Scared Sick by Robin Karr-Morse

Author:Robin Karr-Morse
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2011-12-17T00:00:00+00:00

RISKY FAMILIES

Another area of study, known as “risky family” research, attempts to further delineate families most at risk of maltreating their children. Although there are no perfect families, there is a strong relationship between the number of risk factors that challenge family safety and the emotional and physical health of the family’s children. From a global perspective, conditions like war, environmental toxins, disease and even natural threats like volcanoes, fires and floods have an influence on family health. Within a culture, we have known that social and political factors surrounding families clearly play a role, as do status and wealth—or the privation of these. In our own society, low socioeconomic status (SES) alone is associated with more irritable, punitive and coercive parenting, greater likelihood of exposure to violence, increased rates of alcohol or drug abuse, exposure to secondary smoke and a fattier diet. In the United States, poverty is associated with lower educational achievement, higher rates of arrest, lower income level, higher divorce rates and lower occupational status, each of which exacerbates the likelihood of negative health outcomes.20

As we fine-tune our lens to look more closely at the dynamics that tend to be learned within families, we can readily see that the most serious risks to child health are harsh or coercive parenting behaviors. The problem with these kinds of parenting behaviors is that they fail to teach the child and may in fact impede the child’s ability to learn constructive self-regulation. This critical skill can only be learned in a healthy environment—which fundamentally means a safe environment. Healthy families provide physical safety and emotional security, and they teach behaviors to foster their children’s independent and constructive decision-making so that they can eventually maintain their own physical and emotional health. When parents fail to teach and model skills that enable children to internally manage their reactions to life’s inevitable stressors, their children’s stress response systems will be chronically stimulated and slower to return to balance than those of children who have learned self-regulation. As a result, children’s immune and endocrine regulation is jeopardized. The quality of early family life and of parenting dynamics has a huge impact on how this alarm management system develops.

The ACE Study delineated familial risk characteristics like parental mental illness, addiction and incarceration. The “risky family” research looks more closely at a clearly destructive set of characteristics—often seen in everyday families—that are typically overlooked in the studies of child maltreatment. The goal of this research is to determine how relatively typical family-of-origin dysfunction takes a toll on children’s health long after it occurs. Although these behaviors are subclinical—that is, they are not generally diagnosed as pathological—they do in fact produce more modest versions of the same types of pathology in children that are commonly associated with child abuse or neglect. From these studies we now recognize, for example, that “overt family conflict” (recurrent episodes of anger and aggression) and what is called “deficient nurturing” (interactions with children are cold, unsupportive and derisive) result in parental failure to impart constructive self-regulatory skills to children.

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