3 Why are families often difficult?

Why are families often difficult?

Dear Lily,

You will not have found the last five years easy. You will have argued with your parents, quarrelled with your sister, felt despair, anger, self-loathing, insecurity. You will have felt both intense love and possibly hate for those who brought you up. You may well be beginning to see the point of Oscar Wilde’s remark that ‘Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.’ On the other hand, your parents may have sympathy with Lillian Carter, the mother of the American President Jimmy Carter, who commented ‘I love all my children, but some of them I don’t like.’ Why is there this ambivalence on both sides?

There are particular strains in our family system. As soon as a baby is born it is implicitly being encouraged to be a separate and self-sufficient individual. It is usually put in a separate bed or cot away from its parents, fed regularly but not always on demand, left to cry unless it is a serious matter. It is encouraged to stand, in more ways than one, on its own two feet. The final outcome is known to be a day when he or she will leave home. In the past people went early on as a servant or apprentice, today to school, university, a job in another town.

From that time, and in anticipation well before, he or she will become a separate economic, religious, political and social entity. He or she will emerge finally as a fully ‘grown up’ person who will make all the major decisions over their own life; get a job, marry, travel, buy things on their own.

This is unusual. In almost all societies, as soon as children are born they are encouraged to be part of a group. They will be expected to be deferential and obedient to their parents and older relatives for life. Important decisions will be taken by relatives. An individual is not a separate entity.

Each way of imagining the family has advantages and disadvantages. The western system gives individual freedom. Yet this freedom can be a great weight. It often leads to a potentially damaging struggle between the generations as the child grows up.

A child has to grow separate from his or her parents and other relatives including siblings, but this must be done neither too fast nor too slowly. Parents (alongside schools) must nurture, protect, advise, teach and discipline their children. However, without too much pressure and in the knowledge that the aim of all this is ultimately to turn out a free and separate being. Parents must not smother, spoil or swamp their children with a love that makes them over-dependent. Yet they must also give them security and support. It’s a hard balancing act.

Likewise the child needs to learn to operate freely, but also to accept that in any structured group, including the small family, there are ultimately situations where a decision cannot be shared. If it comes to a final battle of wills, either the child has to accept the authority of the parents, or leave. It is a painful process in which both sides are likely to feel hurt and at times let down. The novelist Anthony Powell caught the sadness by inverting the usual comment when he wrote ‘Parents are sometimes a bit of a disappointment to their children. They don’t fulfil the promise of their early years.’

Why do parents and children argue?

This tension colours all our lives. It has led to the development of various techniques to make things easier. Long ago, much to the surprise of Italian and French visitors, it was noticed that many of the English sent their children off very young (from the age of seven onwards) to be brought up in another household. If they were rich, they were pages or ladies in waiting, if poor, servants or apprentices. The English said they did this because unrelated strangers or friends could exercise good discipline in a way which parents found very difficult.

Later this developed into the sort of education which I had, boarding schools from the age of eight to eighteen with parents abroad in India whom I hardly saw. My grand-parents with whom I lived disciplined me. Meanwhile my parents were like grand-parents who could show an uncomplicated and high level of affection.

The other way of proceeding, used in most societies, is effectively to keep a member of the family as a ‘child’ until his parents die. Thus in parts of Ireland in the nineteenth century a grown man in his fifties might be referred to as ‘the boy’ in the presence of his parents. Such a system has the advantage that there is no doubt about where authority lies. A father is like a king. On the other hand, it makes it difficult for people to break free into becoming fully responsible adults and mature citizens. Often the only way to achieve this is to go right away, as many Irish, people in India, Chinese or other migrants have done when they have experienced the separateness (and loneliness), of ‘escaping’ from their families.

These clashes and tensions vary with the times. A rise in the cost of housing can mean that instead of leaving home and setting up separately, children are forced to stay in their parent’s houses in their twenties or thirties. Or again, the rising costs of old age provision in a separate home means that children have to bring their elderly parents to live with them, or move into their parent’s home.

Both these situations can cause exhausting tensions. For they produce a direct clash between the fundamental ideal of the individualistic and egalitarian relations of modern society, and the need for some kind of hierarchy and discipline within an organization. They can ferment a deadly struggle between love for parents or children and self-love and self esteem. Old age is a country that cannot be understood until it is reached.

How do families work?

Very few of us understand how our family works. Yet if we have some wider knowledge of this, it will put the conflicts and tensions I have discussed so far into context. It may make it easier to sort out the tangles if you realize that most of the difficulties do not have anything to do with our own particular personalities, but are generated by what turns out to be the particularly odd family system in which we live in modern individualistic societies.

In most human societies, it is believed that blood relationship can only be traced through the male line. In a few societies it is believed only to flow through the female line, and in a very few, including western Europe and the United States, it is believed to flow through both males and females.

If you had belonged to a society where people were convinced that you were only related through females, for example the Trobriand islanders of the Pacific, your father would not be a relative, just a person who lived with your mother. When a woman became pregnant, this was believed to be the result of the action of a ghost or spirit.

The belief that you are only related through males or through females, makes it easy to form into large, exclusive clans, like the Chinese or people in India. But if you trace your links through both of your parents you will find that there is no distinct family group. The ‘Bee’ clan does not exist. You just have a network of relations, cousins, nephews and nieces, uncles and aunts.

This is the flexible and rather hazy system in which you live. Without research, you will find it impossible to draw a diagram of your relatives going back more than a couple of generations and which includes more than about fifty people with all their names and relationships to you. Yet in many other societies, people can name hundreds of relations and tell you of ancestors of some five generations or more back.

How do we name our relatives?

Our way of referring to or addressing our relatives does not help us to remember more distant relations. The system forms linguistic rings like the layers of an onion. In the innermost ring is our close family. We call people mother (mummy), father (daddy), brothers and sisters, sons and daughters. They are our close relatives and we think of them as special. We cannot marry or have sex with them.

Then there are various other categories. Our parent’s sisters we call aunts, their brothers are uncles. Our aunts and uncles’ children we call cousins and our siblings (brothers and sisters) children we call nephews and nieces. There are elaborations like ‘first, second, third’ cousins – referring back up the generations, or ‘once or twice removed’, which refers to the level of generation.

To this system we have to add a few terms to fit in the non-blood relations created by marriage. A relationship created through marriage is called a relation in law, in other words an ‘in-law’. So our sister’s husband is our brother-in-law, our husband’s mother is our mother-in-law. If a marriage has occurred and then been disturbed by a re-marriage or divorce, we use the word ‘step’. I married your mother’s mother and so I am your step-grandfather. I am not related to you by blood, but through a step relationship. The wicked step-mother, who married a man after a child’s biological mother had died, is famous in fairy stories and legends because it is such a difficult relationship.

All of this, even if only half familiar, may seem natural to you, but it is in fact unusual. Normally the terms by which you refer to and address relatives are much more precise and elaborate, describing each separate relative by a special word. This helps people to know exactly whom they are trying to address when they have hundreds of relatives living nearby.

In a Nepalese village your father’s oldest brother is called ‘biggest father’, his younger brother ‘younger father’. Your mother’s brother is called by a special term. This mother’s brother is the most important relative of the senior generation apart from your parents. Your cousins are individually called by terms which sharply differentiate those whom you can marry, and those you cannot because they are thought of as close blood relatives.

Our systems of descent and the names we give our relatives have worked quite well since they were introduced by the Anglo-Saxons in the sixth century. However, in the last two generations there have been several major changes which have put great strains on this system..

What is a mother?

Until recently it all seemed quite simple. A man and woman had sex, a child was conceived and later born. The parents were the biological parents. If they were married to each other or lived in some legal relationship of that kind, they were also one’s social parents.

Now, however, with test tube babies, artificial insemination, surrogate mothers and soon, possibly, cloning, it is getting very complicated. What is my relationship to the stranger who has donated the sperm from which I was conceived, to a woman who nurtured the foetus in her womb for a payment and handed it over to another, to the family which paid for and adopted me?

In this relatively simple case there are just four people involved, each of whom can claim to be a ‘father’ and a ‘mother’ in a certain sense. But the cases can get more complicated and the law is having great difficulty in sorting out all the rights and obligations. Likewise, with little formal guidance, individuals are having to adapt and invent new relationships, categories and terminologies to deal with this.

In facing these apparently new problems we can take some comfort from the fact that even before artificial insemination, humans had developed some ingenious ways of dealing with similar patterns. A classic example was found in North Africa.

Among the Nuer people it is essential to have children. Blood-relatedness flows only through the male line. So what happens if there are no sons in the family? A rich daughter will be provided with the wealth to pay for a ‘marriage’ to another woman. The new ‘bride’ will be impregnated by another man. By paying for the bride, the rich daughter has become a social father to any children that are born. So a child when asked who is his or her ‘father’, may point to a woman. In other words, biological and social fatherhood are split and one can have a ‘female’ father, or a ‘male’ mother.

Another variant is ‘ghost’ marriage, where a dead male’s ghost is married off to a woman after his death. She has children (by another biological partner) to this ‘ghost’, whose family have paid for the bride. So the line is continued even though the father is dead at the time of conception. This gives models for what is now happening with frozen semen.

What do we call our father?

Nowadays, around a third of the marriages in Britain end in divorce and re-marriage. Many people have a succession of ‘partners’ with whom they have children but who they do not marry. This leads to a simple difficulty: what do you call all those people who are important in your life.

When I came to live with your granny, your mother was already eight years old. She already had someone she called ‘dad’. So what was she to call me? ‘Alan’ sounded a bit serious, so she called me ‘Ali’. That sounded a bit too short, so she modified it to ‘Ali Bali’. When you were starting to speak she suggested you called me ‘Ali Bali’. You changed this to ‘Aya Baya’, which was easier to say, but being a little long-winded you shortened to ‘Baya’, which is what I have remained. Being your ‘Baya’ distinguishes me from your mother’s father.

If you were from a different social class background you would do it differently. In many parts of England now, the man who is currently living with a child’s mother is called ‘dad’, while whoever conceived the child, the biological father now living elsewhere is called by his Christian name. This is the opposite of what your mum did.

Could we marry our pets?

Until recently the definition of a Christian marriage was roughly ‘the voluntary union, for life, of one man to one woman’. This began to collapse about a hundred years ago when it became possible, at least outside the Catholic Church, to have a full divorce from someone and then legally marry another person. This change undermined ‘for life’, though that is still preserved in the ‘until death us do part’ phrase in the wedding service. Furthermore, same sex marriages of a man to a man or a woman to a woman, are becoming widely accepted. So what is left of marriage?

As anthropologists analysed marriage in different societies, they soon realized that the western Christian concept did not work well outside a particular area of the world. An obvious weakness was that marriage elsewhere was sometimes between one man and several women, or one woman and several men. Furthermore, marriage was often not for life or even for a long time at all, for it was very easy to divorce and re-marry.

Some surprising types of ‘marriage’ emerged. People were found to be marrying someone of the same sex or even dead people, as in the Nuer case. They were marrying someone (a high status person who gave them a position in society) and then never seeing him again, but living and having children by someone else. People even ‘married’ parts of another person, a friend’s arm or little finger, a rock or a tree, as a way of establishing property and other rights.

So the definition of marriage became longer and longer to try and encompass all these variations until it finally became just too complicated. It was better to look at marriage as a bundle of rights and obligations people establish in each other; as sexual partners, as bearers of children, as co-workers in the home, as earners of money outside the home.

Once these rights are considered as distinct, it is easy to see how they might be held as a clump by one person, or by different people. Among the Yoruba of Nigeria, a woman was traditionally parcelled out between various people. Her sexuality, the children she bears and partial rights to her domestic services belong to her husband and his wider family. Some of her domestic services in certain circumstances belong to the family group she was born into. Her economic power and resources belong to her. The famous trading women of west African markets reflect this division since they keep their own earnings.

If we look at marriage in this way, we can see that same-sex marriage makes sense. Recently I read of a case in India where a young man married his ancient grand-mother so that he could look after her more easily. Some people might even think it would be a cunning strategy to ensure the happiness of their loved cat or dog, and evade inheritance tax, if they married the little creature.

Is the family weak?

Organizing life around the ties created through blood and marriage is extremely efficient. In the majority of societies the whole of political life is based on family groups, the members of whom support each other in their feuds and vendettas. Many of the tribal societies such as the Yanomamo of the Amazon forest, or the Nuer of the Sudan are examples of this, but it is also the case in many parts of China or India in the past. The State is relatively unimportant. Marriage is arranged as a political alliance. Likewise, all property flows through the family, most jobs are found through family contacts, who you work with is organized on the basis of family relationships. The impersonal world of money, businesses, market exchanges just exists on the margins.

All of religion revolves around the family. People venerate their ancestors, conduct rituals with their family, need children to help send them to a happy after-life. Furthermore, most of social life is family based. Only family are really to be trusted, they are one’s closest friends, comrades, partners in leisure and work. The family welcomes the new members, who then pass into sexual maturity, get married and are looked after in old age and finally buried.

This is very far from our world, where the family can remain quite important, but mostly at the level of the individual. It is important for our emotions, for our first fifteen years of nurturing and perhaps in our old age. It often gives some satisfaction and pattern in the rest of life. Yet our political allegiances, our religious beliefs, our jobs, our friendships and those we trust are largely separated off. The family is only one element in all of this.

This is such a relatively unusual situation, and so obviously fits with a highly mobile industrial and capitalist society, that many people used to think that it was a recent phenomenon. They believed that it must be the result of the way society had been broken apart by the industrial and urban revolutions of the nineteenth century.

Yet historians have now shown that what we might call the individualistic and flexible family system which you experience goes back hundreds of years. This can be seen in the various ways we use to calculate who we are related to, the terminology, the inheritance systems and in evidence about who lived with whom and what their rights were. For a thousand years in England the family has not provided the foundation for the rest of society. Throughout that period it has contained that inner tension between desiring to be close and dependent, and the desire to be free and adult.

This is very different from the situation in the majority of societies both in the past and the present. The contrast is described in the words of an old North American Pomo Indian of California. ‘What is a man? A man is nothing. Without his family he is of less importance than that bug crossing the trail… A man must be with his family to amount to anything with us. If he had nobody else to help him, the first trouble he got into he would be killed by his enemies… No woman would marry him… He would be poorer than a new-born child, he would be poorer than a worm… In the White way of doing things the family is not so important. The police and soldiers take care of protecting you, the courts give you justice, the post office carries messages for you, the school teaches you. Everything is taken care of, even your children, if you die; but with us the family must do all of that.’

In the modern west, our relations with our family change over our lifetime. Parents start as authority figures who are also the source of all good things. They then become objects of antagonism and perhaps derision. Hopefully they end up as loved grandparents to our children. Likewise children start as exhausting delights, turn into rebellious monsters, and again, with luck, the loved parents of our grand children.

What is certain is that in the western system parents cannot demand their children’s unconditional love and obedience. Nor can children demand that their parents show them endless love and support. Love comes from self-sacrifice and tolerance. It comes from not expecting too much, not reliving in our children our failures and insufficiencies. And on the children’s part it depends on an understanding of aging and the loneliness this brings. Only thus can we avoid the danger pointed out by the old Pomo Indian.

‘With us the family was everything. Now it is nothing. We are getting like the White people and it is bad for the old people. We had no old people’s home like you. The old people were important. They were wise. Your old people must be fools.’