Response by the Tavistock Centre for Couple Relationships to ResPublica’s Commission on Youthsubmitted on 20th August 2012
TCCR welcomes this opportunity to contribute to ResPublica’s Commission on Youth.Our answer is a combined response to the questions.
The role of parental disaffected with institutions
TCCR takes the view that no one root cause will, or can, be found for why things went so wrong last summer.
However, if we are to give these events some historical context and psychological meaning, we feel that it is important to acknowledge that the riots came at a time when institutions (i.e. authority) were at their most discredited. The sense of disappointment in, and disaffection with, the banks, politicians and indeed in the newspapers were at their height; the young people who took part in the riots were no doubt living in a family context where respect for the institutions of state was at an all time low and where parents were most likely expressing their contempt and distaste for the establishment. In this situation, it is worth considering the possibility that parents may have unconsciously provoked their children to enact their own feelings of rage and hostility.
Such an explanation for the explosion of anger that the country saw last year does not in any way diminish the more concrete ‘causes’ which young people have themselves identified, for example insensitive, disrespectful and intrusive policing (e.g. widespread use of stop and search powers) and lack of employment prospects.
Rather, the fact that so many young people have grown up without an internalised sense of a ‘benign authority’ – so crucial if people are to feel protected, or ‘contained’ by the authorities and institutions which are supposed to be acting in the interests of society as a whole – makes the very real experience of heavy-handed policing and worklessness even more potent and likely to provoke people into disorder and violence.
The role of relationship breakdown and inter-parental conflict
Any analysis of the causes of the riots must take into account the role of relationship breakdown, and/or witnessing and being caught up in chronic inter-parental conflict. Although the Guardian/LSE analysis, Reading the riots, maintains that parenting was one of the least important factors identified by the rioters themselves (at 40%), it is salutary to note that the two case studies used to illustrate this particular angle of the analysis involve young people from ‘broken’ homes ( ). It must also be borne in mind that the construct ‘parenting’ is one which concentrates on how children are parented by their individual parents, rather than the much more powerful, if sadly neglected, factor of the quality of the relationship between their parents (whether still together or not).
Incontrovertible evidence has been gathered that shows that inter-parental conflict adversely influences children's psychological development, social competence and academic achievement (Cummings et al, 2000; Harold et al, 2004). While there are, of course, many reasons for inter-parental conflict, a society which so little acknowledges the harm which poorly resolved conflict can have on the life chances and emotional development of young people, and does relatively little to help better equip its citizens to develop the creative use of anger and the resolution of conflict which allows family life and relationships to thrive and grow, fails to give children a model that they can use in their future life at work, study or in their personal relationships.
It can, we believe, be plausibly argued that last summer we witnessed a cadre of young people who have had chronic experience of poorly resolved parental conflict which has left them relatively poorly equipped to manage their dissatisfactions, resentments and disappointments; when many of these young people then encounter disrespectful and humiliating treatment at the hands of the police (thus confirming their internalised picture of a malign authority), coupled with a paucity of employment and economic opportunities, it can be of little wonder that these young people are more likely to channel these feelings of powerlessness and envious rage into destructive anti-social behaviour. Given, as stated above, that the parents of young people taking part in the riots were – with no little justification – feeling highly resentful of the inability of institutions to conduct themselves in an equitable manner and may have unconsciously projected these feelings on to their children, conditions were ripe for wide-scale civil unrest.
The importance of the quality of parental couple relationships
Educational underachievement and educational exclusion are clearly factors which affect young people’s life chances and, as a consequence, their behaviour. They are, however, symptoms of problems in other areas of life. If Government is to respond meaningfully, it must set about the difficult and painful process of acknowledging the real reasons for educational underachievement.
Thus, while school ethos and the curriculum of subjects such as PHSE can play a part in remedying the problems which young people face, the focus of policy should be placed elsewhere, namely back into the realm of human relationships.
While – for the reasons stated above - stronger family and community cohesion would undoubtedly create opportunities for young people to better fulfil their aspirations, TCCR believes it important to talk in terms of couple relationships rather than simply about ‘families’. As adults – parents, governments, social workers, teacher, police officers – we tend to avoid the painful truth that the adult relationship is central to most children’s wellbeing. A stark illustration of this can be found in responses to a survey undertaken by the Children’s Society in 2009, which asked 30,000 respondents to agree or disagree with the statement – “Parents getting on well is one of the most important factors in raising happy children”. Of the 20,000 children asked, 70% of them agreed; of the 10,000 adults surveyed, only 30% of them felt this to be crucial to children’s happiness.
The danger of talking in terms exclusively of family and community cohesion is that we fail to acknowledge the most powerful factor – that which has greatest potential for positive and negative impact on young people – i.e. the quality of the parental relationship.
In light of this, one might expect that support for couples would be central to those policies aimed at children’s welfare and to the practice of those working with parents and children - yet this is not the case. Whilst there has been considerable provision in the form of parenting programmes to train parents to be better carers of their children, provision to strengthen the couple relationship and recognise its impact on children’s lives has lagged a long way behind. Some might say that interventions aimed at supporting and strengthening parenting may have little real impact, if the fundamental context in which this parenting takes place is one of conflict or hostility, yet we continue to largely ignore this issue.
Children and young people need to have the experience of parents who can relate to each other in an adult, constructive manner. This is not to say that conflict can, or should, be avoided; rather to acknowledge that the failure to model the management of frustration and anger which is the hallmark of poorly resolved inter-parental conflict results in children failing in turn to internalise atemplate for the healthy management of conflict and anger.