Facing family change - JRF · Facing family change parts which can be played by other family members and friends, by schools, and by organisations such as Family Mediation or the

Facing family changeChildren’s circumstances, strategies and resources

Amanda Wade and Carol Smart

The Joseph Rowntree Foundation has supported this project as part of its programme of researchand innovative development projects, which it hopes will be of value to policy makers,practitioners and service users. The facts presented and views expressed in this report are,however, those of the authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation.

Amanda Wade is Senior Research Fellow at the University of Leeds, and Carol Smart is Professorof Sociology, and Director of the Centre for Research on Family, Kinship and Childhood,University of Leeds

© Joseph Rowntree Foundation 2002

All rights reserved.

Published for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation by YPS

ISBN 1 84263 077 6 (paperback)ISBN 1 84263 084 9 (pdf: available at www.jrf.org.uk)

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Contents

PageAcknowledgements iv

1 Introduction 1Aims, objectives and design of the study 1The study findings 3

2 The children and their families 4Aggregated families 4Divorced families 6Meshed families 7Diasporic families 8Conclusion 9

3 Relationships that matter 11Committed relationships with both parents 11Diminished commitment 12Absent parents 14Commitment and contact 16

4 Emotional coping 18Can children manage their own feelings? 18Coping strategies 19Active or unaware? 22

5 Managing with the help of friends 24Help from parents 24Help from friends 25Defusing tension with practical help 28

6 The role of schools 30Privacy and primary schools 30Talking to teachers 31Whole-class activities and support 33Supporting children at school 34

7 Participation and support 36Extending participation 37Counselling 38

8 Issues for policy and practice 42

Notes 45

References 46

Appendix: Research methods and sampling procedure 49

We should like to thank everyone who contributedto this study. In particular, our thanks go to all thechildren who took part, especially those whoshared their own experiences with us, and whowere sometimes interviewed in circumstances thatwere not ideal. Their enthusiasm for the project,and determination to express their views, proved apowerful incentive to us. Thanks, too, to the headand class teachers who welcomed us into theirschools, the parents who gave permission for theirchildren to take part and the practitioners who soreadily discussed their work with us.

We would also like to mention the members ofour Advisory Group, whose expertise and support

Acknowledgements

have been invaluable. Susan Taylor of the JosephRowntree Foundation has offered us unobtrusiveguidance throughout, and we have especiallyappreciated her thoughtful comments during theproduction of this report. Thanks, also, to theJoseph Rowntree Foundation which, by providingthe funding, made the whole enterprise possible.

All the names given to the children in the reportare inventions. To protect their anonymity, eachchild chose a fictitious name. As children opted fornames that appealed to them, they do not alwaysreflect ethnicity (although in most instances theydo).

iv

1

Increases in the rate of family ‘breakdown’ havegenerated widespread concern about the ‘harm’which this does to children. Until recently, researchhas focused almost exclusively on investigating theeffects of parental separation on children’s social,emotional and behavioural development, and itsimplications for their future well-being (Rodgersand Pryor, 1998). Although large-scale studies nowindicate that a majority of children cope reasonablywell with family reordering and continue tofunction in the normal range (Joshi, 2000;Hetherington and Kelly, 2002), there has remainedconsiderable anxiety about the upset and distresswhich might be caused by talking about this issuewith children themselves. Researchers havepreferred to collect their data indirectly, relying onreports from parents, teachers and clinicians, oradministering standardised tests. Parents, too, havebeen reluctant to see their children involveddirectly in research (Smart et al., 2001). As a result,there have been few studies which have looked atfamily reordering from children’s own perspectives(Pryor and Rodgers, 2001). Moreover, children haveremained locked in a construction of family changewhich situates them as passive victims who neitheract upon nor influence their circumstances. Currentdevelopments in the social study of childhood are,however, challenging these ideas (James and Prout,1997; Smart et al., 2001). By showing that childrenare active social agents, capable of thinking forthemselves, sociology is making it possible for us tolook at children in new ways and is opening upresearch into children’s views of their lives,including their experiences of separation anddivorce. As a contribution to these developments,this study explores the perspectives of five- to ten-year-old children on managing the family changeswhich accompany a parental separation.

Aims, objectives and design of the study

Our aim was to listen to children’s views onparental separation and to discover their preferred

means of support during times of family change.We focused on children aged between five and tenyears as they are under-represented in whatresearch there is on children’s perspectives ondivorce. The study was carried out in four stages,the first two of which were conducted in fourprimary schools, where our main samplepopulation was recruited.

• In the first stage of the study, we explored theviews of all the children in Year 2 (aged six toseven years) and Year 5 (aged nine to tenyears) of the four schools, irrespective oftheir family circumstances. Our objective wasto familiarise ourselves with their ideasabout what it would be like to live through aparental separation; in particular, what itschallenges might be and how these might bedealt with. The children were interviewed insmall focus groups where issues wereexplored from a generalised or hypotheticalperspective. No attempt was made to explorechildren’s personal experiences during thisstage.

• We then moved on, during the second stage, toconduct individual interviews with childrenwith some experience of a separation. Wedeliberately did not say that we wanted totalk to children whose parents had divorced

because we wanted to find out how relevant‘divorce’ is in terms of the reality ofchildren’s lives. By defining separation asmeaning parents who have ‘split up’ or wholive apart, we hoped to capture arepresentative range of experiences. Theobjective of this second stage was to explorethe children’s perceptions of the familytransitions which they had lived through,and to discover whether they had wanted, orreceived, any help in adjusting to thechanges which they experienced. Amongother things, we sought their views onformal and informal support, notably the

1 Introduction

2

Facing family change

parts which can be played by other familymembers and friends, by schools, and byorganisations such as Family Mediation orthe Family Court Welfare Service (now partof CAFCASS – the Children and FamilyCourt Advisory and Support Service).

• The third stage of the study was designed tosupplement Stage Two. We anticipated thatmany parents of children interviewed inschool would have negotiated the terms oftheir separation informally without recourseto mediation, or there being any necessity fora welfare report. As we wanted to ensurethat we spoke to some children whose viewson their parents’ separation had been soughtfor legal purposes, or who had been referredfor professional help in adjusting to themliving apart, we recruited (with the help ofoutside organisations) a small community-based sub-sample of eight children.

• The fourth stage of the study was designed toenable us to contextualise the study findings.We visited 12 projects set up by the FamilyCourt Welfare Service, Family Mediation andvoluntary organisations. These were allinnovative schemes but differed considerablyin their emphasis and focus, allowing us toreview child mediation schemes, informationworkshops, support groups and individualcounselling, and to discuss a range ofworking practices.

The children and their schools

Our study drew its main in-depth interview sampleof children from four primary schools in Yorkshire.We have called these Brookside, Elm Hill, NewHackney and Woodforde.

The schools we selected were chosen to reflectdifferences in class, religion, ethnic mix and urban/rural location. The reasoning that drove this coreselection was based on the idea that we wanted tointerview children who were likely to have

different life chances, or what might be calleddifferential access to cultural capital (Coleman,1988). Thus Elm Hill was located in a small thrivingmarket town which was closely bordered by fieldsand farms. This was the largest of our schools with368 pupils on roll. The area was one of low densityof minority ethnic families (99 per cent white) andwith low divorce rates compared with more urbanregions in Yorkshire. Housing composition in thearea was almost exclusively owner-occupied (80per cent) with hardly any social housing (15 percent) and virtually no private rented sector. It couldbe called middle England – except that it was in theNorth. We hypothesised that relatively few childrenfrom this school would have experienced divorce.In such a situation, children might find it hard tocome from what might be perceived as a ‘brokenhome’ and they might find that few of their friendshad similar experiences. We were interestedtherefore to discover how the children managed thetransition their family was going through and whatresources they could draw upon in the culturalmilieu of their school.

We selected Woodforde school with the sameprinciples in mind but in this instance we sought aschool with a clear sense of community andreligious adherence. We chose a Jewish school in apleasant suburb of a large city. Here, too, we wereinterested in the cultural milieu of the school andthe extent to which it might (or might not) providea supportive context in which divorce and otherforms of family transitions could be handled by thechildren. The school had 295 pupils on roll. Becauseit was a single-faith school, it drew children fromfamilies outside its immediate catchment area. Thechildren came predominately from economicallyadvantaged or at least financially secure familiesbut it also included some economicallydisadvantaged children too (see Figure 1).

Brookside school represented a traditional whiteworking-class area in an outer suburb of a largecity. There were 215 pupils on roll. Housing stock inthe area was predominantly (51–60 per cent) low-

3

Introduction

rise, social (or former social) housing built in theinterwar period. Nearly 50 per cent of the pupils’families were in receipt of some kind of benefit and41 per cent of the children were in receipt of freeschool meals (see Figure 1). Few families in the areacame from minority ethnic groups because,although there were clusters of streets withapproximately 4–8 per cent of minority ethnicfamilies, a substantial part of the catchment area ofthe school itself was exclusively white. This led usto believe that there would be something of ahomogeneous culture in the school and that thismight influence children’s experiences of livingtheir family lives in the area. We also recognisedthat in this school divorce and separation wouldnot be unusual.

Finally, New Hackney was the most diverseschool of all. We selected an inner-city school in adeprived area with a relatively high density ofchildren from minority ethnic families.Notwithstanding its inner-city status, this schoolhad a lower percentage of parents receiving

benefits than Brookside (see Figure 1). There were227 pupils on roll. Housing tenure in the school’scatchment area was predominantly local authorityor privately rented. The majority of minority ethnicfamilies in the wider area were defined as Pakistanibut the school itself had a mixed ethnic profile withchildren of refugee families in attendance. NewHackney was a very community-oriented schoolwith special classes and provision for parents. Itwas unlike the other three schools, however, in thatit did not have a clear defining feature beyond itsinner-city milieu and its cultural diversity.

The study findings

• The first section of the report (Chapters 2–3)focuses on diversity, highlighting differencesin the children’s family arrangements, thequality of their relationships with theirparents, and their social circumstances andlife chances.

• The second section (Chapters 4–7) examinesthe children’s coping strategies when facedwith family change and the resourcesavailable to help them. Here, we concentrateon the role of friends, of schools and offormal support.

• Finally, we conclude by summarising anumber of issues that have relevance forpolicy or practice.

• An outline of our sampling procedure andresearch methodology is given in theAppendix.

50

40

30

20

10

0

Per

cen

t

Brookside Elm Hill NewHackney

Woodforde

School

In receipt of benefitFree school meals/income support

Figure 1

4

When we started this research project we decidedto reach children through schools because thisroute promised the most opportunities forcontacting a diverse range of children. As weexplain in Chapter 1, we first held sessions withsmall groups of children from each class and wethen carried out more in-depth interviews withindividual children. We selected children we knewhad experienced some kind of family transition forour interviews but because we required parentalconsent and the consent of the children themselveswe were not able to interview all the children ineach class of five year olds and nine year oldswhose parents may have separated.Notwithstanding this, we are confident that, inbroad terms, the children we interviewed were‘typical’ of their other classmates in relation tomatters such as economic resources, housing andeducational level. We did not, for example, speakonly to the minority of disadvantaged children inthe more prosperous schools, nor did we speakonly to the most articulate and competent pupils inthe less advantaged schools. As we had expected,we found that the notion of family transition or‘breakdown’ is highly varied. For some children,this was experienced as a major trauma whichchallenged their expectations of their family livesand relationships; for others, it was only one ofmany changes and adversities. In this chapter, wediscuss the children’s experiences of familytransitions in terms of four distinct constellations offamily and parenting arrangements which wefound and which we refer to as aggregated, divorced,meshed and diasporic families. We feel confident thatin drawing a composite picture of ‘types’ of familywe are not distorting the children’s experiences.There is one proviso to this, however. Any form oftypification involves a degree of oversimplificationand, of course, a significant element ofinterpretation by the researcher. We therefore offerthese characterisations as a form of cognitive map,rather than as a final description. Our purpose is to

convey the core elements so that the reader cancapture a sense of the essential differences betweenthe experiences of groups of children. Thus, notevery child ‘fits’ our picture, but thecharacterisation is a starting point from which amore subtle or nuanced understanding can evolve.Our typifications are also drawn predominantlyfrom the narratives of the children. So this is asociological classification with its foundations inchildren’s worldviews. We have treated seriouslywhat they saw as important. If issues recurred intheir stories (even if – indeed especially if – theywere not issues we were originally looking for) wehave taken them as core defining features for oursubsequent analysis.

Aggregated families

On the basis of children’s descriptions of theirfamilies and the changes they had experienced, andthe accumulation of step-siblings and new kin, wedefined this first group of families as aggregated

families. These children’s experience of parentaldivorce or separation did not fit what we refer to asthe dominant model. The dominant model assumesa nuclear family where the parents, having beenmarried for some years, ‘decide’ to divorce thusintroducing a major change into their, and theirchildren’s, lives. For the children with aggregatedfamilies, the separation of their parents was oftenonly one major event in a life that was already fullof fluctuations and change. These children mightalready have spent time living with another relativeor even with a foster carer. Their mother mighthave been separating from a ‘stepfather’ ratherthan their biological father. They might be living ina household with lots of siblings and step-siblings,some of whom would be in contact with their realfathers and others who would not be. The familiescould be described as complex in the sense that wehave come to expect that ‘proper’ family life shouldbe modelled on a very narrow range of biological

2 The children and their families

5

The children and their families

kin with its base in marriage.1 Even though thismay not be the experience of a great many families,culturally we seem now to expect this kind ofsimple model (see ‘divorced families’ below). Weexpect that where a man and a woman co-residethen the children in the household will be their, andexclusively their, biological children. Where this isnot the case there is a tendency to feel that suchfamilies are breaking fundamental rules of kinship.Even where the children themselves seem perfectlycomfortable with the arrangement, the languagethey are obliged to use forces them into a‘realisation’ that their family structure is‘abnormal’:

Q: So you call them mum and dad. Yes?You know you said he’s not your realdad, you’ve got somebody elsewho’s your real dad, is he real dad forany of your brothers and sisters?

Danni (5): Yeah, he’s for my little brother Dave.My [social] dad is Dave’s real dad aswell. Me and Phil shared a [real] dadeach, and Amber and Stella shared adad, and Aubrey just shared his dadby himself.

Some children broke these rigid rules of kinshipthemselves simply because they came to love asocial father or another child more than theirimmediate biological kin:

Joely (9): And then my stepdad brought me upas a real dad. That’s why I call himdad. I don’t call him stepdad orThomas any more because I like itcalling him dad, because if I do callhim Thomas it’s really upsettingbecause I won’t have a dad to calldad will I? ... He’s really kind and henever smacks me. He never smacksany of the other children.

Joely would not call her ‘real’ father dad butinsisted on using his first name. In the householdshe lives in she has four half-siblings by twodifferent fathers. The man who is social father to allthese children and who has lived with her motherfor several years is not actually biological father toany of them. Joely also has two half-siblings on her‘real’ father’s side. They live with her father and hisnew partner (i.e. not their biological mother). Joelyrefuses to see her ‘real’ father any more eventhough she once wanted to find out more abouthim (see Chapter 3).

Claiming non-kin as kin could also happen in ahorizontal way. So children would not always wantstep-siblings to be thought of as ‘step’ and half-siblings were thought of mainly as full-siblings.

Q: And is she a real sister?Lucy (8): Well, we like to pretend we are

sisters so it doesn’t get us upset andmy mum said to me, ‘It’s like you’veboth been sisters because you’velived together since ...’, I were onlysix when Emma came to live withme ... She used to tell me what it[not living with her mother] was likeand now that I have got older we telleach other every day nearly about.[Emma and Lucy are cousins]

In addition to these relatively complex familyarrangements, the lives of many of these childrencould be described as being at risk from a range ofpotentially adverse events beyond their control.Three of the children had fathers who were (or hadbeen) in prison, one additional father was involvedin criminal activity (‘nicking things’), it seemspossible that some fathers were involved in illicitdrug use and one child had a much older brotherwho had died in gaol. Social workers and policeofficers were features of their lives, even if they didnot intrude directly into their own households:

6


Sam (6): At my house someone died. Somenasty people came and hit Patrick onthe head, the back of the head, there[demonstrates]. He played music inthe pub and it got me to sleep but hedoesn’t now, ’cos he died.[Sam lives in a flat over a pub.]

Lee (9): My dad didn’t move out, the copperstook him out. He got accused ofarmed robbery and he keeps, he’smoved prison now ... Coppers brokeme dad’s knuckles and wrists, youknow, putting handcuffs on him. Andthey took him and said, ‘That’s it’,and put him in prison.

Family violence was also virtually a definingcharacteristic for almost a half of these children.Sometimes it was directed only at mothers byfathers, sometimes it was directed at children aswell and sometimes it was mothers who wereviolent towards the children. These children oftentook hitting and slapping for granted as normalforms of parent–child interaction but, in somecases, it was clear from the way that the childrenspoke that some forms of hitting went beyond this:

Dale (5): Only times I don’t love my mum isbecause she hits me all t’time.... Lisa[adult sister]’s all right. Lisa don’t hitme all t’time ... Our Conrad [olderbrother] punches me. One dayConrad kicked me in’t eye andpunched me in’t nose ... and I had ablack eye and a black nose, and bloodwas dripping down ... When I’m back[with dad] I’m safe.

Joely (9): My dad went to prison when mymum was pregnant and she broke upwith him because when she waspregnant he kept beating her up.

Divorced families

It was clear from our individual interviews andfrom the general tenor of the group sessions thatchildren whose families have been grouped in thiscategory felt that they inhabited a safe personalspace. Their lives did not seem to be precarious norpotentially fraught with trauma or upheaval. In thegroup discussions, it was clear that they werefamiliar with adult anger and arguments, but theydid not use the language of physical chastisementin anything like the same way that the childrenfrom some of the aggregated families did. Ifsomething like a drunken episode occurred it wasexperienced as shocking and frightening, ratherthan fairly common. Of course, this does not meanthat unpleasant events never happened. We have toacknowledge that children might have opted tokeep quiet about such events because they wouldhave been seen as shameful or dishonourable. But,even if this was the case, there was still animportant distinction to be made between thebroad situational contexts and value systems inwhich these two sets of children were beingbrought up. Six-year-old Sophie, for example,recounted how her father had indulged inoutbursts of destructive, drunken violence at thetime of the separation, some of which she hadwitnessed and which she had found extremelyfrightening. However, the violence had beendirected at objects, not at people. Subsequently, shewas able to hold these upsetting memories inbalance with more positive ones. Her father provedreliable and caring during contact visits, andshowed himself to be committed to theirrelationship:

Sometimes I ring him up. And other times I just readhis letters and postcards he sends me. Whenever,like, we go to a castle or somewhere [during contactvisits] we get a postcard and then I write in it or hewrites in it. And if I forget it he sends it.

7


We have identified the main characteristics ofthe sort of family transitions that this group ofchildren experienced as straightforward divorced

families. By this we mean that the typicalexperience seemed to be one where parents weremarried and cohabited for a period of time, raisingtheir children. They then ceased to be happytogether and decided to divorce/separate. Onparting, the parents invariably remained in touchwith their children:

Adam (9): On Tuesday I have to go swimmingso I come round here [father’s house]at about 6 o’clock and come back [tomother’s] at about 8 o’clock. OnWednesday he normally does notcome to get me because I’ve got togo to band practice, so that’s why Inormally go on Tuesdays. Originally,when we changed the days, mymum went to college on Tuesdaysand Thursdays and I used to goWednesdays so I did not see mymum for three days, so we changedit for Tuesdays so that I could see mymum on Wednesday.

It was rare for there to be more than two full-siblings in these families and the children weremuch less likely than those in our first category tohave step- and half-siblings. Of course, the mothersin these families might well have gone on torepartner and have further children, but if so thiswas in the future for most of the six and nine yearolds we spoke to. The households were less denselypopulated than those of aggregated families.However, for these children, grandparents werealso important figures. In two cases, mothers hadmoved back to the area to be with their parentsand, for others who had not left, their maternalgrandparents were close by anyway.

With these families we did not find anyincidence where step-parents replaced biological

parents in children’s affections. Their parents’ newpartners may have been really important to thembut they tended to be depicted as additional kindor useful adults rather than as substitutes. All ofthese children had found the period of the divorcedistressing and ‘sad’, and a few had been veryfrightened because of the behaviour of a parent, butfor the majority their family situation had settleddown again and found a new equilibrium.

Meshed families

This group shares the characteristics of thedivorced families, above, but is distinguished bythe quality of the relationships between thechildren and their parents, and also with wider kin.In many families, including those we have called‘divorced’, we gained the impression thatchildren’s lives and parents’ lives were separate,parallel existences. Children could be acuteobservers of the activities and relationships of theadults with whom they lived. Nonetheless, therewas a sense in which they occupied worlds which,whilst revolving around each other, remaineddistinct. This was evident, too, in relation tograndparents or wider kin, who sometimesprovided practical, emotional, or economicassistance, but had their separate lives andpreoccupations. In the case of the families we turnto now, there was much more meshing of thegenerations. The children, especially the girls,seemed to have a great awareness of the emotionallives of their parents, and particularly their mothers– not because their mothers treated them as adultsor even as friends – but because there seemed to bea particular interest and investment in the lives offamily members across generations.

We have classified the families as meshed. By thiswe mean that emotions and feelings were notsuppressed and the children, but especially thegirls, were emotionally literate and articulatebeyond other children in our sample:

8


Miriam (10): I think my dad misses out. Isometimes feel sorry for him. Mymum has moved to Greystoke, gotthis new life and a load of newfriends and sometimes I feel my dadhas been left behind and stuff.

Although there was much indication of familyrows and difficulties in this group, there was nosuggestion of domestic violence, nor of violencetowards children. Family life was lived withpassion, at good times and at bad. The extendedfamily (particularly grandmothers andgrandfathers) could be very significant. In one caseit was the interference of the extended family thatcaused the parents to separate, although later theygot back together:

Sasha (10): My mum’s always the first one onthe dance floor. She’s not old-fashioned or anything, she is a reallycool mum ... There was a period of acouple of months last year whenmum and dad, they were having areally hard time and mum went to afriend’s. They were fighting everynight loads and ... we didn’t like it, itwas really horrible, because therewere problems with the family. Mydad’s side of the family were reallybeing rude to my mum’s side ... Andthey were fighting over that. So mumwent to her friend’s house for acouple of months ... I was afraid shewouldn’t ever come back and my dadwasn’t coping very well. And I mean,I wasn’t coping very well either ...And then she came back and theytook a really long holiday together, sothat was okay.

Grandparents, too, were closely involved in theaffairs of the immediate family, providing children

with a source of support but without disguisingany partisan feelings which they felt:

Miriam (10): We used to have a little saying thatwe used to say to my grandma whenthings got really horrible, we used tosay ‘Can I sleep at your housetonight?’ and she used to go, ‘Well,go on then, fine’ ... [But sometimesshe] used to slag off my dad. Thatwas really horrible ... She shouted atme if I said ‘I hate mummy formessing up this family. I hate daddyfor messing up this family’, and allthis. She’d start yelling and say it wasall dad’s fault.

In these families children were highly attunedto those around them. There was much interest intheir parents’ lives and, where parents hadseparated permanently, in their new relationships,and the arrival of new children.

Diasporic families

As we have explained in Chapter 1, we wereseeking to interview children whose families hadgone through important transitions and changes.We did not specify only divorce, not least becausewe did not want possibly to stigmatise a particulargroup of children in the school, but also because wewere aware that divorce is a culturally specific formof family transition. It is also an ‘adult’-orienteddefinition which implies that divorce is the only, ormost problematic, form of change that occurs infamilies. With this fourth family typology, adifferent picture emerged which was much harderto classify. None of the accounts formed an obviouspattern beyond what we have identified asresembling a small diaspora.

By this we mean that a common factor for manyof the children was an episode when a parent wouldleave the family, only to return later, or where there

9


was ‘no change’ yet kin were dispersed. In the case ofa Pakistani girl, her father took her older brother toPakistan for a year. Obviously she understood that hewould be coming back, but during that time shemissed her father and brother. Their absence did notsimply mean an emotional loss but altered thedynamics of family life, as her father was the mainauthority figure in the household:

Yasmin (6): It was like my little brother wasn’tscared now, because you know why?Because if he’s not good my dadusually hits him. So he wasn’t scaredthen ... When we go in the shop,right, he starts to scream in the shopand says, ‘I want that thing’ ... Andsometimes when he goes outside hethrows [his toy] on the corner and itgoes in the gutter.

A ten-year-old boy called Chaney had neverlived with his father, although he had seen himregularly until a year previously when the fathermoved away for his job. Chaney remained livingwith his mother and two half-siblings, and kept intouch with his father by letter. Ellie, who was ten,had a father who left her mother for anotherwoman with whom he had two children. He thenreturned to her mother and has stayed ever since.His two youngest children come to visit and staywith the family. Nadine’s father was living inAfrica and she had been brought to England by hergrandmother to live with her mother and cousin. InKelsie’s case, her parents often rowed and split upfor a few days, but then managed to get backtogether. She felt that her family might be on thebrink of a divorce or separation from time to time.Finally, Makeda described a long-standingrelationship between her parents which wasoccasionally violent but also involved mutualsupport:

Makeda (6): I’ve got a dad but he doesn’t live withme ... We kind of see him every day.We come and look around and thenwe have a hug and a kiss and thenwe go back home. We wouldn’t wantto stay there because there’s no TV... He wants to get some moremoney ’cos mummy’s running out ofmoney.

Q: So does he help your mummy?Makeda: Yes. Sometimes when he comes

around. Sometimes he gives mumsome money ... When we movedinto the new house he decoratedwith mum.

Some of these differences clearly reflect culturaldifferences. It is not at all unusual for Pakistanifathers to take their children back to Pakistan for aperiod, nor is it unusual for African children tocome to England during their school years andthen perhaps to settle permanently (especially iftheir families have refugee status). It may also bethe case that more parents are opting to ‘livetogether apart’ although we do not yet havestatistics on this potentially new pattern ofhousehold formation. These mini diasporas offamily networks are not caused by divorce and sothere is a tendency for them to fall outside thescope of studies of family change or ‘breakdown’.Yet the changing arrangements that children mayexperience in these families may be just assignificant as divorce is to children living in nuclearfamilies.

Conclusion

The main conclusion to be drawn from this outlineof the different family arrangements we found isthat it becomes starkly obvious that there is no onesingle type of family that experiences change ordivorce. Moreover, processes of divorce and

10


separation can themselves take different forms andthen in turn they occur in the context of differentfamily cultures. Thus socio-economic class, gender,religion, and ethnicity can combine to produceimmensely different experiences for children whosefamilies are going through change. Although it hasbecome popular to acknowledge diversity in familyforms and structures, we have not yet sufficientlycarried this recognition through into debates ondivorce and separation. Indeed, it is our argumentthat the very concentration on divorce (as if it were areadily identifiable single transition from one type offamily to another) obscures our understanding ofprofoundly different experiences of family life andlife course transitions. Although some of thechildren we interviewed fitted into the perceiveddominant model of marriage, economic security andthen the potentially traumatic experience of divorce,others manifestly did not. These latter experienceshave tended to be excluded from debates on studiesof divorce and pushed into discussions about suchthings as family violence or family poverty, as ifthese were separate issues.2 Thiscompartmentalisation of children’s family lives hasrobbed debates on divorce of a proper appreciationof the complexities of families. What is moreproblematic has been the tendency to assume that itis divorce itself which gives rise to the problems thatare publicly revealed after divorce or separation, butwhich may in fact have been a staple part of familylife beforehand. It is therefore important to expandthe concept of divorce into the wider notion offamily transition so that we are more open tochildren’s own definitions of families and whatmatters to them when families change, ebb and flow.Only then can we begin to see a much more complexpicture which is better fitted to understanding the

lived reality of diverse families.Another of the most important consequences

arising from defining families from the perspectiveof the children is that one moves away from ideasof ‘broken’ families, ‘dysfunctional’ families, or‘one-parent’ families towards an understandingbased much more upon the qualities ofrelationships and the significance of co-residenceand care. The typology derived from ourinterviews with children outlined above does not(or at least tries not to) carry implicit valuejudgements. Terms like ‘broken’ always impart aparticular meaning that is negative. By comparisonterms like ‘aggregated’, ‘demonstrative’, ‘meshed’and ‘diasporic’ should not instantly imply failureor inadequacy. From the perspective of children anaggregated family could be caring and warm, or itcould be alien and unsettling. In a diasporic familya divorce might be a good thing or a bad thing, or itmight make little difference, as far as a child isconcerned. Thus, for some children, divorce orseparation were the least of their worries, while forothers they felt like major traumas. How childrenreacted was related to the nature of their previousexperiences as well as the quality of therelationships they had (or established) withsignificant adults.

What we hope to demonstrate is that divorce orseparation occurs in the context of dynamicrelationships which are already located in a culturalcontext. Family life is not a flat landscape markedonly by marital dissolution or cohabitationbreakdown. Unless we can bring back into ourvision of families the contours and flux of real lifeas it is experienced, we risk formulating policies,programmes and laws that bear little relationshipto everyday life.

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Why is it that, after the initial upset and disruption,some children adapt with relative ease to a parentalseparation while others struggle? There is nowevidence that most children rise to the challenge offamily reordering but that there is a minority whoremain troubled long after the break-up of theirparents’ relationship (Hetherington, 1989; Rodgersand Pryor, 1998; Hetherington and Stanley-Hagan,1999; Smart et al., 2001). The children in this studyare no exception and there are stark divergences intheir experiences. By their own reports, many of thechildren we interviewed were content with theircircumstances. But 18 found some aspects of theirfamily lives and relationships difficult and anothereight described severe emotional pressures.Amongst these 26 children were eight whoseparents had been separated for less than a year.Putting their accounts aside in view of therelatively short time which they had had to adjust,what emerges as being at the heart of much of thedisquiet which children voiced is uncertainty aboutparental commitment. The children’s accounts oftheir day-to-day family activities and practicesconveyed, with varying degrees of directness, agreat deal about their perceptions of the quality oftheir relationships and the extent to which theybelieved themselves to matter to their parents.Three broad groups can be distinguished within thesample as a whole:

• Children who, irrespective of their parents’separation, benefited from close supportivelinks with both parents and who wereconfident that they were important to each ofthem. These children invariably describedthemselves as happy.

• Children who felt that the commitment ofone parent (usually their non-residentparent) had diminished with the separationdespite there being ongoing contact. Thesechildren often expressed distress as theywere coming to believe that they no longer

mattered to this parent as they once haddone.

• Children who were unsure if they had evermattered to one or both parents. Where theyknew themselves to be loved by onecommitted parent, or had formed close tieswith ‘new’ parents, these children sometimesexpressed little interest in an absent parentwith whom they had had no realinvolvement. A number, however, weremade deeply unhappy by this perceived lackof parental commitment and care.

In what follows we have constructed threegroups of case studies that typify these positive andnegative experiences. We then go on to consider theimplications of promoting contact between childrenand their parents when parental commitment isuncertain.

Committed relationships with both parents

Many of the children we spoke to were embeddedwithin a network of close family relationshipswhich worked for them and which included bothof their birth parents. One or both parents mighthave repartnered but the distinctive feature of thesechildren’s accounts was that they knew withcertainty that they were loved by, and important to,them both. It was not simply that each of theirparents was involved in the children’s lives but thatthey both actively communicated theircommitment and care. These family arrangementscan be said to exemplify the ethos of joint parentingpromoted by the Children Act 1989, an objective ofwhich was to shift the mind-set of divorcingparents away from the concept of ‘winning’ or‘losing’ their children towards anacknowledgement of the shared nature of theenterprise of post-divorce parenting (Hoggett, 1994;Smart and Neale, 1999).

3 Relationships that matter

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Case studies

Richard

Nine-year-old Richard has lived with his motherand seven-year-old sister Amy since his parentsseparated two years ago. The children haveroutinely visited their father on alternate weekendsthroughout this time. Richard would prefer hisparents to be together but is no longer undulytroubled by their separation:

Q: How do you think things haveworked out for you? If you gave it amark out of ten, what would you giveit now?

Richard: Seven.

But, as he explained, it had taken him sometime to adjust:

It took me a year-and-a-half to get over it. ’Cos Imissed my dad.

Richard’s main concern, when his parentsseparated, was that he would lose touch with hisfather as he moved to live in the South East. In fact,his father kept in close contact and never failed tocollect Richard and Amy for their weekend visits.However, the long car journeys were tiring andRichard was conscious that his father was far away.The turning point came when his father decided toreturn to the North. In practical terms this hasmeant that Richard sees more of him. Whereasbefore he had to email his father with news of hisprogress in the school football team, his dad nowcomes to watch his matches. The morefundamental point, however, is that Richard hasbeen reassured about his father’s commitment. Hisdecision to live nearer to the children and his activesupport of Richard’s interests are, for Richard,conclusive evidence of this.

Adam

Neither of Richard’s parents has repartneredalthough he expects that they may do in the future.He sometimes talks about this with his classmate,

Adam, as Richard is keen to know what it is like tohave a ‘new’ family. Both of Adam’s parents haveremarried. In addition to his ‘new’ parents, Adamhas a stepbrother of his own age (through hisfather’s new relationship) and a younger half-sister(through his mother’s). His main home is with hismother but he stays overnight with his father atleast twice a week. Adam spoke of all the membersof his divorce-extended family with warmth andaffection. The extent to which both sets of parentswork together to support the children was shownby numerous comments in Adam’s interview. Hetold us, for example, that his stepbrother Andrew,who has become his close friend and ally, regularlystays with him at his mother’s house. Andrew hasno genetic ties with any member of Adam’smother’s household but is treated as a familymember. This matters to Adam as he wantsAndrew to be seen as his brother by both of hisparents (and his step-parents), and for the sharingof a home by the two boys to be a reciprocalarrangement. The willingness of both of hisfamilies to acknowledge how important this is tohim tangibly demonstrates their commitment tohim.

Diminished commitment

Many of the children who were struggling tomanage the changes brought about by theirparents’ separation were troubled, above all else,by alterations in their relationship with their non-resident parent (usually their father). Acharacteristic scenario has some similarities withthat of children whose families transcendseparation in that the children remained in contactwith their father. But, despite these contactarrangements, they were beginning to question thestrength of their father’s commitment. Often thiswas because they saw him developing a new life inwhich they themselves played little part, and theyfelt that his attention was inexorably shifting awayto new interests and new family ties. However,

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Relationships that matter

repartnering was not always responsible for thesechanges. A parent’s insensitivity to children’sinterests or feelings about contact arrangementscould also leave them feeling that they no longermattered as they once had done.

Case study

JJ

Ten-year-old JJ’s parents have been separated forthree years. He lives with his mother and youngerbrother, and has regular weekly contact with hisfather. Yet, despite the reliability of thesearrangements, JJ has become increasingly unhappyand, by his own report, was experiencingemotional and behavioural problems at home andat school. He said:

It’s been three years and still new problems keephappening and I just have to keep coping and copingand coping until I can’t. And it’s getting to ‘I can’t’now.

JJ’s father had repartnered, introducing a newparent and a new stepbrother into his life, and hisstepmother had recently become pregnant. Hefound this sequence of changes difficult in itself buthis main problem was the quality of hisrelationship with his father. In response to aquestion about the important people in his life hereferred to his mother and brother thencommented, ‘My dad is but I don’t really...’ Later,we picked this remark up and he told us:

It’s going to start to go worser than it is now, eventhough I don’t like it and I’m nearly in tears. Becausethere’s a new baby coming and think of it – pram,baby chair, ‘why is it crying?’. It’s going to be muchharder now ... it feels a lot more [sigh] how do I sayit? Er, lot more per cent that I won’t see him a lot.

Despite regularly spending time with his father,JJ was concerned about losing him. He was openabout his anxiety about how the arrival of the newbaby would affect his relationship with his father,

but his upset was compounded by his father’sapparent lack of regard for JJ’s own social life andinterests:

JJ: I see him every Wednesday andSunday ... but the trouble is I don’treally like it, yes I do like my dad it’sjust I don’t like going onWednesdays. ’Cos on Wednesdays Igo to the Base [youth club] and itstops me from going to the Base ifI’m going to my dad’s.

Q: So that makes it hard for you, doesit?

JJ: Not really hard but makes me quitesad. When I go there I’m in tears ...My mum’s all right taking me but mydad, I asked my dad, he’s too tired.Grandma and Grandpa’s got friendsround. That’s it ... And he’s going tohave a lot more excuses ’cos ‘I’vegot to look after the baby, Tammy[new partner] can’t cope’.

From JJ’s perspective, seeing his father was notthe crucial issue; what he wanted was to know thathe mattered to him. His father’s inability tocommunicate his commitment to JJ in practicalways, such as supporting his social activities andhobbies, meant that spending time with his fathercould heighten rather than diminish his sense ofunimportance. JJ mistrusted his father’s explanationsand saw them as excuses. He compared his presentlife negatively with the past, and was left wishingthat the separation had never occurred:

Every time I go to bed I think this is all a dream ...One day I’ll wake up and say ‘Hi mum’, and dad willbe there and I’ll say ‘Dad, what are you doing here?’ Iknow it’s not true. I think to myself, ‘What are youtalking about JJ?’ but I wish ... and just think in mymind, ‘I hope it’s true’.

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Absent parents

A third group of children had little or no contactwith one birth parent or, less usually, with either.For some of these children their absent parent hadlittle relevance to their lives. Particularly wherethey knew themselves to be loved and cared for bytheir resident parent, or where they had formedclose ties with ‘social’ parents, they gave littlethought to a parent they barely knew. Thesechildren mostly spoke of themselves as beinghappy with the relationships which they had, andknew they could rely on. There were others,however, who were less sanguine and whoseabsent parents took up more mental space. Many ofthese latter children had parents whose ownrelationship was short-lived and often violent, andthe children, too, had sometimes been abused.Rejection was a common feature in their accountsand contact, where it had been attempted, was insome cases resisted by the child, and in others hadraised the child’s expectations only to disappointthem.

Case studies

Christie

Six-year-old Christie appeared to have fewsupportive relationships. Her grandparents weredead and her family had become defined for her ascomprising only her mother and herself. When wespoke to her, her mother was pregnant but was notplanning for the baby’s father to be a part of theirlives. Christie was looking forward to having a newbrother or sister and saw nothing out of theordinary in their circumstances. She had come tothe conclusion that families work best withoutfathers:

I’ve always wanted [just] my mum ’cos my dad, henever did anything for me ... Well, me dad never likedmy mum in the first place ... He just didn’t want herbecause her hair was all fuzzy and stuff [although] heliked her when they were at the pub ... He used to

get in the bedroom, lock me out of the bedroom andnever care and just hit my mum. No matter howmuch I was screaming ... Because when he walks in,he expects that meals are on the table for him and hejust starts getting angry and loses his temper. He justwants everything his way ... I [don’t] ever want to seehim again and never because of what he’s done tomy mum and me.

Christie had no contact with her father. He hadapplied for a contact order but his application wasrefused; Christie had no regrets. When her mothersubsequently found a new partner Christieimagined she would now have a ‘real’ father, butwas quickly disillusioned:

He just didn’t want to do anything. I couldn’t evenwatch programmes after school, it was just horseracing or wrestling ... I just didn’t think it was thatgood. To have a dad like that. Or any dad.

So, at the age of six, Christie had neverexperienced what it was like to have a committedfather. Nor had she seen any evidence ofcommitment from her father (or from subsequentcohabitants) to her mother. She ‘knew’ that not allmen behaved in this way, and wondered why hermother’s relationships took the course they did.Reflecting that her mother’s boyfriends werealways ‘nasty’, she remarked ‘I don’t know whypeople are always nasty to my mum?’ Yet, ifChristie was saddened by these experiences, shewas nevertheless positive in her outlook. Ratherthan feeling that she herself was rejected by herfather she chose to reject him, constructing his lackof involvement in her life as a benefit rather than aloss. Also, she was confident in her relationshipwith her mother, and knew that she mattered toher. She therefore remained hopeful:

Me and my mum’s going to get over it soon. Time ...We don’t think about it that much, we think about thebaby. How it’s going to be and when it’s grown upand stuff.

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Joely

Joely (aged nine) was remarkably resilient in heroutlook. For many years she had believed herfather to be Thomas, her mother’s cohabitee. It wasonly when she was six that she learnt that this wasnot so:

Q: How did you find out that Mark isyour real dad?

Joely (9): I couldn’t get to sleep so I wentdown with mum and she waswatching Emmerdale, she let mestay down, then I think summat justslipped out of my mum’s head andshe said, ‘Come here, Joely’ and shetold me, and it was really, reallyupsetting. But then I ignored my dad[Thomas] for ... about eight weeks ...because I thought when I was little,that he took Mark off my mum.

Q: So, tell me how you started to seeMark?

Joely: Cos I was carrying on, just to seehim, what he was like. He sent somephotos and a letter saying, my mumwas a little bit upset, ’cos he sent aletter saying ‘Come and live with menow’. And he says ‘We can go onholiday together’ ... But I didn’t wantto go and live with him anyway ...Just [wanted] to find out who he wasand how he looked.

Having discovered the existence of her ‘real’father Joely, unsurprisingly, wanted to get to knowhim. It seems that there was an attempt by everyoneconcerned to support her in this (despite concernsabout Mark’s background) for contact wasestablished and she eventually went to stay with herfather and his new family for a short time. However,the relationship she hoped for never developed.Extravagant promises made to her by her fathercame to nothing, and Joely gradually discovered thatthis would be the pattern of their relationship:

I don’t care about him any more because everythinghe’s promised, he lets me down all the time.

What finally turned Joely against her father wasdiscovering his propensity to violence. Thisfrightened Joely, and the more she learnt of him themore certain she became that she did not like himor wish to continue seeing him. She was helped inreaching her decision by the comparison she wasable to draw between Mark and her social father,Thomas. She told us:

I got into like, he was my dad. But I think he’s notbecause really my dad’s Thomas, he’s the one thatbrought me up and I like it that way.

Joely was fortunate in that when she becamedisillusioned with Mark as a father she still hadThomas who had been reliable and dependablethroughout. From her perspective, the lack of agenetic link with Thomas is unimportant; he andher mother and her siblings are what constitutesher family because they are the ones involved inthe day-to-day family activities which build ties ofcommitment and care. It is arguable, however, thatit helped Joely to meet Mark and form her ownopinion of him. The fantasy which she was temptedto construct in her mind lost whatever influence itmight have had once it was exposed to the realityof Mark himself.

Matthew

Ten-year-old Matthew was being brought up by hismaternal grandparents. He had no contact with hismother and made no mention of his father. He said:

[My mum]’s left home. She sent me to court for mygrandma to get me ’cos she didn’t want me. Shewanted to go out partying and drinking and that. Sheleft everything that my grandma and grandad got forher and left.

Matthew was eight months old when hismother gave him up. He remained deeplypreoccupied by this event, despite having closerelationships with his grandparents; as he put it, ‘I

16


still have it in my mind, like’. He had been given anexplanation of why he lived with his grandparentsand not his mother (‘She wanted to go out partyingand drinking’) but this did not satisfy him. Thequestion which he wanted to have answered wasthe more fundamental one, ‘Why didn’t she wantme?’ This was all the more pointed for him as hewas aware that his mother now had other childrenwhom she was raising herself. Eventually, inresponse to his repeated questions, hisgrandmother arranged for him to meet his motherso that he could talk to her directly. But the meetingwas not a success:

When I seen [my mum], I just wanted to see her byherself but she brought somebody with her. And Ithought, ‘This is a complete stranger to me’. And Isays, I exactly said to her ‘I want you by yourself’, andshe just ignored me. And I never got any answers outof my mum ... She just sat there doing nowt whileTina [her friend] just kept talking. Like when I said toher, ‘Why did you leave me?’, Tina talked. Sara wasjust going like this [bored expression].

Although much about his relationship to hismother was shrouded in mystery for Matthew, theone thing he ‘knew’ with certainty was that hismother had not ‘wanted’ him. And what he readfrom his eventual meeting with her wasconfirmation of this; she ‘ignored’ his request to seeher alone; she let her friend speak for her ratherthan answering his questions herself; she pulled aface, as if she were bored. Irrespective of whetherMatthew’s interpretation is correct, this is what hebelieves. Unsurprisingly, this sense of rejection isdifficult for Matthew to live with. At school, andelsewhere, he is acutely sensitive to references tohis mother; perceived taunts from other children(see Chapter 5) make it hard for him to control hisfeelings: ‘I get so worked up, I sort of like, do owt’,he said.

Commitment and contact

The prevailing stereotype of divorce constructs thisas a source of harm to children because itundermines the security which young children arepresumed to need, and which is widely regarded asbeing based in a loving and reliable relationshipwith both parents. As a means of minimising therisk posed by separation and divorce, family policyand legislation emphasise that ongoing contactwith both parents is a ‘right’ to which children areentitled (Fortin, 1998). However, this policyassumes that all children have two parents who areequally there for them and this is demonstrably notthe case. Although the majority of children in oursample had strong ties of affection and care withboth birth parents, others were less fortunate. Forthese latter children, the value of contact wassometimes questionable. Spending time with aparent who – for whatever reason – is unable tocommunicate commitment beyond the simple factof their presence can, as JJ’s story shows, bepainful. Similarly, efforts to promote or reinvigorateparent–child relationships which have never beenestablished or which are already seriouslycompromised may only lead to children beingrequired to see someone who cannot sustain thenecessary commitment. Clearly, decisions aboutcontact are complex. The risks and benefitsinvolved can only be assessed individually for, asthe accounts of Joely and Matthew suggest,information about a biological parent is oftenbound up with children’s sense of identity.Nonetheless, in some cases, children may find iteasier to live without a parent (even if temporarily)than to repeatedly face the failure of their hopesand legitimate expectations. At the same time, thereneeds to be a wider recognition of the fact that theabsence of a genetic parent from children’s livesdoes not invariably spell harm. As some of thechildren we spoke to made clear, it is the quality oftheir relationships that matters, not biological

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connection per se. Children can feel confident inthemselves and their family relationships whetherthey have two committed parents or one; equally,the care shown by social parents can be no lessvaluable than that of genetic kin. We wouldtherefore argue that, while the promotion of contacthas undoubtedly done much to ensure thatchildren’s family relationships transcend divorce,this policy needs to be balanced by support for the

relationships which children have and which workfor them, whether based in blood or in social ties.

Moving now from the divergences betweenchildren to the commonalities which they share, wefound remarkable similarities in children’sattitudes towards the kinds of help which theyvalue. This is the subject of the chapters whichfollow.

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We begin our examination of the resourcesavailable to children to help them manage changesin their family lives by considering children aspeople capable of dealing themselves with everydayproblems. We therefore focus in this chapter on thestrategies which children described as helpingthem to cope emotionally with the upset associatedwith a parental separation, drawing on both groupand individual interviews. All quotations are fromindividual interviews unless otherwise stated.

Can children manage their own feelings?

The idea that young children actively manage theirfeelings is one that arouses surprise among manyadults (Waksler, 1991). For all that concepts ofchildhood are changing, age remains closely boundup with notions of competence (Hutchby andMoran-Ellis, 1998). Young children, especially, areoften thought to have, at best, limited capabilities.This is particularly so in terms of understandingthe thoughts and behaviour of others, or copingwith personal dilemmas or difficulties withoutadult support. Added to this, their physicalsmallness, dependency and perceived social‘innocence’ trigger powerful desires to shield themfrom the harsher realities of life. All of this hasgenerated a climate in which, traditionally, parentshave been encouraged to protect their childrenfrom learning of any problems they (the parents)are facing (Reynolds, 2001), in the comforting beliefthat, unless explicitly confronted with what ishappening, the children will not ‘notice’. This viewis engagingly captured in a (1994) article byHoggett on the private law provisions of theChildren Act 1989, where she notes:

[Children] can be sublimely indifferent to theirparents’ unhappiness as long as it does not concernthem directly. They suffer when their parents’conflicts put their own little worlds at risk, but less soif their parents can hide the conflict from them.(Hoggett, 1994, p. 9)

Yet, as Anne Fine, the children’s laureate, hasremarked, children are ‘half-sized, not half-brained’,1 and take a keen interest in the socialworld from an early age. Stories, from traditionalfairy tales to Harry Potter, offer them animaginative means of making sense of thecomplexities of social relationships and engagingwith worrying or frightening aspects of everydaylife (Bettelheim, 1975; Rustin and Rustin, 2001).Even more importantly, family life provides themwith abundant opportunities to gain an entry intosocial understanding. Tizard and Hughes (1984),and Dunn (1996), have provided vivid accounts ofthe persistence with which children as young asthree or four pursue answers to the questions thatpuzzle or intrigue them. They show children’sfascination with understanding how the worldworks and why people behave as they do. Otherclinical and developmental psychologists(Rothbaum et al., 1982; Band and Weisz, 1988;Thurber and Weisz, 1997) have identified children’sresponses to day-to-day problems, classifying theseas involving:

• changing the world (trying to alter theirexternal circumstances)

• changing themselves (trying to change theirinternal states) or

• giving up (doing nothing).

We therefore began with the assumption thatthe children we interviewed would have madeefforts to understand why their parents hadseparated and would also be able to describe howthey (or a fictional child) could help themselvesduring times of upset linked to family change. Inparticular, we wanted to know the children’s viewson the coping strategies that work best, and howthese help. Before moving on to outline ourfindings, two points of particular interest emergedfrom the individual interviews which are worthnoting:

4 Emotional coping

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Emotional coping

• Despite the differences in the children’slifestyles and experiences, there were manysimilarities in their attitudes towards copingand support, with more differences emergingbetween boys and girls, and older andyounger children, than between childrenfrom dissimilar social circumstances.

• There were no children who said there wasnothing that could be done if they wereupset by changes taking place in theirfamilies, despite their restricted scope toinfluence or alter their parents’ decisions.

Coping strategies

The coping strategies that the children identifiedwere overwhelmingly concerned with emotionalcoping (‘changing themselves’). In their focusgroups they enjoyed fantasising about taking directaction to reunite parents intent on a separation, orto sabotage parents’ new relationships. But theyinvariably acknowledged that in reality there wasusually little they could do to influence parents’personal lives or decisions; in other words, theirscope for strategies based on ‘changing the world’was highly restricted. So, in practice, theyconcentrated on altering their own states of mind(if they were unhappy), as this gave them someprospect of making a real difference. Theirpreferred means of coping fell into two broadgroups, which we have called:

• diversion

• emotional expression.

As will become apparent in the chapters thatfollow, the children’s preference for diversionaryand emotionally expressive strategies was notrestricted to their individual coping efforts but wasalso a feature of their attitudes towards helpgenerally. Below, however, we restrict ourselves tothe part they played in children’s management oftheir emotional responses to family change.

Diversion

Family transitions are not events but processes, andtake time. This means that children’s coping effortsoften have to be extended ones. It is this necessityto live with upset and uncertainty over aconsiderable period of time that can make theprocess of coping so difficult and demanding.When coupled with children’s inability to altertheir external circumstances in any significant way,it is undoubtedly also this feature of familytransitions that makes diversion so appealing,because the hardest thing, children said, was toretain a sense of normality:

Q: What is the hardest thing for childrenif mums and dads split up?

Rekha (9): To keep their life going.

Elise (10): There’s nothing children can do [ifparents split up]. It’s because it’s theirparents. There’s no point gettinginvolved because it might make itworse.

Q: So what’s the best thing to do?Elise: Try and forget what’s happened and

get on with normal life.

It is not that children were oblivious to whatwas taking place, or wanted to pretend thatnothing was happening. As numerous studies havenow shown, children are keen to be treated as fullmembers of their families (Smart et al., 2001); tohave information about changes that will affectthem, and opportunities to participate in the plansthat their parents are making for them (Walzac andBurns, 1984; Mitchell, 1985; Cockett and Tripp,1994; Fincham et al., 2001). The children in thepresent study were no exception to this. But theyindicated that, when their family life was disruptedand uncertain, they also needed opportunities torid themselves temporarily of their anxieties. It wasat these times that diversion offered an escaperoute and a means of buffering themselves againstthe upsetting events around them. The primary

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goal of this set of behaviours was, as the childrenexpressed it, to forget.

One means of achieving this was throughavoidance. The drawing shown below in Figure 2 isa semi-humorous reference to this by a ten-year-old, Ben.

In his picture, Ben shows two brothers absorbedin watching a football match on the television whiletheir parents argue in the same room. During afocus group discussion, when writing acollaborative story about parental separation, hehad commented that boys and girls react differentlyto this type of event:

Ben (10): [The boys] don’t care about it. Tara[their sister] cares about it and shegets upset but the boys don’t. If theyare watching the TV at night and[their parents] start arguing they justsit there ... and ignore it.

Q: So Tara will try to understand what ishappening but Colin and James willtry to ignore it, will they?

Ben: Yeah. Because there are better thingsto watch on TV.(Extracted from group interview)

In the context of a mixed-sex group the childrenhad enjoyed debating whether girls are more‘sensitive’ than boys. With his drawing, Ben wasenjoying a chance to provoke the girls with hisassertion of a particular male stereotype.Nevertheless, in individual interviews, some boyswere open about their efforts to block out upsettingevents:

JJ (10): When they [parents] started fighting,I just turned my back. Just went tomy room.

Girls preferred to think that, faced with arguingparents, they would try to act as peacemakers.They too, however, often spoke of times when theyhad wanted to forget what was happening betweentheir parents, and described numbers of ways inwhich they tried to put distressing thoughts fromtheir minds. Taking refuge in their bedroom wasespecially popular as this was somewhere theycould find privacy, and have recourse toimaginative distractions, such as immersingthemselves in a book or a private game.

Physical comfort was another importantrecourse, particularly for the younger children,who found this a helpful way of reducing bodily

Figure 2 Ben’s picture

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Emotional coping

and mental tension when they were trying to copewith difficult feelings. Cuddling a soft toy in bedwas popular with both boys and girls, and couldalso help an anxious child to feel braver. William(six years old), whose father had been violenttowards both him and his mother, said, ‘When yougo in my bedroom there are teddies guarding allaround my bedroom’. Pets, too, constituted acomforting source of emotional support(McNicholas and Collis, 2001). Several childrenspoke of feeling happier when they stroked orcuddled a pet, or said their pet would lick them‘better’, offer them a sympathetic ear, or cheer themup by joining in a game.

Comfort eating was sometimes referred to,although differences in family practices meant thatsome children risked punishment if they helpedthemselves to food. However, one six-year-old boyexplained that, ‘I have asthma every night. Milkmakes me feel better.’ Similarly, Miriam (10)described how:

I used to stuff myself with chocolate ... to forgetabout it [parents’ arguments] and watch TV till aboutthree o’clock in the morning.

Although most of the children relied on someform of activity to distract themselves and induce ashift in their state of mind, a number employedpurely cognitive strategies and articulated themerits of ‘positive thinking’:

Max (10): Just think about next week when it’sover. And the future, what’s going tohappen. Just leave the past behind’cos it’s happened and you can stillsee your dad. I did that, I didn’t thinkabout the past.

Lucy (8): When I get upset I just think ofsomething nice and then I gethappier, then I cuddle my teddy, thenI go to sleep.

However, perhaps the most frequentlymentioned option was sleep:

Q: What would Jay [vignette character]do if he’s feeling upset?

Sam Brown (9): I think Jay would probably go tosleep. It normally helps me to forget.

Lizzie (10): Jay just goes and lays on his bed andsleeps until morning. ’Cos I feelbetter when I wake up, forget aboutit.

At first glance, these references to sleep aredispiriting, as they seem to imply feelings ofnegativity and powerlessness. A closer reading,however, suggests that such remarks are less aboutgiving up in the face of a situation not of their ownchoosing than bringing about an alteration in theirstate of mind. The children invariably spoke of‘feeling better’ when they woke up, and indicatedthat in most cases it was to achieve this mood shiftthat they sought sleep rather than from a sense ofhopelessness.

Emotional expression

A second set of strategies for emotional coping thatchildren described themselves as using focused onaltering their mood by expressing (and soreleasing) feelings of upset rather than by trying totake their mind off whatever was making themunhappy. Crying is an obvious and acceptable wayof releasing feelings of distress, and is a responsethat we expect from children faced with a parentalseparation. Interestingly, however, childrenthemselves were open that they would often cry asmuch to attract attention and elicit help, as toobtain emotional relief.

Far less acceptable, to many adults, are displaysof anger from children. Nonetheless, this was anemotion that many children described as being onepart of their response to a decision by their parentsto separate. Younger children, especially, talked of

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finding emotional relief in angry or destructiveoutbursts. Asked what a fictional child might do ifa father failed to turn up for a contact visit, theresponses included:

Kelly Marie (6): Smack him.Adam (9): He [child] might be ... flipping things

around and getting bored.Sarah (7): Kick in the door.Patrick (6): [He] gets angry. Messes his bedroom

up.Miriam (10): He might get a bit angry and annoyed

... scream and shout and breakthings.

It is important for us to recognise that suchbehaviour is an expression of distress and to helpchildren find ways of channelling such powerfulemotions. One child who had received such helpwas six-year-old Spike, who said:

Spike (6): If you keep your feelings inside it willmake you poorly. When you’ve gotsome badness it all gets inside you,then you have a tummy ache orsomething.

Q: So what can Jay do?Spike: Well, he’ll like, play with his toys and

cry. Or take deep breaths[demonstrates]. Some children sortof shout and get angry by having afight with their toys, with punching acushion ... because if you feel angryand kick your mum and stuff, thatdoesn’t help. Because it goes backinside you.

Q: What if you kick your toys and notyour mum?

Spike: That doesn’t matter ’cos they don’thave feelings.

Spike was clearly a resourceful child whoenjoyed putting into practice some of the strategieshe had been taught by a counsellor. But it was notbeyond children’s abilities to discover their own

‘safe’ methods for expressing strong feelings. Apopular method amongst some of the older girlswas to express their feelings in a diary or drawing:

Kara (9): I’ve got a secret diary where I put allmy, you know like you’re talking tome about, I’m talking to you aboutmy family, I’ve been putting things inthere, in my diary.

Joely (9): I just scribble on some paper, orstamp on some paper and screw itup when I’m really, really angry ... Itgets all the feeling away. I’ve got ...this table ... and that’s where I candraw, ’cos I’ve got my own room andI’ve got my key to my room. It’s inmy bag, no one can go in mybedroom.

Active or unaware?

What is so striking about many of the children’scomments is their self-awareness andresourcefulness. The five and six year olds mayhave employed a restricted vocabulary whendescribing their own or fictional children’s feelings(usually relying on ‘sad’ or ‘happy’), but even theyoungest children could relate practical steps thatthey or another child might take to makethemselves feel better when upset. Of course,saying what ‘might’ be done is not the same asactually doing this. Nevertheless, the readinesswith which they came up with a range ofpossibilities shows the extent to which childrenactively engage with personal dilemmas ratherthan passively endure them.

The strategies that the children described are,however, open to misinterpretation. We haveargued that diversion and avoidance are copingstrategies that children knowingly employ. But it iseasy for activities such as these to be mistaken assigns that children are ‘unaware’ of what ishappening around them – particularly when this

23

Emotional coping

offers the comforting illusion that it is kinder to saynothing to children than to upset them by keepingthem informed.

24

In the last chapter, we showed how many primary-school-aged children, faced with a parentalseparation, adopt a policy of ‘trying to get on withit’. Knowing that they can do little to alter theircircumstances they try to make the best of thingsand focus their efforts on managing anyunhappiness they feel. As some of the childrenindicated (see Rekha and Elise, Chapter 4), itbecomes important to them to maintain some senseof ‘normal life’ at such times, and it is here thatsiblings and friends often play a vital role. In thischapter we look at the help that children give toeach other and, in particular, what it is that makessome children a good source of support (and othersnot), and the kinds of help that children appreciatefrom their peers. First, however, we brieflybacktrack to consider why children might look forhelp from friends in the first place.

Help from parents

The concept of childhood dependency, and theprivileged status of the parent–child relationship,give rise to expectations that it should be parentswho concern themselves with their children’s well-being and support them during times of trouble.And, undoubtedly, most parents do exactly this,most of the time. But there are risks in assumingthat children’s needs will always or primarily bemet by their parents, not least that:

• this isolates both parents and children; and

• means we fail to recognise that children’slives are not straightforwardly subsumedwithin those of their parents, or

• that, as separate persons, children may wantto exercise some choice about where theylook for help.

In the context of separation, divorce orrepartnering, however, the question of parentalsupport raises some especially tricky issues, in that:

• many children are inhibited aboutapproaching their parents with theiranxieties at such times, fearing to upset them(Gorell Barnes et al., 1998; Dowling andGorell Barnes, 2000)

• parents are often preoccupied with thechanges going on in their own lives and as aresult can be less emotionally available totheir children (Cockett and Tripp, 1994;Harald, 2001).

In these circumstances it is unsurprising that arecent study has reported that only 5 per cent ofchildren with separated parents had feltencouraged to talk to them about what washappening (Dunn and Deater-Deckard, 2001).Nevertheless, this leaves open the question ofwhere children can turn for help if not to theirparents.

One answer is other family members, and Dunnand Deater-Deckard (2001) discuss the importanceof grandparents to children living through familytransitions. Another is friends. The supportivenature of adolescent friendships is now wellestablished (Boldero and Fallon, 1995; Fawcett,1997; Childline, 1998; Hallett et al., 2000), and thereis a growing interest in the benefits of peer supportschemes for this age group (Cowie and Sharp, 1996;Sharp and Cowie, 1998). However, despite theinclusion of a number of younger children in theresearch samples of some recent studies (see Dunnand Deater-Deckard, 2001; Fincham et al., 2001),relatively little is known of the role that friendshipplays for primary school children facing familytransitions. Common sense suggests that there maybe differences in their attitudes and those of olderchildren. Indeed, in a more generalised context,Berndt (1988) has reported that younger childrenare less likely than older ones to disclose theirthoughts and feelings to their friends, although inother respects their friendships may be just assupportive. This raises some interesting questions

5 Managing with the help of friends

25

Managing with the help of friends

such as whether confiding involves social skills or alevel of reflexiveness which young children havenot fully acquired, or whether they prefer otherforms of support. Whichever way such questionsare answered, Berndt’s findings highlight theimportance of suspending any assumptions aboutwhat constitutes support between young friends.

Help from friends

In general, our findings show that friendship doesindeed play an important role for children, but theyare discriminating in the kinds of help that theylook for, and the friends they will accept help from.Once again, we found that the children’s commentsclustered around the same two coping strategiesthat we discussed in Chapter 4, namely diversionand emotional expression, although here they tooka slightly different form. In this context diversion isa matter of:

• being cheered up, and• forgetting.

While emotional expression is principally about:

• certain forms of play, and• confiding.

Diversion was much the most popular form ofpeer support and it was on the issue of confidingthat there was most variation in the children’sresponses. In part this was a matter of gender withfewer boys than girls saying they would talk to afriend, but the children’s doubts primarily centredon issues of privacy, trust and the emotional costsof confiding. We concentrate in this chapter onconfiding as this was the topic that dividedchildren most.

Choosing a friend to confide in

Confiding personal feelings is widely assumed tobe one of the most helpful ways of dealing withpersonal problems, and this is reflected in the

advice leaflets written for separating parents, oneof which says, ‘[t]he children who usually cope bestare those who have a chance to talk to someoneabout how they are feeling’ (Lord Chancellor’sDepartment, 2001). However, the children wespoke to were clear that confiding is not a universalpanacea. When it came to friends, children who didconfide were highly discriminating in who theychose to open up to. A confidante had to besomebody with the right personal qualities:

Q: If you were thinking about somebodyto talk to at school, who would youtalk to?

Buffy (11): I don’t know really because I’m nottoo friendly with Chantal [whoseparents have split up] and James[ditto] isn’t a person that I want totalk to. He’s a friend but he’s not aperson that I would talk to. So there’sno one really out of those two and soI would go to my friends.

Q: What makes James not that sort ofperson?

Buffy: I don’t know, because he’s like achatty person, he doesn’t really liketo talk about things like that.(Our emphasis)

Other children said their peers were sometimestoo curious and too lacking in sensitivity to be goodconfidants. By speaking to friends, they could leavethemselves open to inquisitive questioning, whichwould simply inflame rather than relieve whateverunhappiness they were feeling. In thesecircumstances, confiding came with an emotionalcost:

Lauren (10): Sometimes friends make it evenworse. They keep talking about it andthey don’t stop and keep askingquestions about it.

26


Sophie (6): I like to keep about the divorceprivate. I sort of don’t mind talking toadults. But they [other children] askme ‘What’s a divorce?’ and go on andon and I really hate it.

Q: So you wouldn’t tell a friend whatwas happening?

Sarah (7): No, it’s just too upsetting.

Talking to a school friend

Children were particularly concerned about talkingto school friends. Overwhelmingly, they preferredto keep their family lives private when they were inschool and their greatest anxiety was that personalinformation would become public knowledge. Thismeant that any confidants who were also schoolfriends had to be chosen with care. The childrenneeded to know that their friends would respectthe privacy of any personal information which theyshared with them. ‘Best’ friends could usually betrusted but some school friends could not:

Lucy (8): Sometimes I want to tell some of myfriends my mum and dad have splitup, my friends that I trust and thatdon’t tell anybody ... if everybodyknew it wouldn’t be nice. You know,say if they went and told somebodyelse and then that person went andtold somebody else and theneverybody knew, it wouldn’t be asecret any more.

Kara (9): You don’t want to go telling ’em[classmates] your business ’cos theymight be telling other people ... Idon’t think I trust Ellie May ’coswhen I came to school one daypeople were coming over to me andsaying, ‘Where’s your dad gone?Where’s your dad gone?’, and Ialways thought that was Ellie May.

Helen (9): [I wouldn’t tell school friendsbecause] they might tell people youdon’t want to know and then it mightspread and then people will be nastyto you and tease you and call younames and say your mum and dadare horrible.

Taunting

The children had good reason to be circumspect for,as Helen indicates, verbal taunts are an everydaypart of social interaction between children atschool. Information about family backgroundsprovides a particularly fertile source for the insultstraded in the playground. Many children seedisparaging remarks about their family as a morepainful form of abuse than physical assaults(Cawson et al., 2001). A number of the children weinterviewed had experienced this form of ill-usageby their peers and it could lead to considerableproblems, as the following extracts show:

Kimberley (9): My dad’s 46 and I’m only nine andthey [classmates] go, ‘Well my dadisn’t old like yours’, and they all walkround the classroom going [croakingnoise] ... And everyone’s saying thatmy dad shoplifts and ‘crafts’, that’sshoplifting, and on drugs andeverything and it’s just not nice ... Iwas talking [about it] to Francine inprivacy and I says, ‘Please don’t let itout because I don’t want telling allthe school what I’m about’, and whatdoes she do next day? She justblurted it all out and everyone startedto laugh at me. It weren’t nice at allso I had to say, ‘I told you not to let itout, didn’t I Francine?’ and then shestarted to push me and I says, ‘Don’tpush me Francine, I don’t want to getinto a fight’, and then she slappedme across face and my dad says, ‘If

27


anyone hits you, you hit ’em back’,so I remembered that and I punchedher, so she doesn’t touch me everagain.

Q: Does anyone at school know that youdon’t live with your mum?

Matthew (10): I don’t know, I ain’t asked them.Brent Sadler and Jason Orchard, wellmy mum actually lives next door tothem. ’Cos I asked them, ‘Has mymum sent you to annoy me orsummat?’ and they said ‘Yeah’. ’Cosshe usually asks them [to do] jobsand that. She asks them, ‘Will you doa favour for me?’

Q: How do they annoy you Matthew?Matthew: Sort of like say, ‘Where is your

mum?’ and that and I say, ‘Oh, I don’tknow’, and they says to me ‘Well, Iknow’, and I says to them, ‘Well,where?’ and they say ‘Well, what’sthe point telling you if you haven’t gota mum?’

Q: What do you do when people saythings like that?

Matthew: I get, I just sort of like say, ‘Well, it’snone of your business anyway.’

Q: So have you learnt not to let it upsetyou?

Matthew: No. It still gets at me.Q: Does it? But you try not to show it?Matthew: No. ’Cos if I do it makes them do it

even more. ’Cos what happens, I getso worked up I sort of like do owt. Doowt. If they are annoying me so muchI just punch them. ’Cos it gets at me.

Both of these children responded with physicalretaliation to the taunts they were subjected to. Oneof the difficulties, of course, is that when childrenare provoked into counter-attacks in this way it canresult in disciplinary measures by the school. InKimberley’s case, she had already been warned

that she would be moved to another class if shebecame involved in any further disruption. She washighly anxious about this prospect for, despite hervolatile relationships with her classmates, she likedthe school, which represented one of the fewsources of continuity and reliability in her life:

I don’t tell my dad because I don’t want to moveschools, it’s a nice school. It’s just the people in theschool ... That night [after the warning from theteacher] I started to cry and my heart was awful.

Talk which helps

If children were sometimes cruel to each other, theycould also be kind. Among the younger children inthe sample this often took the form of offering toplay with a friend who seemed sad, or sharing toysor crisps. Talk, too, could constitute a form ofemotional support, even amongst the Year 1 andYear 2 children. Asked how friends help theirresponses included:

Mark (6): They listen to what you say.

Josh (6): They were thinking of ideas to helpme.

Yvette (6): By saying nice things and hugging[you].

Cherie (6): [They say] ‘I’m sorry your dad hasn’tcome for you.’

As these comments reveal, talk was a way ofoffering sympathy, advice and comfort. Among theYear 4 and 5 children it was the girls who had mostto say on this topic but boys, too, sometimes said itwas helpful to talk:

Q: Tell me what it was like talking toyour friends.

Richard (9): Well, I asked them what it [splittingup] was like and stuff like that.

Q: Was that a help Richard?Richard: It was, ’cos I knew that I wasn’t the

only one.

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Nevertheless, confiding was only one of theroles of talk for the children. What many of themvalued about talking to a friend was that this was ameans by which they could cheer themselves up andforget their immediate worries. It was often theamusing and diversionary aspects of talk thatappealed to them:

Miriam (10): If he’s a good friend he will listen andmaybe give advice. Because minedo, my friends do. At the Youth Clubwe just sit in the toilets and talkabout it and say, ‘What can we do?’,‘What do you do?’ and just try toignore it and stuff, and like forgetabout it ... My friend tells me thingslike, ‘You should just try to get onwith it and try to forget about it’, andstuff ... We talk about food, Chineseand pizza and favourite toppings andall sorts of things. And that reallyhelps you forget and then you playfootball and take it out of the ball.That’s fun. I really like that.

Buffy (11): My best friend, she was really nice. Itold her about it. She was reallyhelpful. She just made me smile allthe time, she tried to make me happyand think of other things. There’s thisprogramme on the telly called Buffythe Vampire Slayer and we used toalways talk about that, what wasgoing on on that and what we think’sgoing to happen next, stuff like that.

Michael (9): He’d tell a friend after a few dayswhen he got used to it.

Q: What makes friends good people totalk to?

Michael: They can help you out. They canmake you feel better. They will cheeryou up.

Q: Say Alex was a bit upset, what wouldyou do to cheer him up?

Michael: Just say any jokes.

What the children appreciated about theirfriends was their willingness to play or to talkabout something funny or light-hearted. This madethem feel better by cheering them up and helpingthem to forget their worries. Their comments areinstructive. What is often forgotten, in the face ofthe counselling culture that pervades so much ofthe general advice on handling personal problems,is that it takes a lot of skill to be a good confidant.As Lauren, Sophie and Sarah point out (above),talking about personal difficulties can leave youfeeling worse rather than better.

But, for those children who did want to talk,what made talking to a friend especially helpfulwas that they could choose the person they confidedin, and their moment for confiding. Friends, too,were said to be alert to signs that enough had beensaid and recognised when to stop talking andsuggest doing something fun instead.

Defusing tension with practical help

We conclude by looking at one child’s account of atime when friends were helpful. During or after aseparation children see their parents behaving innew ways. They might have to become used tothem being with a new partner, or living alonewhen they might be unhappy or depressed.Joshua’s mother was a single parent and began todrink when her husband left her:

Joshua (6): Mum got drunk one night and she fellasleep on floor and she weed oncarpet ... Paul [older brother] wasplaying on the computer and Paul,me and Ben, Paul’s friend, we wentdownstairs and Ben said ‘Emma, youwent to the toilet on the carpet.’ Andthen we found she’d been drinking a

29


lot of beer ... And then I said ‘Mum!’and she said ‘Shut up’, and then Bensaid ‘Emma, I think you can’t drinkany more because you’ll feel sick.’When he was saying it she keptsaying ‘Shut up!’ and then we put allthe, we hid the beer, we decided toput the beer in the bin ... My mumused to do it all the time ... I normally,I just normally go to bed becausewhen she’s normally drunk, whenshe’s finished being sick andeverything, then she normally justmakes some eggs on toast.

Joshua was from a middle-class home. He andhis family were not subject to social work or otherforms of scrutiny (as were some of the childrenfrom disadvantaged homes), neither did he haveany relatives living nearby. So he and his brotherhad to learn to deal with their mother’s drinking bythemselves. One of the things which is strikingabout his account is how matter of fact it is. Theonly time he hesitated was when he spoke of thetimes when he and his mother were on their own.Otherwise, he presents his ‘story’ as if he wererelating an adventure in which he, his brother andtheir friend Ben had been involved. This particularnarrative convention is one which a number of sixyear olds used when recounting how friends orsiblings had helped them in difficult situations. It

provides an interesting model, for the adventurestory epitomises childhood agency, showing how,in the absence of authoritative adults, children actresourcefully to resolve a challenging situation. Byreconstructing upsetting experiences in this waychildren can defuse them of their emotional tensionwhile also boosting their own confidence. Ofcourse, we cannot know how far they use this tacticin the face of a worrying situation as opposed to inits retelling. Nevertheless, reading between thelines, we can speculate that Ben’s practical responsewas invaluable to Joshua at the time. Dealing witha problem practically not only makes itmanageable, but also reduces its power assomething out of the ordinary, making it lessfrightening or upsetting.

For many children it was especially asrepresentatives of normality that their friends wereimportant during family transitions. In a changingsituation, friendships represented continuity. Theyprovided a refuge to which children could escapewhen the going within their family became toorough and which, when much else was disruptedand unstable, was comfortingly familiar. Thisdesire for restitution of the everyday is evident inJoshua’s account where he describes how, if he goesto bed when his mother is drunk, there is the hopethat when he next sees her she will be doingsomething as mundane (and safe) as scramblingherself some eggs.

30

Few children, as Chapter 5 showed, relish theprospect of family problems becoming known totheir classmates. Nonetheless, there is a widespreadbelief that schools are well situated to help childrenwho are upset by processes of family change. Thisrests on two sets of suppositions:

1 That teachers become familiar with theirpupils through the day-to-day interactionthat they have with them, and so are in aposition to see any changes in their moodand behaviour, as well as to offer themopportunities to confide.

2 That, while young children in general havelimited scope to access outside help forthemselves, the school provides a readilyavailable site in which there are known andtrustworthy adults whom they mightapproach for assistance.

Embedded in these ideas there are, of course, anumber of assumptions, not least that teachershave the time and aptitude to help children withtheir personal problems, and that they are people inwhom children would choose to confide. Wedecided to ask children for their views on thesematters and also to explore with them whetherthere are other ways in which schools might help.These might include the establishment of peersupport schemes, now widely advocated as anegalitarian and educative means of supportingchildren with self-defined problems (Cowie andSharp, 1996; Sharp and Cowie, 1998; Franklin, 2001;the Mental Health Foundation, 2001; Rowe, 2001).Or it might include activities such as Circle Time(Bliss et al., 1995) and lessons in Personal, Healthand Social Education (PHSE) (see Childline, 2001for sample lesson plans), both of which are thoughtto promote co-operation and greater self-awarenessamongst pupils by encouraging them to reflecttogether on topics such as loneliness, rivalry, orbullying.

Unfortunately, none of the schools in which wecarried out our fieldwork operated a peer supportscheme (not surprisingly as the majority of suchschemes are found in secondary schools), and ourdata only reflect indirectly on the relevance of thisto primary-school-aged children through theircomments on confiding in friends. However, one ofthe schools held regular Circle Time sessions(known to the children as the ‘Sharing Circle’) andthe other three operated an informal, ad hocversion of this concept. In what follows, wetherefore focus on the children’s attitudes towardstalking to teachers, and on their views of whole-class activities which offer an indirect form ofsupport. But before moving on to the data wewould first like to address an issue that arosethrough our experience in the field; the difficulty ofholding a private conversation with a child in aprimary school.

Privacy and primary schools

What children invariably say that they want whenthey talk about family matters is privacy (Fawcett,1997; Childline, 1998; Neale and Smart, 2001).However, if our experience is typical, it is difficultto speak to children privately in primary schools.We faced two main obstacles:

• The first is the design of schools. Those inwhich we worked were open plan, withgroups of three-sided ‘classrooms’ clusteredaround shared activity areas. The only self-contained rooms were the offices of theheadteacher, deputy head and schoolsecretary; the staffroom; and storerooms.Some of our interviews were conducted, bydefault, in open areas with other children oradults working within hearing distance, andwhere there were frequent disruptionscaused by teachers or pupils walking past. Insituations where our interviews could be

6 The role of schools

31

The role of schools

overheard it was impossible for us, ethically,to encourage children to talk as openly assome of them would have liked. In thesecases we tended to rely on indirect questions,for example, using vignettes.1 The point wewish to make, however, is that, beforechildren can reveal personal information atschool, issues of privacy and confidentialityhave to be addressed.

• We also found that the Child Protectionpolicy that one school had adopted bannedall adults from speaking to children on a one-to-one basis in a room with a closed door. Werecognise that child protection raisescomplex issues which have to be a priorityfor schools, but such a defensive attitudemust undermine the establishment ofrelations of trust between children and staff,as well as deprive children of the conditionsnecessary for talking in privacy.

In these circumstances it was perhapsunsurprising to discover that there wasconsiderable variation in teachers’ knowledge oftheir pupils’ lives outside school, with some readilyacknowledging that they knew very little. Theseteachers are unlikely to be unusual as McLaughlinand her colleagues have noted that ‘seeing a childalone in privacy is the most uncommon activity tooccur in a school’ (McLaughlin et al., 1999, p. 98).

Nevertheless, the everyday contact betweenchildren and their teachers makes the latter avaluable resource and we were interested inexploring children’s attitudes towards teachers (aswell as schools) as sources of support.

Talking to teachers

Our data suggest that for many children the qualityof the relationship between the teacher and child,and the culture of the school, are important factorsin determining whether they look to teachers for

personal help, or not. For some, the parameters oftheir relationships with teachers did not encompassconfiding:

Q: Would you tell a teacher?Rachel (10): Not really, because I wouldn’t really

cry at school ... I haven’t really toldthem.

Miriam (10): You can’t really talk to a teacherbecause you have to see her everyday, or him, and if you break downcrying in the middle it’s veryembarrassing. So I mean, I wouldn’t,I’d just talk to my mum about it or anunderstanding adult.

In contrasting a teacher with an ‘understanding’adult Miriam highlights how the teacher–pupilrelationship tends to be seen by children as formaland asymmetrical rather than personal andempathic or reciprocal. This perhaps explains why,although a number of children told us that theirteacher had sought them out to say that if they everwanted to talk about their home situation theycould, they invariably said that they had not takenthis offer up, despite appreciating the fact that ithad been made.

Richard (9): My mum told my teachers and theykept saying that I could talk to them.

Q: So did you ever?Richard: Um, not much, no.

Buffy (10): My teacher’s really nice about it. Shesaid that if ever I want to talk to her Ican.

Q: And have you ever?Buffy: Er ... well, I wrote this story about

someone that ... mum and dad hadsplit up, but I’ve never actuallyspoken to her about it.

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The prospect of confiding in a teacher wasespecially daunting to some of the youngerchildren in the sample. Many of them saw theirteachers as being too busy, or too impatient, tolisten to them. As one group of six year oldsexplained:

Child: Teachers never listen.Q: Teachers don’t listen?Child: No.Child: Not very good.Child: You have to follow them around and

pester them and tell them and say,‘Mrs Hughes, Mrs Hughes ...’

Child: And then she shouts at you, ‘What isit now?’

They were also put off by fears that the teacherwould report whatever they had said to theirparent:

Q: Would Jay tell his teacher why hewas upset?

Cherie (6): No. ’Cos if his mum comes to pickhim up his teacher might say ‘Why isyour son being upset?’ and ‘He toldme his dad hasn’t picked him up.’

There were, however, some exceptions to this,notably where there was considerable warmth inthe teachers’ relationships with their pupils. Onefive year old, who was in his third school, havingalready left two where he was ‘always in trouble’,was particularly attached to his present classteacher who gave him responsibility for tasks suchas fetching the class register, making him feeltrusted and dependable. His affection for histeacher was echoed by his classmate Paul who toldus, ‘My teacher is kind. She lets us have biscuits.’Both of these boys had decided views on theprivacy of family matters but were responsive topersonal attention. Their teacher instilled in them abelief that they mattered and they, in response, sawher as someone who was kind and fair, and who

would take an interest in their lives. Older childrenin the same school also saw their teachers as beingconcerned about them, and so as people theywould confide in:

Louise (9): I talk to teachers when I feel lonelybecause they make you feel a bithappier.

Jonathan (9): I’d talk to a teacher in case my dad,he’d run away because the policewere after him, he’d put my mum inhospital and teachers would have totake me home and look after me.

Interestingly, one of the children in the sub-sample, when asked if he had a friend who hadhelped, said:

Michael (9): Mrs George, one of our helpers fromschool. And she gave me ablackcurrant drink and I told hereverything what’s happened.

Classroom assistants have a different status tothat of teachers, and can seem more approachableto many children. However, Michael’s comments,when asked what it is about some adults thatmeans they can become friends, were enlightening:

Michael (9): They are kind some of them. Theyare nice; they can be cheerfulsometimes.

His comments show that, just as with olderchildren (Butler and Williamson, 1994; Fawcett,1997; Sandbaek, 1999), it is the personal qualities ofthe adult concerned which children value andwhich prompt them to confide. Kindness wasespecially important to the children we spoke to.The offer of a biscuit or a drink, when they wereunhappy, made them feel cared for and comforted.Cheerfulness mattered too, because it put theirworries into perspective.

33

The role of schools

Whole-class activities and support

If many children would not confide in a teacher,there are nevertheless several ways in whichschools can help children living through difficulttransitions. The day-to-day activities andfriendships found there can help children to forgettheir preoccupations. In other words, being atschool can provide them with the opportunities toforget, and to be cheered up, which we have seenthat children value:

Miriam (10): I like to get in to work and like listenand everything and forget about it.And just like to have a laugh[laughing].

Lauren (10): [Being in school] took my mind off it.

We also found that some formal classroomactivities were seen as helpful. Mullender (2001)has noted that drama and discussion are a valuableand enjoyable means of offering children indirectsupport with domestic violence, as well asproviding a forum for participative learning, andthis appears to be true too of parental separationand repartnering. Children we spoke to enjoyedactivities such as Circle Time and PHSE, describinghow these had given them opportunities todiscover practical solutions to common problemsand everyday dilemmas:

Lucy (8): My teacher said if you get mad anytime at all you can always come to acushion, you know, those big softbean bag cushions. As long assomebody was watching you andyou had your shoes off, and she saidthat you can scrunch paper andscrew it up, screw up paper, scribbleon it, you could do anything like thatand you could punch the cushion butyou aren’t allowed to punch anyoneelse.

These whole-class activities have the advantageof influencing school cultures, creating a moresupportive and understanding environment. Evenmore importantly, they avoid the problem ofchildren being singled out as ‘needing’ help,enabling them instead to unobtrusively take fromthe discussions whatever they find most helpful.Below, a group of ten-year-old children discusstheir experiences of Circle Time, and one childreflects on how it has helped him:

Q: Would you talk to a teacher [if youhad a problem]?

Child: We have to rely on a Sharing Circle.Child: Yeah we have our Sharing Circle. But

I don’t think anyone would say it inthere because people might laugh atthem.

Child: They wouldn’t. [All talking together]Child: Miss Callaghan [class teacher], she

gets frustrated sometimes.Child: Yeah like a girl came in and said

‘somebody has been mean to meand pulling my hair’ and MissCallaghan wouldn’t want to know.

Child: She would like say ‘Oh you have tosort it out, go away and sort it out.’

Q: So what sort of things do you talkabout in the Sharing Circle?

Child: Well, we talk about the problem or if... what’s it called er, like ... like, if youhad a problem with somebody andthey were annoying you they wouldprobably talk about a subject but notactually saying names.

Child: Like, fighting and that.Child: Like, revenge we talked about. Like,

‘my sister did something, whatwould you do?’

Child: Like, just taking time out.(Year 5, group discussion)

34


JJ (10): Miss Callaghan’s taught me a lot thisyear. She’s helped in Sharing Circleand everything.

Q: Can you think of one thing she’sdone or said that’s helped that youcould tell me?

JJ: It’s not exactly something she’sdone. Well, it’s something she’sdone, it’s not anything she’s said. Ithink Sharing Circle’s done the help.

Q: So tell me about Sharing Circle.What’s Sharing Circle?

JJ: We either think of a subject or think[how] to make things better.

Q: Have you ever talked about anythingin the Sharing Circle? Or is it listeningto what other people say that’shelped?

JJ: Listening to other people say ‘Whatdo you say?’ When it comes to myturn I’m a bit nervous, but ... We didone just a couple of days ago, a quickone ... because we sort of forgotabout it. We did a ‘how to sortourselves’. I said, ‘have a niceshower, forget about it’, and Simon,this funny person, said ‘I just bouncemyself if I’m bored.’

Here we can see that, while most of thesechildren would not use Circle Time to revealpersonal problems, it can nevertheless be helpfulon a personal basis as well as providing a means ofsocial education. JJ’s choice of a Circle Time sessionwhich made him laugh is also instructive. Hevalued some of the more serious discussions in thegroup as these give him a chance to reflect on otherpeople’s suggestions about how ‘to make thingsbetter’ but having fun mattered too, for this helpedhim to cheer up and forget his troubles for a time.

Supporting children at school

The younger children are, the less scope they havefor independently seeking out information or helpwhich they might need. Schools are thereforeincreasingly being seen as places on which to focus,both in terms of training teachers to recognise signsthat children may need help in handling problemsoutside the school, or targeting resources tofacilitate children’s opportunities to access help forthemselves. A number of new initiatives are beingtried, such as the appointment of learning mentorsor the establishment of peer support schemes. Asthese were not widely available when we carriedout the fieldwork for this study, however, wefocused instead on children’s attitudes towardsbeing helped with family problems at school. Whatour findings show is that a majority of childrenprefer to keep their home lives private. Not onlyare they reluctant to do anything which mightidentify them to their classmates as having aproblem (such as being seen in a tearful state, aftertalking privately to a member of staff), but manyfind teachers difficult to talk to on a personal basisbecause of the authority role which teachers haveto adopt if they are to maintain class discipline andassess children’s work. A number of teachers domanage to overcome these problems, and have thepersonal qualities which lead children to see themas approachable and kind, but these are probably aminority. This suggests that if schools are to take ona wider role in providing children with personalsupport this might best be achieved by non-teaching staff appointed for the specific purpose, orby outside organisations coming into the school ona regular basis. Children’s privacy would, however,have to be safeguarded.

Certainly, for the children we spoke to, the mosthelpful assistance that schools gave was usuallyindirect. Especially for those for whom familytransitions were a prelude to renegotiated butessentially stable family lives, the fact that being inschool required them to focus on something other

35

The role of schools

than what was happening at home wasconstructive. By becoming absorbed in theirlessons, or mixing with their friends, they achieveda respite from personal troubles. It is importantthat, in our desire to help children, we do not forgetthe benefits of normalisation.

Whole-class activities and discussions were alsofound helpful. These provide a means by whichchildren can obtain information without being

identified as ‘needy’, or becoming objects ofattention. Concrete self-help strategies such asrelaxation or anger management skills can also belearnt in whole-class groups. For many childrenthese group activities are fun as well as useful. Thisgives them an immediate appeal, in contrast to‘confiding’ talk, which children sometimes findemotionally draining, as our next chapter shows.

36

In recent years there has been a growing interest inwork with children facing a parental separation.Most early initiatives were designed to helpchildren indirectly by supporting or educating theirparents (Wallerstein, 1991; Petersen and Steinman,1994; Kelly, 2000). However, attention is nowshifting to children themselves, in particular:

• engaging them in the negotiation ofdecisions that will affect them

• providing information and support to helpthem adjust to family change.

The Family Court Welfare Service (nowChildren and Family Court Advisory and SupportService) now works directly with children(Buchanan et al., 2001), rather than relying onparents’ accounts of their children’s views aboutarrangements. Furthermore, following a lengthydebate amongst mediators about the desirability ofworking directly with children (Simpson, 1991;Cockett and Tripp, 1994; Gentry, 1997), the FamilyMediation Service (FMS) has begun to holdmediation sessions with children. Recognising thatparental separation is not a single event, some FMSgroups and other voluntary organisations have alsoestablished separate counselling services forchildren (see, for example, NCH Action forChildren and Greater Manchester ProbationService; Oxfordshire Family Mediation Service;Family Care, Nottingham; all undated). Otherswork in schools, opening up discussion withwhole-class groups about family change and howthis can be managed or, like the organisationRainbows, have set up school-based peer supportgroups for children coming to terms withseparation or divorce (Rainbows, n.d.). The ethosunderpinning these services varies widely, somehaving a welfare/problem orientation withchildren ‘referred’ for individual or groupcounselling by parents or teachers, while othersemphasise children’s agency and reach out to

children themselves. Inevitably, in a study of thiskind, we cannot hope to reflect the full range ofactivities taking place. Nevertheless, since there is,as yet, very little information on children’sperspectives on these developments, this chaptersummarises the views and experiences of thechildren we interviewed. Before moving on to thedata, there are two preliminary points to be made:

1 Only a minority of the children in the sample had

had any contact with specialist outside agencies.Of the children interviewed in school, sevenreferred to contact or residence proceedingsof which they were the subject but nonespoke of seeing a Court Welfare Officer, andonly two mentioned Mediation orcounselling. We quite deliberately chose tointerview children in a way that allowedthem to determine how much personalinformation they gave us, and it may be thatsome of them chose to withhold details ofoutside help which they were receiving. It ispossible, though, that very few had neededor received specialist help, or participateddirectly in formal discussions about theirparents’ separation. In support of this, it isrelevant that a number of children referred totheir contacts with other outside agencies.Eight spoke openly of ‘having’ a socialworker; a similar number talked of policeintervention to resolve domestic disputesbetween their parents, and one discussed hiscontacts with a child psychologist. In view ofthis, we recruited a small sub-sample of eightchildren with direct experience of targetedsupport. Four of these had receivedcounselling from voluntary organisationswith dedicated separation/divorce services;two had been interviewed by Family CourtWelfare Officers, and two had attended aContact Centre for supported contact with anon-resident parent.

7 Participation and support

37

Participation and support

2 Unless the children had already been in contact

with Mediators or Court Welfare Officers, they

were unaware of their existence. When weasked the children general questions in focusgroups about where outside help might comefrom, they spoke of solicitors, the courts,teachers, the police, social workers andChildline, but not the Court Welfare Serviceor Mediation. Of these, Childline was theonly agency that they could see themselvescontacting for advice unless they werealready involved with Social Services. Inthese cases, if they had a good relationshipwith their social worker, they saw him or heras someone they could talk to. In otherinstances when they were faced with anemergency, they knew to contact the policeby dialling 999. Otherwise, their expectationof there being any formal support forchildren was non-existent. This is notsurprising, given that Fawcett (1997, 2000)has shown that adolescents lack informationand choices about where to find targetedhelp with problems arising from parentalseparation. Nonetheless, the success ofChildline in establishing itself as a resourceshows that children of primary school agecan have sufficient confidence to makeindependent use of services which ‘belong’to them and to which they have ready access.On its own, however, Childline cannotprovide children with the range of optionsand opportunities for choice in the supportthey seek out, which are needed.

In what follows, we look first at children’sexperiences of involvement with the Family CourtWelfare Service and with Mediation, and thenmove on to their experiences of counselling. In theprocess, we raise issues about the extent to whichchildren engage in active, as opposed to token,participation, and their attitudes towards talk as away of coping.

Extending participation

There is a statutory requirement that children’sviews should be ascertained in private lawproceedings affecting their care, but until recentlythere was considerable doubt about the wisdom ofinvolving them directly in this process (Cantwelland Scott, 1995; DoH et al., 1998). Most CourtWelfare Officers (CWOs) and Mediators relied onparents to communicate their children’s wishes andhad no direct contact with children themselves. Inthese circumstances, it is unsurprising that therewere children in our sample who had played nodirect part in the resolution of contact or residencedisputes. One such child was five-year-old Grady,who had been brought up for most of his life by hisgrandfather, and who described how he came tolive with his mother and her new partner asfollows:

Grady (5): There were like two people whowanted me, two people who wantsame kid and then ... a mister toldmy mum, ‘Grady’s going to live withyou’, told my mum. He said I’d soonlive with my mum and then grandadTom phoned up and he, he wanted tolive with me.

Q: He wanted you as well? Did anyoneask you who you wanted to livewith?

Grady: No. I wanted to live with grandadTom but I’m living with my mum ... Amister just thought which one I hadto live with and he said that.

Q: Did the mister talk to you?Grady: I just said a mister didn’t I, ’cos I

don’t know what his name was. He’sa stranger. I didn’t even see himwhen he told me.

This suggests that Grady was the subject ofresidence proceedings, although, if there was anassessment of his best interests (as there must

38


undoubtedly have been), then he was its objectrather than its subject. It is important to avoid over-interpreting his comments, of course. Nonetheless,we might consider the effect on Grady of excludinghim from the assessment process, particularlywhen he was aware of what was taking place andconscious of his inability to have any real influenceon a decision that would have a profound effectupon his life.

Children can, however, be excluded fromparticipation even when they are seen by CWOs orMediators. Indeed, the language used in thiscontext (‘are seen’) conveys the passive nature ofthe role that can be ascribed to them. Take theexperience of Liam and April:

Liam (6): Once we went to a woman’s office,Vicky. And we went to her playroom,right, and me and April made a cake.And there was a big house, well, a bitlike a tent.

April (8): What me and Liam [did], we had todraw a picture first and tell where welive and ... we were all chattingtogether about [unclear]. And[unclear] if I said it was really goodwithout dad, me and Liam wouldwrite it down on our paper ... Andthen we were playing and Vicky weretalking to my mum.

Q: So tell me why you went to seeVicky?

April: Well, first of all because my mumand my dad left each other. Andsecond ... well, I don’t know whyVicky wanted to see us.

Liam and April had enjoyed meeting ‘Vicky’and were happy to talk about their visit to heroffice. But they had little idea why the meeting hadtaken place. This does not mean that they lackedthe capacity to understand its purpose, or that theCWO gave them no information. Maybe, in astrange environment, meeting an unfamiliar adult

for the first time, they simply did not take inwhatever they were told. Alternatively, there mayhave been a decision to ‘protect’ them by inquiringindirectly into their views, using play-basedtechniques or projective tests. The point we want tomake is that, lacking a clear understanding of thepurpose of the meeting, the children were unable toparticipate fully. They had no opportunity to voicetheir own agenda, or even to decide whether theywanted to make their wishes known. This raisesquestions about the benefits to the children of sucha meeting, and whether their interests were simplybeing subsumed to those of the court process.

It is not our intention here to be critical of thepractitioners involved in these two cases. Werecognise that children’s proceedings are complexand children themselves are a heterogeneousgroup. Some may well be anxious about the effectupon people they care for of openly voicing theirfeelings, while others will feel deprived if they areexcluded from participation. However, we wouldsuggest that it is preferable to give childrenopportunities to decide for themselves how far theywant to participate rather than to make thisdecision for them, without their knowledge.Children themselves invariably say that they wantgenuine choices about whether or not they will talkto practitioners, and to be clear about howwhatever views they express will be used andcommunicated. We understand that someMediators do, in fact, negotiate children’sparticipation in this way, and make the compilationof written and agreed ‘statements’, which expressthe children’s wishes and views in their ownwords, the focus of any subsequent meetings (see,for example, Milton Keynes Family MediationService). But this was not the experience of thechildren we met.

Counselling

The advantages of working openly with children,and giving them real information and choices,

39


became apparent once we interviewed childrenwith experience of counselling. One of thedifficulties that CWOs and Mediators face is thattheir contacts with children are brief, usuallyinvolving one or, at most, two meetings.Counselling has the benefit of being extended oversome six or more sessions, creating an opportunityfor both children and counsellors to get to knoweach other. Many children need this time toovercome their shyness faced with an adult they donot know. Nine-year-old Michael, for example, saidhe felt ‘nervous and scared’ when he first met hiscounsellor, because ‘I didn’t really know her’. Itwas only by working with her over a period of timethat he became sufficiently confident and relaxed toopen up to her and to challenge her.

We found that the children we spoke to whohad been counselled by a practitioner they hadgrown to know and trust, like those children in thesample who had a good relationship with a socialworker, were practised interviewees. They relatedto us in a more self-assured manner than many oftheir peers, and were well informed about issueslike confidentiality. Indeed, Buffy said that, for her,confidentiality was a crucial feature of counselling:

Q: It sounds like you trust Hilary?Buffy (11): Yes, because I’ve seen her loads of

times and she hasn’t told Mummyany of the things I told her.

Q: And is that important?Buffy: Yeah, because sometimes I don’t

want her to tell stuff.

On the other hand, as Buffy’s last comment infers,there are times when children do want informationpassed on. For the two younger children in thissub-category, it was the counsellor’s role as anadvocate that they valued, because this meant thatthey could rely on her to communicate messages totheir parents which they did not want to voicethemselves:

Q: How would Jeanie help Ben?Spike (6): By stop making him [him being] sad.

By telling his mum to let him go athis daddy’s house sometimes.

The crucial point is that it was the children whowere in charge of whether or not information waspassed on. It was only if they asked for, or agreedto, something being said to their parents that thisoccurred. Otherwise, the contents of theircounselling sessions were private.

Turning to the methods used by the counsellors,these involved a mixture of play and talk for theyounger children:

Spike (6): I went in this play area and she askedme some things.

Michael (9): She let us draw pictures on a boardand she let us draw things on paper.

All of the children were enthusiastic aboutusing physical activities and games to express (andsometimes resolve) feelings, and were equally keenon learning practical skills such as breathingexercises which helped them to relax. However,there was more ambivalence towards talking,which dominated the older children’s counsellingsessions. Asked if she felt counselling helped, Buffysaid:

I don’t know whether this is good or bad, but itmakes me think about daddy a lot, and whathappened.

She continued:

Buffy: Sometimes [it helps to talk]. Notalways, but sometimes.

Q: Tell me a little bit about the times itdoesn’t help.

Buffy: Sometimes I don’t really feel likegoing because I just don’t really wantto talk about things.

Q: And when are the times when itdoes help?

40


Buffy: Sometimes when I really need tospeak about things and I can’t speakto my mum.

The formal nature of the counselling sessionsgave Buffy no opportunity to choose her momentfor confiding. So, much as she appreciated thesupport of her counsellor, there were times when,knowing that their meeting would put her in touchwith feelings she would rather not confront, sheapproached it with apprehension. There is anassumption that talking helps children by clarifyingtheir feelings and enabling them to communicatetheir anxieties. What Buffy points to is that it isdemanding and can sometimes intensify emotionaltension, rather than alleviate it.

It has been suggested that boys can be morereluctant to talk about problems than girls(Macleod and Barter, 1996), and it was a boy whoexpressed the most negative attitude towardscounselling. He subscribed to the notion that, inprinciple, it is a good idea but said:

Ocky (11): That one mum did [send me to]didn’t work ... All I did was play withthe toys they had there and I nevertalked once.

Q: Why didn’t you talk to the counsellor?Ocky: Because I don’t like talking.Q: Is there anything the counsellor could

have done that would have made itbetter?

Ocky: I don’t think they can. They say theycan but I don’t think they can. I thinkthat’s a load of crap but I’m not allowedto say that ... Well, it didn’t work for me.

Four years after his parents’ separation Ockyremained ‘angry with mum for leaving dad andmoving so far away’. He is precisely the sort ofchild it is assumed should benefit from counsellingand it is important to consider why it did not workfor him, especially as the reasons for such failuresare often attributed to some incapacity in the child.

In Ocky’s case, it would be easy to say that theresponsibility lay with him, since he refused to talk.However, there are some clues as to other reasonsin his comments. The decision that he should see acounsellor was not Ocky’s but his mother’s; he sawhimself as having had no choice in the matter. Healso lacked confidence in his ability to talk (tellingus, before his interview began, that he was ‘notgood at’ it), and believed, presumably based onexperience, that the vehemence of his opinionswould annoy an adult listener. None of these thingsshould have prevented him from having a positiveexperience of counselling, given time and acounsellor he could relate to. But the reliance ofmany voluntary organisations on volunteers tostaff their programmes means that somecounsellors have relatively little experience ortraining, and may lack the expertise to work withchildren like Ocky. In saying this, we do not wantto appear to be critical of people who do their bestto help. It is the lack of alternative resources whichis the main problem.

To conclude, in much of this report we have, ofnecessity, concentrated on the experiences ofchildren who were unhappy about some aspect oftheir family lives. It is important to remember that

many children rise to the challenge of family transitions

without the need for outside intervention. The support of

parents, close family and friends, can be all they need to

manage their initial upset. Indeed, most children prefer

informal to formal support. Nonetheless, if they ortheir parents are struggling to cope, children willusually talk to professionals or volunteers, giventhe opportunity. There will always be those whoneed outside assistance, and the trend towardsinvolving children more directly in the family lawprocess is also likely to continue. It is thereforeimportant to ensure that the services that childrenbecome involved with are child-centred. The datain this chapter are based on the experiences of avery few children, but their experiences drawattention to some fundamental points:

41


• Children are knowing subjects and need real(rather than token) choices about whether ornot they will participate in formal aspects ofthe legal or mediation process, or incounselling.

• The value of one-off contacts withpractitioners to ‘ascertain children’s views’ ishighly questionable and meets the needs ofthe legal process better than it does those ofchildren. Children are happiest disclosingtheir feelings and opinions when they arefamiliar with, and know they can trust, theperson they are speaking to.

• Working with children is a skilled activity.They are remarkably tolerant of adults who

are inexperienced as practitioners butgenuine in their desire to help; nonetheless,inept interventions sometimes do real harm.It should not be assumed that this is workwhich can always be done by volunteers.

• The emphasis on ‘talk’ as the primaryconstituent of therapy or counselling can beunhelpful to young children, many of whomprefer alternative activity and play-basedmethods.

• Finally, as the children in the precedingchapters point out, having fun, and beingcheered up, are essential ingredients inmanaging change.

42

In this chapter, we will draw together some of themain findings from our research. A number ofissues that arise have relevance for policy andpractice and we offer them here as suggestions thatmay help to guide thinking in the future.

Children’s experiences of parental separation

are highly diverse

The normative image of children facing a parentalseparation that informs policy debates centres ondivorce. It portrays families in which two marriedparents separate after a lengthy period of mutuallysatisfying cohabitation, during which time theyjointly raised their children. However, we foundthat half of the children in our sample were fromfamilies that diverged from this image. The familyand parenting arrangements that they experiencedwere highly diverse. They ranged from ‘intact’families where parents had spent periods of timeliving apart, through those where parents hadnever lived together or where they had formed aseries of cohabiting relationships, to a smallnumber in which children were cared for bymembers of their extended family. We havereferred to these different families as ‘aggregated’,‘divorced’, ‘meshed’ and ‘diasporic’. These termswill be useful if they help to remind us of thereality of family diversity.

There is a risk of a growing divergence between the

concept of ‘the family’ which informs policy debates and

the diverse experiences of family life of many children.

Divorce is only one of many problems which

some children face

The construction of an essentially middle-class‘model’ of separation and divorce draws attentionaway not only from diversity in family structuresbut also from differences in children’s life chances.Whilst it is important to recognise the implicationsof a separation for children from well-resourced

families, it is equally important to be responsive toits effects on those whose families have fewermaterial, social or emotional resources. Separationor divorce was only one of many adversities withwhich a number of the children in this study werecoping. Additional pressures included parental ill-health or unemployment; poor housing conditions;family violence; limited parental manifestations ofcare; and, in some cases, drug abuse and crime.Some had spent periods of time accommodated bythe local authority or living with a relative.

Studies that focus exclusively on the process of divorce

overlook the fuller picture of the adversities that some

children face. We think that the artificial distinctions

whereby matters such as divorce, poverty, crime and

family violence are discussed as discrete social issues are

unhelpful, and obscure the realities of children’s lives.

This in turn has implications for the delivery ofsupport services. The combining of Court WelfareOfficers (who traditionally deal with children anddivorce in the private law system) and Guardiansad Litem (who traditionally deal with children indifficulties in the public law system) in CAFCASSholds the promise of demolishing the falsedistinction between children in need based on legalcategories rather than real life. Our research would

therefore support the principle of a unified service which

lies at the foundation of CAFCASS.

There is broad agreement among children

about support during family transitions

Although there is enormous diversity in children’sexperiences and life chances, there is an impressivelevel of agreement amongst them about whatmatters when parents separate and the support thatthey find helpful at these times.

Having someone whom children can trust and

confide in is important but they also want opportunities

to keep as many ‘normal’ aspects of their own lives going

as possible. Opportunities to ‘forget’ about what is

happening and to be cheered up matter just as much as

8 Issues for policy and practice

43

Issues for policy and practice

being able to talk about what is happening and to

participate in the decisions that have to be made.

When parents are unable to help, children’s

most accessible source of support is from

other family members and friends

One of the biggest handicaps faced by youngchildren upset by family reordering is their limitedscope for accessing outside help, especially if theirparents are preoccupied with their own problems.Many of them rely on support from their widerfamily and friends, and these relationships would

benefit from wider recognition in the policy sphere.

Children are discriminating about accepting

outside help

Children are highly discriminating in the help theywill accept. Informal confidants are chosen for theirpersonal qualities, amongst which aretrustworthiness, empathy, kindness andcheerfulness. These same qualities also matterwhen children come into contact with outsideagencies; the way in which practitioners relate to

children is a vital ingredient in the establishment (or

not) of a helping relationship.

Choice and respect

One of the central aspects of helping relationshipswhich children look for is respect. Children want to

be treated as persons. They want real, as opposed totoken, opportunities to decide for themselves if thehelp offered is for them. They also want their viewsto be listened to and treated with genuineconsideration.

Does talking always help children?

There is considerable interest among policy makersand practitioners in talking to children. Attention is

currently focused on widening opportunities forchildren to ‘talk’ to Family Court Reporters orMediators about post-divorce family arrangements,or to speak to counsellors about the emotionaladjustments that they face. While this benefits somechildren there is a risk of creating a culture inwhich children are expected to talk. Not all children

want to talk. Invitations to children to meet with

practitioners should include genuine options for them to

decline. This is particularly important when, as can be

the case in meetings with Family Reporters, they will

not have the option of speaking in confidence. Withregard to counselling, while some children find ithelpful to work with a counsellor, the increasingemphasis on talk as children become older isstressful for some. It is not simply that confiding is an

activity more associated with older, rather than younger,

children, but that many prefer activity and skills-based

methods.

The role of schools

The diversity in children’s circumstances andneeds, and the difficulties which young childrenface in accessing outside help, means that flexibleand imaginative solutions are needed, especially ifopportunities for children to exercise some choicein the matter of being helped are to be enhanced.Although many children prefer to keep their familylives private when in school, schools can play asignificant role in promoting children’s agency andproviding a contact point for the dissemination ofinformation. Participative activities for whole-class

groups such as drama, discussion or Circle Time are

popular with children and provide an unobtrusive means

by which they can obtain information or learn concrete

skills (such as relaxation), thereby widening their choices

and means of helping themselves.

Tackling issues of family change with whole-class groups may also promote a more positiveculture within schools. Hurtful verbal taunting about

some children’s home circumstances remains an

44


unattractive feature of playground cultures and needs to

be addressed.

Supporting families

The dependency of young children and those inmiddle childhood should not be ignored. Ourstudy reveals that children want opportunities forparticipation and choice, but they also appreciatethings being done for them, and knowing they can

rely on receiving material manifestations of care.Being cared for is central to children’s lives. The

quality of relationships with biological and social

parents, and with wider kin, is probably the single most

important factor in determining how well children cope

with family transitions. Support for families cannotbe divorced from support for children and shouldbe an integral part of a continuum of accessibleservices and solutions.

45

Chapter 2

1 This normative model is, of course, culturallyspecific. Nonetheless, there is a sense in whichminority ethnic families, too, are expected to‘fit’ into cultural norms in the UK.

2 We are not suggesting here that research ondivorce has failed to address topics such asfamily poverty or violence. These issues havereceived plenty of attention (see, Joshi, 2000;Buchanan et al., 2001; Reynolds, 2001). Rather,we are referring to public debates and theirparticular content and concerns. Having saidthis we would, however, note that researchstudies, by their nature, invariably have closelydefined objectives. So, poverty, for instance,may be examined solely in terms of the impactof divorce on family incomes, rather than inrelation to its wider manifestations. This, in itsown way, can contribute to a certain amount ofcompartmentalisation, unless balanced bymeta-analyses and reviews.

Notes

Chapter 4

1 Speaking on BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs,

20 December 2001.

Chapter 6

1 Fortunately, school staff were extremelyhelpful. One headteacher gave up his office tous and, in other schools, some teachers alertedus to empty classrooms. If the weather allowed,there was also the option to interview childrenoutdoors, on empty playing fields. It was onlyin these cases, when the children had privacy,that we felt able to follow up their morepersonal disclosures.

46

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49

The schools’ sample

At Elm Hill, New Hackney and Woodforde schools,we worked with children in Years 2 (aged six toseven years) and 5 (aged nine to ten years) but, atBrookside, because of other projects which thechildren in these classes were engaged in, weworked instead with the Year 1 (aged five to sixyears) and Year 4 (aged eight to nine years) groups.

Information about the study was circulated tothe children’s parents before beginning work inboth Stages One and Two. On the advice of theheadteachers of three schools we used an opt-outconsent process. Parents were asked to contact us,or the class teacher, if they wanted moreinformation or did not want their children to takepart. At Elm Hill, which had a policy of requiringpositive parental consent, we worked only withchildren whose parents gave written permission.These different consent processes highlighted anumber of issues in relation to children’s researchparticipation. For instance, we were approached bychildren at Elm Hill who asked to take part butwho could not be involved as their parents had notreturned a consent slip. One child with separatedparents then attempted to forge their parent’sconsent as a way of gaining entry to the study. Wedo not have the space in this report to discuss theethical questions involved but, clearly, consentinvolves complex issues on which there is, atpresent, no consensus. Details of the consentsreceived at Elm Hill for Stage One are summarisedin Table A1.1. The numbers of children taking partin Stage One in all four schools are given in TableA1.2.

In addition to providing information aboutchildren’s perceptions of family change, the work

Appendix: Research methods and sampling

procedure

Table A1.1 Stage One consents – Elm Hill

Class Permission Permission Nosize given refused reply

Class 2a 27 15 3 9Class 2b 27 13 3 11Class 5a 29 19 2 8Class 5b 30 23 5 2

Table A1.2 Stage One – numbers of participating

children: all schools

Year 1/2 Year 4/5Boys Girls Boys Girls

Brookside 18 13 12 17Elm Hill 12 16 20 22New Hackney 11 19 10 14Woodforde 11 6 12 21

carried out during Stage One gave children anopportunity to become familiar with us and todecide if they would like to talk about any relevantexperiences of their own in an individual interview.

The numbers of children taking part in StageTwo interviews are summarised in Table A1.3.Information on the numbers of children in eachclass we were able to identify as having experienceof parental separation is shown in Table A1.4.

At Elm Hill, where we needed written parentalconsent to interview children at each stage of thestudy, permission was given to involve six of theten Year 2 children with separated parents duringStage One and five during Stage Two. An interviewwith a Year 2 child from an intact family wascarried out to avoid disappointing her. Of the 14target children in Year 5, seven were interviewed inStage One and five in Stage Two.

50


The community sub-sample

During the course of our visits to organisationsproviding specialist services for children withseparated parents, we asked practitioners if theywould circulate information about the study to thefamilies of children with whom they had worked,or to leave copies of our leaflets in their waitingrooms and reception areas. The same request wasmade of the Yorkshire Family Court WelfareService. Four hundred leaflets were distributed inthis way and replies were received from the parentsof eight children expressing interest in taking part.This was fewer than we had hoped, although wewere aware that recruiting research participants bysuch an indirect means, particularly for a study ofchildren’s experiences of separation and divorce, isnotoriously difficult (Smart et al., 2001).

Methods

Our primary aim was to engage with children’sown perspectives so we prioritised researchmethods that enabled the children to respond toour enquiries on their own terms. In Stage One, thechildren took part in informal focus groups. Withour supervision, small groups of five or six childrenworked to collaboratively develop stories aboutfamily reordering. The discussions that arose in thecourse of this activity gave us an insight into thegeneral concerns of the children in relation tofamily life and its various transitions. It was only inthe individual interviews that we touched onmatters private to each child’s family. Theseindividual interviews were loosely structured andconversational in style. They focused on thechildren’s accounts of their family histories andexperiences, and their ideas about how familytransitions could be managed. Drawing was usedwith the children in Years 1 and 2 as a way ofreducing the intensity of a one-to-one interviewand as an alternative means of communication. Inall the interviews, we gave the children threevignettes describing some typical dilemmas inreordered families, allowing them to move awayfrom their own experiences to a more generalconsideration of how things ‘should’ or mightwork.

Children in the community sub-sample wereinterviewed in a similar way, with the interviewsfollowing the same format as those in Stage Twobut with the addition of more detailed questionsabout the children’s experiences of formal support.The eight children (four boys and four girls) wereall seen in their own homes. A brother and sisterwere interviewed together; one boy wasinterviewed, at his request, with his mother sittingnearby; and five were happy to be interviewedalone. Four children (two boys and two girls) wereaged between six and eight years, and four wereaged between nine and 11 years.

Table A1.3 Children taking part in Stage Two

interviews

Year 1/2 Year 4/5Boys Girls Boys Girls

Brookside 4 2 1 6Elm Hill 3 3 3 2New Hackney 2 3 3 5Woodforde 2 2 2 4

Table A1.4 Children with experience of a parental

separation

Year 1/2 Year 4/5Target Target

Class children Class childrensize found size found

Brookside 31 13 29 11Elm Hill A 27 6 29 11Elm Hill B 27 4 30 3New Hackney 30 11 24 9Woodforde 17 5 33 8

Documents

Facing family change - JRF · Facing family change parts which can be played by other family members and friends, by schools, and by organisations such as Family Mediation or the