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| |    All in the Family: How Family Dynamics Shape a Child's Behavior by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P. reviewed by Robert Needlman, M.D., F.A.A.P. Over the last 30 or 40 years, we've learned that a lot of puzzling behavior by children--and puzzling behavior by adults, too--makes sense when you take a step back and look at their families as a whole. Ever since Freud, of course, we've been used to thinking about the relationship between a child and his mother as being the key to understanding his development. But the mother-child relationship is only part of a bigger, complex web of family dynamics. Chain reactions Here's an example of how a change in the life of one family member can lead to changes in the behavior of the others: A three-year-old who has been sleeping through the night suddenly starts waking up crying. Nothing in that child's life has changed except that his father was recently promoted and has been coming home a bit later than usual. As a result, he doesn't play with his son as much in the evenings, and the boy's mother (who is tired out herself by the end of the day) has less patience and snaps at her son more. The boy goes to bed feeling a bit angry, and wakes at midnight feeling anxious. Another example: A husband and wife have been having marital problems, and there are more arguments and more tense silences than usual. At about the same time, their six-year-old, who had been fairly boisterous and prone to leaving her toys all over, becomes quieter and starts picking up very conscientiously. She seems to think that by being "perfect" she can make things better between her parents. She also develops a nail-biting habit, which has her mother concerned. These examples might seem obvious to you. But to the people involved, the connections are much harder to perceive. Families are like certain Impressionist paintings that you see in museums: up close, they are just a confusing collection of dots, but as you step back, a pattern begins to emerge. Keeping families healthy Every family has conflicts pretty much all of the time. What makes a family healthy is an ability to work through those conflicts in a positive way. When families are in trouble, it is often because they have gotten stuck repeating the same negative patterns over and over. Why, you might ask, would a family play out the same conflict day after day, making everyone miserable? Families that are healthy do change; those that cannot change develop symptoms of illness. Quite often, a child's "bad" behavior (or, as in the second example, anxious behavior) is a symptom of a family that is not well. Family therapists and family-oriented psychologists have developed some powerful ways of seeing the patterns of behavior within families and helping them change. They pay attention to the roles different members play, the patterns of interaction in the family, and how changes by one person cause changes in all the others. I hope that by understanding more about family dynamics and the role of therapists, you will be able to help your own kith and kin grow in healthy ways and feel more comfortable getting help if it's needed.
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