Mind Kind by Joanna North

Author:Joanna North
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Exisle Publishing Pty Ltd

Behaviours that raise risk

In my view, these include chosen behaviours such as drug addiction, alcohol addiction and parental conflict. I know that parents who are addicted to drugs and alcohol will not feel that they have a choice about that addiction. This may be true but it is definitely true that it is hard to recover from addiction without support. But parents have to find a way to manage how they behave during that addiction around their children. There are, of course, arguable points in between, so while divorce is often not preventable it is certainly true that parental conflict around children is 100 per cent preventable. If children are being raised in a war zone, parents can hardly be held responsible for the trauma that is caused to those children and they just need support to get them out and protect them as much as possible. As a society we have a duty to support those in this kind of life scenario and we cannot avoid these realities. But those instances are very different from the situations where dangerous experiences for children arise when conflicted parents unwittingly place their children in their very own war zone in their homes.

Ultimately, all of these risk factors, both behavioural and life events, require management of the environment around children. All children have risk factors around them and while some parents need to be more aware of what that looks or feels like, most parents are managing and assessing this all the time in quiet ways. Equally, children may have protective factors around them like supportive grandparents or extended family. The work of Michael Rutter, described as 'the father of child psychology', points out that exposure to three risk factors (i.e. drugs, domestic violence or alcohol) could lead to a 75 per cent possibility of the development of a behavioural difficulty in a child, whereas the presence of a loving and supportive parent could undoubtedly reduce risk.

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