Parent and Child - Mirror and Image

When a child is born, she comes into an environment that predates her. It is a fixed, preset matrix into which she is born. A matrix is a creative, supportive and holding learning environment. The child's parents are already there. Their own physical and psychological makeup is already well established and they will have fixed and clear ideas of who they are and who they want their children to be. Most parents will want a child, will have planned the birth and will already have plans and ambitions for their children. In some cases they will have gone as far as deciding what school the child will go to. The colours in the child's bedroom will have been chosen and the child's name will have been decided. In other words when a child is born her fife is already mapped out. And all this happens before the child has even been seen!

When a child is born, she enters a matrix of language, behaviour, expectations, religious belief and values that may or may not be in tune with her genetic makeup at birth, and the unspoken expectation is that she will become a part of this, and that she will become the future carrier of the family's genetic and social inheritance. It is expected that the child will fit into the prefabricated psychosocial niche in society that awaits her, rather than that the environment will change to suit the child.

Though her environment is already established, when the child enters it she will cause change whether the family wants it or not. The balance of power in the family group will alter and the routine of the house will be changed. But to a significant degree the child is a passive participant in all that happens to her. For the most part, it is the child who has to adapt to her surroundings and it is the existing family set up which remains fixed and demands that the child adapt to its demands. Santrock and Yussen's scientifically based work on child development deals extensively with the subject of heredity. It is clear that the child who bears the genetic and archetypal inheritance of her family to begin with is born into an environment that manifests, values and rewards these very traits. So from the very outset, the child is shaped and conditioned in a way that satisfies the family's need to main­tain its own self view.

Much work has been done by people such as Stanley Coopersmith, Jerome Kagan and Paul Mussen, detailing the significance of the family environment on the child's think­ing, feeling and behaviour in the first five years of life. It is both necessary and inevitable that we as parents want our children to carry on the family traits and characteristics which we value; this reassures us of our own worth, our own self-esteem and our own place in the greater scheme of things. This underlying need to value and maintain our genetic family traits is an unconscious desire to satisfy our need to survive and is essential to the self-esteem and self-image of both parents and children. The more we value ourselves as separate individuals and the more we value our family's genetic traits, the more we will feel that what we have is worth giving to our children. This has added import­ance, because it also means that we are satisfied that our future is guaranteed in the greater scheme of things.

Much of this self-maintaining is unconscious, which means that to a greater or lesser degree we are shaping our children and rewarding them for the traits which we value in our own psychological makeup, while not being fully aware of what we are doing. It is the unconscious need for vali­dation of our own being which motivates us to praise and encourage our children to reproduce and replicate the be­haviours which we deem to have been successful in making us what we are.

So it is therefore both inevitable and necessary that parents will want their children to be like them. To begin with, a certain amount of likeness is inevitable and good, so why question it? The problem arises from the fact that much of this is in reality an unconscious attempt to recreate ourselves. In other words, as the work of Melannie Klein shows, it is more for the maintenance of our own self view that we do this rather than for the 'sake of the children', and it may turn out that it is not the best thing for the particular child in question.

In terms of consciously wanting our children to be like us this happens in the following way. Our religious beliefs, our family values and our general oudook on life are all part of our overall psychological makeup and part of what makes us what we are. The stronger our belief in what and who we are, the more we are likely to want our children to be like us, because we are convinced that if it worked for us and has made us successful, then it is bound to work for the child. At the same time, it will guarantee our stake in the future. The modes of behaviour, language, social and academic expectations of the home will reflect the things we value and children will be rewarded or punished according to how well they fulfil our expectations.

We will naturally reward them for the behaviour that meets with our approval and we will punish, or at least dis­courage, them for behaviour we don't agree with. In other words, we will encourage that behaviour which we want, or which satisfies our unconscious need for survival, and we will discourage those behaviours which we consider do not meet these criteria. Through a very simple form of conditioning, the children quickly learn which behaviours meet with adult approval and which do not. They become like us, and the more like us they become, the more we like it and the more approval they get. We are in effect recreating ourselves.

Carl Jung explored the way in which the behaviours which are valued, and therefore which are most often engaged in by the child, go on to form the persona of the child and later adult and become her public image, her con­cession to the requirements of society. Her persona is an important part of her survival kit, as it helps her to survive as an individual while at the same time satisfying the 'collective' demands of society. The persona is the person's outer psycho­logical mask, made up of all the aspects of herself that she would like society to know about her.

As the child's persona develops through the continued practice of acceptable behaviours, at the same time those behaviours that are not valued are avoided and become part of the child's unconscious. Andrew Samuels' commentary on the work of Carl Jung details how these 'unacceptable behaviours' go to form that aspect of the person which is not visible and which is for the most part repressed or hidden. The aspects of the person which she does not like to acknowledge and which she tries to hide from herself and from others are all consigned to the dumping ground of the unconscious, and go to form the shadow. Though her shadow is unconscious, it is nevertheless a part of the child's psychological makeup and is at all times active and therefore at all times affecting her behaviour, though she is not aware of this.

What this means is that we tend to treat our children as extensions of ourselves and to reward that behaviour which mirrors ourselves, while at the same time extinguishing that behaviour which upsets our view of ourselves. The fact that much of this is an unconscious process and that we as parents are not always aware of what we are doing, does not lessen its impact. It is unavoidable that children will mirror their par­ents in terms of physique, psychological makeup, emotional needs, responses and even behaviour. The important thing for parents and teachers is to be aware of this, to accept that it happens and that it is necessary for the emotional well-being of both parent and child that this is so.

This sameness provides the young child with the foun­dation for developing a sense of identity, as well as providing feelings of security and belonging which, as the work of current practitioners such as Tony Humphreys and Denis Lawrence shows, are important as part of the process of build­ing and enhancing self-esteem. It is by becoming consciously aware of these processes that we will be able to make the most important decision of all and acknowledge that our children are not us, they are not extensions of us and do not have the same needs. Nor do they have the same life situations to cotend with and do not need the same skills or capabilities to cope with their life situations. The physical, psychological, emo­tional and intellectual environment, though similar and close to that of the parents, is at the same time different than that which the parents experienced. The parents will therefore have to make the leap from thinking in terms of what is best for themselves, to what is and will be best for a different person in a different environment. The most effective way of doing this is in being conscious and aware of one's own 'psycho­logical baggage'. All children are more than the sum of their parents' psychologies and physiologies. In addition to the genet­ic inheritance of their parents' physical, emotional and overall psychological traits, they also inherit to a lesser extent the traits and characteristics of a wider collective, including grand­parents and great-grandparents, as well as the environmental influences which have been assimilated by all these people. In addition, the child absorbs her own environmental influences.

And yet the thread running through all this is the parental input. The parents are not only the main contributors to the child's genetic, psychological, emotional and intellectual pool, they are also the primary mediators of society's norms and demands, and as such will act as a filter for the effects of society on the child. What this means is that while there are coundess environmental influences on the psyche of the child, all are in one way or another filtered through the parental sieve. This means that all influences, both genetic and environmental, will carry the stamp of the parents' psyche — with all its positive and negative aspects.

As the child grows for the five most formative years of her life in the cocoon of the family home, little or no other out­side influence is allowed in. Although more and more children attend pre-schools and nurseries, there is still a strong sense of the sacredness of the family in Irish society, resulting in the fact that the family structure is to all intents and purposes a closed situation. The effect of such closedness can be to create a strong psychological boundary and so give the child a strong sense of who she is, a strong sense of family worth, a strong sense that she is good enough to play a role in the outside world and, most importantly, a strong feeling of being safe. But where the closedness is characterised by secrecy, abuse or fear, it becomes an environment that represses the child's attempts at independence. It has the effect of smothering the child, and produces a child who has no trust in the collective good of society as represented to her by her family.

Robert Reasoner's work on self-esteem provides clear evi­dence of how important the psychological condition of the family, both collectively and individually, is in the development of the child. The self-image of each family member and the collective self-image of the family as a group, the confidence each family member has in herself and the collective confi­dence of the family as a group, the belief of each family member to be an effective agent in their own destinies as well as the collective self-belief of the family as a group, all have a bearing on the way in which the child will grow or not grow. Perhaps the most important issue here is the confidence which the child has in her family as a group. All these areas are connected and interrelated in the formation and growth of the child, and serve to illustrate how closely finked the child's world is with that of her parents.

The family with collectively and individually low self-esteem, negative self-image, lack of belief in their own effective­ness and low trust levels, will create an environment in which these negative traits will be seen as desirable, because a confi­dent, assertive child would pose a threat to parents with low self-esteem and negative self-image.

On the other hand, the family that has confidence both in the self and in the 'other' will unconsciously and consciously generate this confidence and reward it in the child who dis­plays it. Hand-in-hand with this is the presence or absence of threat and isolation within the family. Where individuals in a family, and indeed families as a whole, feel that society is not on their side and that they have no say in what goes in society, a negative view of society will be held up for the children. This will lead to mistrust, isolation and an inability to accept authority. The parents' perception of society, whether it accurately reflects society or not, will become the child's, and so will have a major impact on how the child will respond to the outside world when he goes to school. We see from the work of many experts, and in particular from the work of Robert Burns on self-concept formation, how the parents' sense of powerlessness and mistrust will be transmitted to the child as feelings of frustration and apathy. This is both because of their parents' modelling and because of their parents' inability to foster a sense of personal effectiveness.

Many of the problems that arise later in fife for both chil­dren and adults have their origins in the first years of the child's life and are a reflection of the values and attitudes which underpin the parents' treatment of them. Over-anxiety about the child's welfare when she is born can, as Eric Neumann suggests, lead to the parents not allowing the child any freedom during early and middle childhood, causing the child to be afraid of risks and challenges. Over-concern for appearances and order when the child is young will lead to the child growing up as an adult who is afraid of failure and will lack the 'willingness to try'. Over-concern for the child's safety during the first years of the child's life causes the child to become overly cautious and fearful of other people arid any form of uncertainty. The unconscious and unacknow­ledged issues in the parents become the problems and weak­nesses of the children as they grow.