Families: A mix of good and bad

Families are a human construct and are no different, in some important ways, from any other human construct. It is possible for people to live alone, or to live communally, or to be celibate - it is just convention that we choose more often to live in small groups. There is nothing intrinsically "right" about it - it is convenient, our society is used to it, and it has some real advantages.

The concept of “family” is not a given. Especially the nuclear family, regarded by many as the “norm” now, is not the universal form of "family". In many societies today larger family groups are quite normal - perhaps 20 or 30 people - not nuclear groupings. In other societies children are separated from parents at a young age, quite unlike what occurs in nuclear families. For example, the Israeli Kibbutz movement has a lot more communal activity involving children than does our society. It is unhelpful to classify one model as "good" and another as "bad". It is rather a matter of seeing what works in a particular society at a particular time.

So the first problem is to decide together what the word “family” means. It could mean different things in different places at different times and for different people, depending on the values that underpin them.

For example, our society values human life and has rules to protect life and to punish those who take (human) lives. But not all human groups share that value. For other societies, killing, especially of people outside their group, is quite acceptable. Another example of value-based belief is homosexuality that was regarded for a long time as a crime (that is, it was defined by human beings as being criminal) and was punished: This is rarely the case now. And so on.

One thing we should do in studying “families” is to examine the values that underpin the concept. For example, I would regard two people (or more) living in any dependent relationship as a “family”, especially if that relationship was a loving one. Some people would reject my base value position and would substitute their own. Some people would restrict the word "family" to those who had been through a ceremony accepted by the state.

At one policy meeting of my Party (when I was a politician), someone argued, with passion, that there must be dependent children in the mix to make the grouping “a family”. In vain I protested. I asked if my wife and I were not a family before children came, and were we not still a family after the children grew up and left home. Unlike some others, I would not insist that people be married, or that children were present, but would accept other arrangements that would encompass (for example) stable group housing situations and couples without children.

Like many other things, “families” have costs and benefits.

Other articles in this “Families feature” will dwell at length on some of the benefits. The benefits include; physical protection during the very vulnerable period of infancy and helplessness; shared values; the support that adults get from other adults; the modelling (which is a benefit if the model is good); transmission of culture and shared values; transmission of information; the setting of behavioural limits; and so on. These benefits are real and valuable.

But there might be costs too.

Let us set aside the genetic costs. They are not generally avoidable yet (but are likely to be susceptible to manipulation in the future). Let me say clearly though, that the colour of skin, or the country of origin, is beyond the capacity of any individual to alter, and should not be a determinant of the "value" of a person.

We might judge people on things over which they have control and not judge, or punish, people for matters over which they have no control. That is the classical liberal position.

Religion too of most children is the religion (or lack of religion) of the parents. It is only at a later age that most people can decide their religious affiliations for themselves. There is nothing that is a priori "right" about a particular form of religious affiliation or religious belief - otherwise there would be a lot of good and thoughtful people who might be judged as "wrong" for beliefs that they hold conscientiously.

The first set of costs of families comes from modelling oneself on a non-coping or impaired parent in a family grouping. So one might become, for example, an alcoholic, violent, or an hysteric, or a slattern or a bully, if that is what a parent was like. Children are often victims of this long-term modelling and some behaviours run through generations, largely the result of modelling learned in childhood.

Second, the aspirations of parents for their children may not be met by the child’s capabilities. So a parent might want a child to excel in something that parent admires - something like a particular sport, or a musical instrument, or an activity (like dancing). Some parents have hopes of children fulfilling what they have failed to achieve themselves - a child then becomes a proxy for the parent. This can produce great tension in the child, especially (and this is the usual situation) if the child cannot meet the expectations of the parent. Some parents expect a certain level of academic performance (when I was Minister for Education the completion rate to year 12 was 91 per cent in Killara High School and 16 per cent in Balmain High School, presumably representing parental goals, beliefs, values, and economic advantage).

Failure to achieve what parents seek might be unreasonable. A child may not be able to be a nuclear physicist but might have other capabilities (for example to take up an honourable trade successfully), capacities that must be discovered and nurtured for the good of the person and for the benefit of the society. Otherwise the child might end up with an unwarranted sense of failure, certainly failure to achieve what the parents wanted.

Third, a child might meet abuse, physical, sexual or mental, in a family setting. It is a fact of most surveys that it is often close relatives who abuse children in one of the ways above, and that most victims of violence know their attackers. With children, since there are always power differentials involved, the behaviour is reprehensible.

This question of power differentials, and the use of power, is important. Many cases of eating disorders are, among other things, means of control over those around them, often other members of a family. Also, when a family has a psychiatrically ill member, that member sometimes takes centre stage and controls what the family does and can do.

Fourth, faced with unpleasant realities in families, children might be unable to reconcile what is said publicly and piously with the reality they face at home. Many psychiatric illnesses flow from conflicts arising from the dissonance between the rhetoric of trusted authority figures and what they themselves have experienced in their families. After all, if one is taught that many good things come from families, but if one's own experience is that the family is an unhappy place, there is a conflict to be resolved. Some people cannot resolve that conflict readily (some can), and they might present with psychiatric problems.

So families, however defined, are a mixed grill. They have good and bad features. And any contribution to discussion that does not acknowledge that mix might be viewed with suspicion.