OPINION:If we foresee a grim future for our young, we may find the answer lies in giving and not counting the cost, writes Marie Murray
THE CHANGES in family patterns in Ireland are well documented. Census figures from 2006 show the extent of change in the past two decades, with an increase of 80 per cent in the number of lone-parent families.
One-fifth of children are now in one-parent families, which are four times more likely to live in poverty than others. More than one-third of children are born outside of marriage. One quarter of children are raised in non-marital families. An increasing number of children live with same-sex parents. The number of children being taken into care through the courts has tripled in the past four years, and supervision orders have doubled, showing how much families need support.
Two hundred thousand adults have experienced marital breakdown. Family configurations are increasingly complex, whereby children living together may be those of first, second or subsequent relationships of one or more of their parents. These children may scatter to different households at weekends to join their "other parent", while one or more children of the current arrangement are left behind. Sometimes those children are joined in their home by children of former relationships of one of their own parents. It can be confusing in terms of identity, security, family cohesion and extended family relationships.
Depending on circumstances, family arrangements may seem to children to be temporary: home being where, and with whom, they currently live, subject to adult decisions over which they have no control. While there has been much research on the psychological impact of changing family constitutions upon children, the long term sociological implications for child-rearing practices will remain indeterminate until a number of generations of the children resulting from these fluid family forms enter into their own adult relationship commitments and parenting roles.
The traditional two-parent, separate gendered nuclear family with children is now just one family configuration amongst many. How one views this and changing family patterns depends upon a variety of factors: one's personal experiences of the family of origin, experience of being parented, current marital status and relationship history. Additionally, most people have a personal ideological position with regard to parenting principles and ideal family forms, with a dominant belief about the conditions most conducive to child development, adolescent security, adult stability, relationship constancy and ideas about personal rights, individual happiness and community welfare.
There are those who welcome the ease and flux of family life, those who despise its disregard for childhood, those who believe that child development is compromised by its diversity, and those who believe that the personality of the child is liberated by multiplicity in relationships and life experiences. The "truths" are in dispute.
However, there is one "truth", one perspective, one parenting precept, one child guidance approach and one potential means of social cohesion that deserves careful consideration at this time. That is the fostering of altruism, usually defined as "behaviour motivated by concern for others, by internalised values and goals, rather than expectation of social rewards or the desire to avoid punishment or sanctions". Here is a researched method of imbuing interactions, relationships in diverse family configurations, educational aspirations and community endeavours with meaning. Social learning theory shows how children learn of altruistic behaviour through seeing adults modelling ideal behaviour, opportunities to experience themselves as competent carers, and conversations that promote altruism and affirm it in them.
In this "Great Revolution" of family life, simple, gentle attention to altruism may be the key. For many of us who work clinically, there is one constant in the flux of life, one iridescent message of hope, one exceptional shining psychological light: and this is the extraordinary inherent, powerful capacity of a child to love its caregivers, to attach, to bond, to form close relationships with those in his or her orbit and (except in cases of extreme adult psychopathology) to create and evoke what is best in human nature and what is most important for the survival of our species in noble form. Children love their parents. Their parents love them.
Researcher Felix Warneken shows how the young child, as early as 18 months of age, spontaneously displays that most magnificent of human capacities: the capacity for altruistic behaviour: giving, sharing and caring, without gain. Nancy Eisenberg's psychological research work The Caring Child alerts us to the development of those prosocial altruistic behaviours already within the child. What this demonstrates is that parent-child relationships are not about technique, but about love. While behaviourist parenting approaches may produce child compliance; while cognitive behaviour work with adolescents may reduce negative thinking and behaviour, there is an inspirational edge and transformative power to fostering altruism in the young that supersedes psychoeducational technique.
When we speak about violence in society, the demise of social structures, the economic recession and predict a grim global future for us all, perhaps we could remember that the solution may lie within ourselves in our untapped altruistic capacity "to give and not to count the cost".
Imagine that to nurture the child, to bring forth what is most splendid in adolescence and to encourage what is most gracious in adulthood, we may simply need to return to the gentleness of altruism in our lives.
• Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and director of the student counselling services in University College Dublin. She is author of Living Our Timeswhich has just been re-released in paperback. This article is an extract from her paper on Changing Family Patternsbeing presented today in Ennis to the 2008 Céifin Conference on Family Life Today: The Greatest Revolution