, but I hope in this part of the book I can give you some ideas on how to make improvements if you need to.
Even if you live apart from your child’s other parent, what matters is that you refer to them in respectful ways, that you can appreciate their good points and not always be emphasizing their faults. I know this may seem impossible to some people, especially after a difficult break-up. It may make it easier for you when I tell you how important it is for a child: they see themselves as belonging, attached to and part of each of you. If one half of the partnership that brought them into being is often referred to as somehow being a ‘bad’ person, that is all too often internalized by the child so that they too see themselves as a ‘bad’ person. A child can also be torn apart by the pull to be loyal to both their parents.
So what’s the best way to negotiate a split? A child fares better afterwards if the parents cooperate with each other and communicate well and if the child continues to have regular close contact with both parents. If you can manage that, your child is less likely to become depressed or aggressive. As for the child’s relationship with their non-resident parent, this also works better if there is clear, positive communication between the parents. If one parent (it is often the father, but not always) drifts away after separation, the child is more likely to suffer distress, anger, depression or low self-esteem. That’s why it’s such a worry that, in the UK, more than a quarter of children whose parents have split up have no further contact with their father three years after the event.
I understand it is not always possible to get along with an ex, as this story I’m about to share shows. Mel is mum to a six-year-old son, Noah. She had a relationship with Noah’s father, James, for five years. They often lived in different countries and didn’t see themselves as a committed couple, but they enjoyed each other’s company hugely when they did get together. Mel’s story may sound extreme, but anyone who’s had parenting disagreements with an ex may find it useful.
When Mel got pregnant, James assumed she would have an abortion. When she didn’t, he was furious and tried to sever their connection. Now, he pays minimal maintenance, and only agreed to do so after the humiliating procedure of a paternity test. He wants nothing to do with Noah.
When I have spoken to people in a similar position to James’s, they’ve told me that they like their life as it is. They feel threatened and scared by the possibility of it changing if they were to acknowledge the importance of a dependant.
And yet a child – who is not an ‘it’ but a person in your life, albeit one who is dependent on you for a couple of decades – is more than a mere catalyst for change. If you were to look at becoming a parent selfishly, a child is in fact a source of enrichment.
Also, a child does not cease to exist just because they are being ignored. Sadly, some men (and women) do distance themselves from their children. It’s as though, if they pretend they have nothing to do with them, they do not really exist. Mel instinctively knew that she must not tell Noah his father had let her down, even though she felt he had. If her son asks about him, she remembers his dad’s many good qualities and talents and tells her son about them. If, in the future, Noah’s father should ever want to re-enter his life, Mel being positive about him will help this process. As Noah gets older and asks more questions, it’s becoming harder for her. She is worried that her son, when he does know the whole story, will take his father’s desertion personally and that it might harm his self-esteem, or maybe distort how he regards his gender, or even negatively influence his own behaviour when he is an adult.
Because Mel is aware of these pitfalls, she can guide Noah around them but, even so, there can be no guarantee he won’t at some stage take the fact that his father isn’t there for him to heart. Sometimes there isn’t a prescription to make everything okay. Mel has a lot of loving and involved family and friends and feels they do go some way to filling in the gap for Noah where a father would have been.
I have told you Mel’s story because it’s not always easy to conjure up a smooth-running, cooperative relationship with an ex. And when one is lacking, all we can do is try our best not to run down the other parent to our child, or indeed to ourselves.
We want to make our child’s life pain-free and worry-free. We certainly don’t want them suffering because we were unlucky with our choice of the person we had a relationship with, or because there is conflict in our close relationships. But it’s impossible to protect them completely. No life is without angst, unsolved mystery, longing and loss.
How you can make their pain bearable is to be alongside them and with them when they feel it. You need to be present, for your child and the people close to you; open and accepting to what they show you and what they feel. You may not be able to fix their pain, but by being with it rather than denying it or pushing it away, you can keep them company through it. And this kind of attuned company makes anything more bearable. I will say more about this in the part on feelings (see p. 51).
If you are caring for your child with a co-parent, the love, goodwill, caring and respect between you will contribute to your child’s sense of security. And yet, as anyone who’s had a child knows, it puts a strain on your relationship. Spontaneity may be compromised, time alone with your partner or other people you feel close to diminished, time on your own reduced or disappear completely. Your or your partner’s relationship with sex may change, and opportunities for sex will happen less often. Sleep patterns will be disrupted and it is likely that you will have to manage on significantly less sleep; each member of a couple, or of a wider extended family, may have different parenting philosophies and the dynamics within the relationships may shift. Your work habits will change and, if you stop paid work, that may alter how you see yourself too. There will be an effect on your social life; there may be less or no contact with former colleagues; some friends may seem to recede for a while due to your preoccupation with your baby; and so on.
And this is by no means an exhaustive list. If you are in a couple, the transition from that partnership to becoming a family takes some getting used to. And just when you think you’ve got used to it, it changes again, as your child and/or your family continues to grow. These changes can also contribute to the resentment you may experience towards each other and towards your child. By the way, it’s better to admit any resentment, even if only to yourself. If you don’t, you are more likely to justify acting out of that feeling rather than taking responsibility for it.
Life is never static and being able to accept, work with and embrace change is more useful than resisting it. Thinking about how you can be flexible may be more effective than trying to regain what was lost. This doesn’t mean you won’t miss your old life sometimes. And it does mean you may need to work at surrendering to your new one and embracing it. Remember Mark on p. 19; he resented the way in which his life was turned upside down by the change from being a couple to becoming a family of three and he learned to accept that change by tracing the source of his resentment to his own upbringing and finding meaning in childcare rather than just writing it off as a boring chore. He also found that when he accepted joint and equal responsibility for his child with his partner, this freed her up to be more of her old self again, rather than being wholly preoccupied with her baby.
Most families argue – but it’s how you work through any conflict (or don’t) and how it’s resolved (or not) that matters. Differences in and of themselves do not have to damage a relationship and therefore your child’s environment. People with successful partnerships and functional families have disagreements and argue. That’s a fact. But when they do they continue to respect and appreciate each other and to have their differences acknowledged and their feelings heard.
Now let’s talk about the nuts and bolts of arguing. In any conflict, there is the context. That is what you are arguing about. Then there is how you feel about the conflict and how the other person feels about it. And then there is the process, which is how you go about solving the problem.
To tackle difference, it’s important to know how you feel about the context and to share that. The next step is to learn how the other person feels about the context and to take their feelings into consideration. If feelings are left out of it, both sides can get more and more heated as they play what I call ‘fact tennis’, lobbing reasons over the net to each other, finding more and more to hit the other person with. In this style of arguing, the aim of the conflict becomes to win points rather than find a workable solution. Finding out about differences and working through them is about understanding and compromise, not about winning.
Let’s take a typical family argument, about the washing-up. The washing-up is the context, then there’s how people feel about it. This is what happens when the process becomes fact tennis:
SERVER The trouble is, if you leave the washing-up not done, the food hardens on it and it is harder to wash off, so do it straightaway. 15–love
RESPONDER It is a better use of my time if I leave the washing-up during the day and just do it all together once. 15 all
SERVER It is unhygienic to leave the washing-up undone. 30–15
RESPONDER Any accumulated bacteria will be killed when it is eventually washed up. 30 all
SERVER The dirty dishes attract flies. 40–30
RESPONDER It’s winter. No flies have accumulated around the dirty dishes. Deuce
And so on. When one person eventually runs out of reasons and is therefore deemed to have ‘lost’, they do not feel loving or warm towards their opponent. And if the ‘winner’ feels good, it’s at the expense of their partner.
Another style people use to deal with difference and conflict is what I call ‘Look, squirrel!’, or distraction. This is when, instead of talking about what is bothering you or someone else, you change the subject. So you see that the washing-up has not been done but, rather than address that problem, you say or do something else. This may be fine – it may be appropriate to delay talking about something – but it is not okay to avoid discussing differences altogether. If all conflict is avoided, what tends to happen is that intimacy is avoided as well, because when too many subjects become taboo, politely skirting around each other can make things lonely.
A third arguing style is being a martyr. This is when you say, as you arrive home, ‘Don’t worry about the washing-up, I’ll do it.’ Unfortunately, what tends to happen in situations like this is that the martyr, rather than making everyone feel guilty, eventually becomes resentful and blames other people, or becomes a persecutor (see below) and starts flinging insults.
The persecutor attacks: ‘You’re a real pig for not doing the washing-up. Your hygiene standards are disgusting.’ If you are on the other end of that comment, you feel like attacking back.
None of these four kinds of conflict makes for a great atmosphere in a family home. Conflict puts children on alert, threatens their sense of security and leaves them less able to be open and curious about the world. Instead, their energy and focus are switched into a sort of emergency mode.
What, then, is the ideal way to argue? When working through a difference, work with one issue at a time and think about what the argument is really about. Don’t save up your grouches and pour them out on to the other person at once. Start with how the issue makes you feel, not with an attack or by blaming. So, back to the washing-up …
‘I feel fed up when I come home after having washed up in the morning to see more of it. What would really make me feel better would be if you washed up your stuff during the day.’
The ideal style isn’t about winning, it is about understanding. An answer might come back: ‘Oh, sorry, darling, I don’t want you to feel bad. I had so much work on. I can see it’s not a great sight to come home to.’ And the response to it might be: ‘Yeah, you do have a lot on. Never mind. How about you wash and I’ll dry?’
A good rule of thumb when arguing is to do it with ‘I-statements’, not ‘you-statements’, for example, ‘I feel hurt when you don’t answer me when you’re on your phone’, not ‘You’re always ignoring me when you’re on your phone.’ Few of us like to be defined or pigeon-holed – especially negatively – by someone else. If you instead describe how what you hear or see makes you feel, then you are talking about yourself, which is far easier for the other person to hear.
Of course, no way of voicing a complaint is guaranteed to ‘work’, that is, ensure that you get what you want. But good relating is not about manipulation, it is about having good relationships. Being open about what you feel and what you want can help you to have good relationships, whereas manipulating someone doesn’t make for a good connection.
Speaking in I-statements, not you-statements, owning your own feelings and finding out about and acknowledging the other person’s feelings are usually the best ways to deal with the inevitable differences that arise in families. It will also help your child feel more secure, as it reduces resentments and promotes understanding. They will also be more likely to adopt this respectful and emotionally intelligent argument style themselves, having had it as their example.
One reason disagreements arise in the first place is when one person thinks they’ve been attacked on purpose when they haven’t. This example happened in a typical family. (I’ll call them the Heritage family.)
Jonny, a twenty-two-year-old student, is inspecting his dad’s old leather jacket. He says, ‘You’re sixty, Dad, you’re never going to wear this again. Can I have it?’
Keith, a teacher, has had a bad day of not understanding his son’s generation at work, so is feeling old. And Jonny has hit a nerve. Keith raises his voice and says, ‘What, can’t you even wait for me to be dead before you start eyeing up my possessions?’
Jonny feels like this has come out of nowhere, and now he feels attacked. ‘Blimey, I only asked. Why are you always having a go at me?’
‘I’m not having a go at you, but I don’t like being treated as though I’m already dead.’
This isn’t a serious dispute, and I’m pretty certain that Keith will end it by throwing Jonny his jacket and saying, ‘You have it, then,’ and Jonny saying, ‘I don’t want it now. You’ll need something to wear in your coffin,’ and they’ll both laugh themselves into a truce. But if they don’t understand what went on, they’ll both still feel a bit hurt and something similar is liable to happen again.
So, let’s see what was really going on by pretending there is a wise mediator there with them.
‘He wants me dead,’ says Keith.
‘No, I don’t, I want his jacket,’ says Jonny.
‘Same thing,’ says Keith, realizing at the same time it is not the same thing.
The mediator says, ‘It’s not the same thing but, today, for you, Keith, it feels like the same thing – and Jonny has no reason to know that. You, Keith, felt attacked. As Jonny didn’t realize that you felt attacked, he felt what you saw as your retaliation came from nowhere, so he counter-attacked.’
‘That’s certainly true for me,’ Jonny says.
Keith is quiet, so the mediator says to him, ‘Just because you felt attacked, it doesn’t mean you were attacked.’
‘He called me sixty!’ Keith defensively replies.
Mediator: ‘Yes, he was hiding his feelings behind a fact, a habit he has picked up from all the “fact tennis” he’s been witness to since he was born. Moving on, it seems you find being sixty hard to come to terms with. So you’d quite like to cling to symbols of your youth, like that leather jacket. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t, and you can say so if it’s true.’
A new version of the conversation might sound like this:
‘I love your leather jacket. Can I have it?’
‘I need some time to think about that … I can see you really want it, but I’m not ready to let the jacket go. It’s true, I may never wear it again, but I need time to get used to the idea of being as old as I am. And, in the meantime, clinging on to my youthful clothes is a comfort to me.’
‘Sorry, my asking reminded you of being sixty.’
‘Oh, don’t worry, I need reminding. I’m feeling a bit old because I don’t understand what some of my students are going on about.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’ve just got my head around what social media is, but what do they mean when they say “swipe left” at me?’
‘Here, let me show you …’
Exercise: Unpack an argument
Think about the last disagreement you had with a loved one. Without getting caught up in who was right or who was wrong, unpack what happened like I did in the example between Jonny and Keith. Then, again as I did in that example, take a meta perspective to see the situation and work out the feelings of each protagonist. Then play the role of a wise mediator and think about how to change the dialogue in the disagreement and how it could have gone better.
Here is a quick recap list of what to remember when you’re talking about a difficult subject or when you’re getting annoyed or think that an argument is imminent:
- Acknowledge your feelings and consider the other person’s feelings. That means not making yourself ‘right’ and the other person ‘wrong’, not making yourself ‘clever’ and the other person ‘stupid’. Nothing wears a relationship or a family down more than if the people within it insist on being the person who is right. Instead of thinking in terms of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, think in terms of how you each feel.
- Define yourself and not the other, so speak in I-statements and not you-statements.
- Don’t react, reflect. You don’t always have to reflect before reacting – I’m not advocating that you lose all spontaneity – but if you feel annoyed or angry, I think it is a good idea to pause and understand why. If Keith had done that in the example above, he would have realized that the anger he felt towards his son when he asked for the jacket did not belong with his son.
- Embrace your vulnerability, rather than fearing it. In the example above, Keith would also have realized he was scared of growing old and he was about to mask that fear with anger rather than allowing himself to be vulnerable. But it is only by allowing our vulnerability, being open about who we are, that we can have close relationships.
- Don’t assume the intent of the other person. Without assuming too much or projecting yourself on to the other, try to work out what they are feeling too, and admit it if you got it wrong. Understanding your own feelings and those of the person you are negotiating with is not only the cornerstone of negotiations, it is the foundation of functional relationships and of empathic parenting. It is never too late to start this way of interacting.
When parents are able to do all this, I’ve found that improvements in patterns of relating to one another usually come pretty swiftly.
In a couple or in a family, having the ability to consider each other’s feelings requires a store of goodwill. If you feel you’re running low, you need to bolster it up.
So, what fosters goodwill? There seem to be two main ways to do it: (1) responding to bids for connection or attention, and (2) finding solace in each other rather than seeing the other, or others, in the family as adversaries. In other words, both cooperation and collaboration but not competition.
When psychologist John Gottman and his colleague Robert Levenson set up what they called the Love Lab at the University of Washington in 1986, one of their experiments was to ask couples to talk about their relationship: to discuss a disagreement they had had with each other, to talk about how they met and a positive memory they shared.
While the couples had these conversations they were wired up so that their stress levels could be measured.
All couples appeared to be calm on the outside, however, the results of the stress test showed something completely different. Only some of the couples had in fact been calm. Others had high heart rates, sweated a lot and generally showed all the signs of being in fight-or-flight mode.
But the real revelation came six years later, at the follow-up session. All the high-stress couples had either split up or were still together but in a dysfunctional relationship. Gottman called these couples the ‘Disasters’. The ones who had shown no stress during their initial interview he called the ‘Masters’.
It appeared from the data that the Disasters each experienced the other as a sort of threat – more like an adversary than a friend. Gottman studied thousands of couples over a long period of time and found that the higher the couple’s stress indicators, the closer they were to being Disasters and the more likely they were to split up or have a dysfunctional partnership.
So, what do these findings mean? The more you feel stressed and threatened in the company of your partner, the more likely you are to act in a hostile or cold manner towards them. The more your relationship is based on getting one up on them, on winning or losing, on being right, the more likely you are to feel hostility rather than goodwill towards your partner. It can be a relationship vicious circle. One-upmanship is all too common in our culture as a way of being together. Even advertising seems to rely for its success on making the target market feel superior to others; this is second only to making the target consumer feel sexually desirable. I’m thinking of the ‘dumb dad’ advertisements for cleaning products or commercials where the ‘prize’ for buying a product seems to be that you get to be smug, as if you have somehow been proven to be superior to your partner.
Conversely, when a couple feels calm and soothed by being together, this makes each partner more likely to be warm and affectionate with the other. Gottman set up another experiment where he observed 130 couples socializing together in a holiday home for a day. What he discovered was that when couples are together they make what he refers to as ‘bids’ for connection. For example, if one partner is reading and says, ‘Listen to this,’ and the other one puts down their own book ready to listen, their bid for connection has been satisfied. They are looking for a response, a sign of support or interest.
Responding to someone’s bid meets their emotional needs. Gottman found that couples who were no longer together after six years (the time of the follow-up session) had on average only a three in ten response rate to such bids. These small, day-to-day interactions generate goodwill and reciprocal treatment, and without them our relationships cannot be sustained. So, this is the key to a successful partnership: be responsive and interested. And what is true for couples is true for all relationships, and especially for those with our children.
As well as responding to requests for attention, there are other things you can choose to do that will foster goodwill – or the opposite. You can look for things to appreciate in your partner, family members and, indeed, in your children. Or, instead, you can scan them for their faults and mistakes. You can choose to express your appreciation or your criticism. I know which I prefer to hear. You can choose to be kind – and the good news is, kindness is catching. If you are unilaterally kind, research has shown that it is likely that your partner will catch it and pass it on.
Tipping the scales, if they are unbalanced, from being critical to finding things to appreciate is not only crucial in your partnership or in your relationship with your family but in life as a whole. I come from a family where the culture was tipped slightly more towards criticism than appreciation, and I have had to work hard to change that. When I slip back into old habits, it can feel like I’m bathing myself in a toxic soup of criticism.
Being kind is not about being a victim or being unassertive. Being kind does not mean you don’t share your feelings when you are angry. What it does mean is explaining how you feel and why but without blaming or insulting the other person.
It is also important to know that just because you did not intend that your actions should cause a family member to be upset or irritated, it does not mean that those actions did not upset them. When someone feels bad in response to something we may have said or done, even unintentionally, it is important to listen and to validate how they feel rather than become defensive. We need to remember that we all experience the same things differently. No one is wrong because their experience is different from what ours would be. Such differences need to be respected rather than causing you to get into arguments as to who is having the ‘right’ experience.
There’s lots of advice out there. Some of it will tell you not to sweat the small stuff in families and relationships. Others counsel the exact opposite and advise dealing with minor irritations before they become big. The main thing I believe we should aim for is understanding how the other person feels, even if we feel differently, and feeling for them where they’re at and, hopefully, being felt for in our turn. Everyone benefits from being listened to, understood and empathized with. Make this a priority in your family. It will make your family a good place for a baby to land and a good environment for a child to develop in.
Exercise: Notice attention bids
Become more aware when members of your family make a bid for your attention or connection and, if possible, turn towards that bid rather than turning away. This is whether the bid comes from your partner, your mother or your children. Relationships are precious, and turning towards bids is a major part of relationship maintenance.
Although we are individuals, we are also very much part of a system and a product of our environment. As we have seen in this part of the book, there are several things we can do to help that system and environment be a healthy place for our children to grow.