Children's Needs – Parenting Capacity - Digital Education Resource ...

Child development and parents’ responses – middle childhood 145I’ve seen her very upset on the ward literally running up the curtains when herfather got violent on the ward.(Brandon and Lewis 1996, p.61)However, it is important to stress that not all children whose parents areexperiencing mental illness, learning disability, substance misuse or domesticviolence display emotional and behavioural problems (VanDeMark et al. 2005).What is identified in much research is that children are more at risk of experiencingdifficulties when parental substance misuse, mental illness or learning disability coexistor when children are also exposed to domestic violence (Velleman and Orford2001; Cleaver et al. 2007; Covell and Howe 2009). Time and again, it seems thatthe combination of problems is much more likely to have a detrimental impact onchildren than a parental disorder which exists in isolation.Children cope with parents’ frightening and unpredictable behaviour in differentways depending on their personality, age, gender, level of self-esteem and theopportunities open to them (Gorin 2004). For example, although boys and girlsare thought to be equally affected by their parents’ problems, their response tendsto differ. It is widely accepted that boys are more likely to act out their distress withantisocial and aggressive behaviours such as stealing, lying, attention seeking andattacks on peers. In contrast, girls tend to respond by internalising their worries,showing symptoms of depression, anxiety and withdrawal (Bentovim and Williams1998; Velleman and Orford 2001).We didn’t notice Kylie’s [aged 8 years] difficulties at first. We noticed with herbrother – he was aggressive with her, copying his dad.(Disabled mother experiencing domestic violence quoted in Cleaver et al.2007 p.89)Temperament of the child is also an issue. When parents became irritable,aggressive and quarrelsome this does not impinge equally on all children in thefamily. For example, parental annoyance may be directed towards the child who isregarded by their parents as being temperamentally ‘difficult’ (Rutter and Quinton1984).Some children may cope with the stress produced by unpredictable, unexpectedand irrational parental behaviour by seeking to escape. They may do this throughfantasy and make-believe, where the frightening behaviour of their parents isreinterpreted in acceptable ways.Sometimes, when my parents were raging at each other in the kitchen, Lecia andI would talk about finding a shack on the beach to live in. We’d sit cross-leggedunder the blue cotton quilt with a flashlight, doing parodies of their fights. ‘ReelSix, Tape Fifty One. Let her roll,’ Lecia would say ... as if what we were listeningto was only one more take in a long movie we were shooting.(Karr 1995, p.38)