The Vicious Cycle of Family Dysfunction
FEATURE
I am a twenty-two year old student, and though I am nowhere close to being married, the state of marriages and families today is a great burden on my heart. After hearing and reading countless stories of broken marriages and observing how that has fractured relationships within the family, I have come to notice a pattern of dysfunction at work.
The Vicious Cycle of Dysfunction
When marriages are dysfunctional, it inevitably breaks up the family system as the marital relationship is the core foundation of a family unit. This fractures the parent-child and sibling relationships within the family, and children who are raised in this kind of environment grow up to become dysfunctional individuals who would later marry, and the vicious cycle of dysfunction continues through the generations. As this cycle expands, society itself breaks down as its effects are multiplied, leading ultimately to a fractured and broken humanity.
In New Zealand, the Dunedin study and the Christchurch Health and Development Study which began in the 1970s tracked the health and development of thousands of randomly chosen children into their thirties. These longitudinal studies found that families at risk of passing on their dysfunction to the next generation typically live under these conditions:
mental health problems,
a mother who has multiple partners,
a young mother with little support and education,
drug and alcohol abuse, and
poverty.
A review of empirical evidence in social science literature provides us a glimpse into the root causes of crimes and social ills, which include:
High-crime neighborhoods typically have high concentrations of families abandoned by fathers.
The rise in violent crime over the past thirty years corresponds to the rise in families abandoned by fathers.
According to a state-by-state analysis in the United States, a 10 percent increase in the percentage of children from single-parent families usually leads to a 17 percent increase in the occurrence of juvenile crime.
The existing literature on criminology is surprisingly consistent on the root causes of violent crimes: the breakdown of family and the resulting destabilization of community. And this sequence has its deepest roots in the absence of stable marriages. These studies clearly show us a correlation between family dysfunction and societal ills. Arthur J. Rolnick, Director of Research at the Federal Bank of Minneapolis, comments that, “Two independent lines of research – brain studies and longitudinal economic analysis – leads us to conclude that the early years are critical to the society’s economic development.
High quality, early childhood programs help society avoid the enormous costs associated with fixing – or not fixing – later social and economic problems.” Society bears the cost when families break down as children of dysfunctional families impose large economic costs on the education, welfare, health, justice, and correction systems of the country.
So, why are families important? Why are functional and healthy families crucial to the healthy development of a child? A functional family, by definition, fulfils its proper functions. Besides providing basic living necessities, these functions include facilitating the socialization process of the child, providing a point of reference for proper rules of behavior, and providing emotional support. Neurological studies have found that exposure to chronically stressful environments have long-lasting effects on the development of young children, and children who grow up with parents who have poor mental health will themselves experience a four to five fold increase in the likelihood of developing emotional and conduct disorders.
As lay people who may not possess the knowledge, skills, and experience necessary in providing therapeutic or professional help to intervene in troubled families, you might think that there is little you can do to help this situation. You might even feel like this crisis we are facing is too big and complex for you to make any significant positive change. Allow me to share with you the life of Henri Nouwen.
Henri Nouwen's "Holy Inefficiency"
Trained as a psychologist and theologian in Holland, Henri spent his early years teaching at Notre Dame, Yale, and Harvard. A highly educated man, he wrote an average of more than a book a year, and travelled extensively as a conference speaker. After a six-month sabbatical in South America, Henri decided to move away from all of that to live in obscurity with a small community of severely mentally handicapped people in Toronto. He spent his time there bathing, feeding, and praying with people who could not care for themselves. He did this for ten years until the day that he died.
Henri Nouwen lived a life of “holy inefficiency”. Spending time personally caring for handicapped people instead of teaching at Harvard was an inefficient use of resources and potential, but it was a holy act of service. Another example of a life lived in holy inefficiency is Jesus Christ. Christ himself spent time with a small band of twelve uneducated, seemingly insignificant men, and in the short span of his life on earth he chose to spend it with society’s rejects, intentionally making personal contact and speaking into the lives of these broken people.
Real change happens in the context of a personal, one-on-one relationship. In order to impact society, we need to start small. In order to break this vicious cycle, we all need to put our hands to the plow and start somewhere. Intervention can happen at any stage of the cycle, be it at the individual level where young children, youths, and young adults are cared for and mentored, at the marital level where troubled couples may find solace and guidance from older, more experienced couples, or at the familial level where broken families can seek help from people who will avail themselves to enter into another family’s brokenness to work through the messiness of pain and hurt.
In the words of Henri Nouwen, “the goal of education and formation for the ministry is continually to recognize the Lord’s voice, his face, and his touch in every person we meet.” May it not be that we ever think we have nothing of ourselves to offer, that someone else can do it better, or that the hurting family next door has nothing to do with us.
“If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” – Mother Teresa
References
Christchurch Health and Development Study; Review of New Zealand Longitudinal Studies, Families Commission, May 2005, www.nzfamilies.org.nz
Coote, J. (2009). Ending intergenerational dysfunction in NZ families: The importance of early intervention. New Zealand Federation of Graduate Women. Retrieved from http://www.nzfgw.org.nz/Documents/ihfgw-paper.pdf
Dunedin Longitudinal Study; Review of New Zealand Longitudinal Studies, Families Commission, May 2005, www.nzfamilies.org.nz
Fagan, P. F. (1995). The real root causes of violent crime: The breakdown of marriage, family, and community. The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved from http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1995/03/bg1026nbsp-the-real-root-causes-of-violent-crime
Mental health: Poverty, ethnicity, and family breakdown. The Centre for Social Justice. Interim Policy Briefing, February 2011. Retrieved from http://www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk/UserStorage/pdf/Pdf%20reports/MentalHealthInterimReport.pdf
Yancey, P. (1996). The holy inefficiency of Henri Nouwen. Christianity Today. Retrieved from http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/1996/december9/6te080.html
