Good Cop / Bad Cop: the parenting soft- hard split as an

adaptation Jenny Brown MSW PhD Candidate

UNSW Social Science The family Systems Institute

www.thefsi.com.au

The Soft - Hard Split in Family Therapy

• Minichin 1971; Rosman, B. L., Minuchin, S. & Liebmann, R. Family lunch: An introduction to family therapy in anorexia nervosa (1975)

• Palazzoli, M. S., Boscolo, L., Cecchin, G. and Prata, G. (1978), A Ritualized Prescription in Family Therapy: Odd Days and Even Days

More recent literature/research

• Parenting Styles – which is ideal?

• Parenting style and impact on development of symptoms

• Spill over of conflict in marriage on children

Contributing factors:

• Culture and parenting styles (generational)

• Attachment model: parents' working models of childhood attachments and parent-child relations

Review of parenting styles

Simons and Conger 2007

M-F differences in parenting –

Adolescent outcomes

• 451 families child in 8th grade

• Authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and uninvolved (Maccoby and Martin 83)

• Majority similar styles. 1/3 -1/4 disparate styles

• No pairs of authoritarian

• No gender traditional: authoritarian fa. and indulgent mo.

Parent Sample Textual data: descriptions of help seeking

& involvement in program

Grounded theory/qualitative research

• Parents from 14 households. 3 interviews each

• 1st interviews at beginning of adolescent’s

admission to tertiary partial hospital unit.

• 3 couples, 8 mothers, 3 fathers.

• 5 both biol. parents at home, 3 step parent at

home, 4 single mothers.1 adoptive parents, 1 in

process of separating.

Research Site : partial hospital connected to Westmead Hospital

Too soft /Too hard: Strong theme for parent dyads

• Not predictable gender split

“ But we inevitably end up fighting; Because I will manage it in a quiet drawn out process, and she’ll manage it there and then. And I don’t agree with that.” “I would always give in quicker than she would.” “Well I think we got into a rut where we’d punish her and nothing worked. And then I’ll be the lenient one. My wife will say I’m being too soft and, you know at the end of the day, the same result evolved, from discipline or no discipline.”

Sickness or behaviour problem?

• “My husband and I have a completely different view on this whole thing. You couldn’t get two people that have more difference of opinion on what this diagnosis means.”

• “The thing is when the sickness occurs we try to blame each other, and I say you’re too strict and my wife says you’re too loose. But at the end of the day it is unhelpful if we blame each other.”

Step parents

• “I think the relationship was awkward with my partner (of 7 years), he’s old fashioned because he couldn’t understand why I was seeing a psychologist. he can’t understand why you can’t just tell her to go to school.”

• “He didn’t get too involved, there was so much friction there; and I said if you can’t help I’d rather you back off and don’t get involved.”

Bowen’s NIMH research

• 18 families.

• Reciprocity observed

“Opposing viewpoints appear to be related more to opposing the other than to real strength of conviction.”

“The opposing viewpoints seem to function in the service of maintaining identity.” 2013 p 112

Process in triangle the interdependent triad

• “One parent, basing opinion on knowing how the patient felt would say that behaviour was caused by sickness and advocate understanding, love and kindness for the patient. The other parent would conclude that it was not all sickness and advocate management based on what the patient did, instead of feelings.”

P119 2013

As an adaptive process: “This pressure for adaptations or accommodations emanates from the emotional reactiveness of people and not from the thoughtful recognition of a need for compromise to improve co-operation. ” Kerr p79

13

See the interdependence – reciprocity

An instinctive reactivity

1. A family member becomes anxious worried about a perceived problem in another….

2. the anxious one becomes preoccupied with the one perceived to have a problem..

3. the “problem one” typically exaggerates the very demeanour that the other is worried about…

4. An escalating cycle of anxiety and problem behaviour ensues

5. resulting in the anxious one getting more into a caretaker position than he or she wanted and the problem one getting into more of a patient or child position than he or she wanted.

Kerr p8

Neuroscience of reactive reciprocity

We are inexorably drawn into an intimate brain-to-brain linkup whenever we engage with another person. Welsh et al 2013

• “This instinctive survival process often leads to

grief in human relationships. When we feel threatened interpersonally, the amygdala leads us to fight or flee. The paradox underlying much of the push-pull ambivalence in human relationships is that we are wired both for self-protection and for connection.” Fishbane 07, p 397

Emotional systems as automatic as a reflex and occur as automatically as the force that causes the sunflower to keep its face towards the sun. p158

• “The child focussed energy is deeply imbedded, and it includes the full range of emotional involvements from the most positive to the most negative.” P 297

A Clinical response

• Normalise

• Observe the pattern

• Parent focus on managing reactivity rather than focus on child and other caregivers response to child. (child focussed triangle)

Bowen: An approach “designed for the parents to make a project out of themselves.”

UNSW School of Social Sciences

Supervisors Dr Jan Breckenridge; Kerrie James.

& The family Systems Institute

www.thefsi.com.au

jbrown@thefsi.com.au