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Families: A mix of good and bad

By Peter Baume - posted Monday, 13 December 2004


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.

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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.

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About the Author

Professor Peter Baume is a former Australian politician. Baume was Professor of Community Medicine at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) from 1991 to 2000 and studied euthanasia, drug policy and evaluation. Since 2000, he has been an honorary research associate with the Social Policy Research Centre at UNSW. He was Chancellor of the Australian National University from 1994 to 2006. He has also been Commissioner of the Australian Law Reform Commission, Deputy Chair of the Australian National Council on AIDS and Foundation Chair of the Australian Sports Drug Agency. He was appointed a director of Sydney Water in 1998. Baume was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia in January 1992 in recognition of service to the Australian Parliament and upgraded to Companion in the 2008 Queen's Birthday Honours List. He received an honorary doctorate from the Australian National University in December 2004. He is also patron of The National Forum, publisher of On Line Opinion.

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