Melody Padilla and her husband Carlos thought they had similar
views on parenting. It was easy to pick out the clear-cut rules of
childhood: Church, bed time, movie ratings. But when their five
children started to grow up, they were confronted with a deep
divide. They couldn’t agree on how to parent their teens.
Melody Padilla and her husband Carlos thought they had similar views on parenting. It was easy to pick out the clear-cut rules of childhood: Church, bed time, movie ratings. But when their five children started to grow up, they were confronted with a deep divide. They couldn’t agree on how to parent their teens.
When their eldest child began listening to more adult music, Carlos felt it was OK as long as the songs didn’t contain any curse words. Melody felt the message mattered more. The Gilroy couple dug their heels in.
Family counseling, the practice of involving the entire family in counseling sessions rather than just one person, aims to treat developmental, emotional and discipline issues from a holistic standpoint, taking aim at improving the function of the family together rather than adjusting behavior one person at a time.
It’s a popular method for helping children deal with major life changes like the death of a parent, a divorce in the family, remarriage or the announcement that a parent suffers from a serious or terminal disease. However, family counseling can also be used to help parents restore order, to address the anger and perhaps abuse that arise from alcoholism and to confront a variety of other issues within the family, according to local experts.
“When a problem concerns a child, family therapy is almost always a better choice than having just the child in,” said Vicky Tamashiro, assistant program director of Chamberlain’s Mental Health in Gilroy. “I just don’t think a child exists by themselves. Kids’ lives are wrapped around family, school and friends. A family is part of the child’s life … so much a part of the child’s life that therapy will only be successful with the family involved.”
While adult patients can be instructed as to what they need to do to complete their therapy, children rely most frequently on parents to fulfill this role, said Tamashiro.
One of the main things children need from their parents is authority, according to Barbara Sachs, a marriage and family therapist in Morgan Hill.
“A family should be a structure where there is room for everyone in it, but also where rolls are clearly defined,” said Sachs. “The parents do have authority, but they do listen to the children and give them a voice in decisions. Ultimately, though, it should be the parent making the choice.”
Sachs frequently sees patients where this balance has been thrown off, and children are making decisions instead of adults.
That is, in part, what happened to Padilla.
“We knew we needed to put our pride and put our self-righteousness aside and come together to have some compromise,” said Padilla. “The kids see that mom and dad aren’t agreeing, and they start playing you against one another to get what they want. It was important that my husband and I learned how to have a united front. ”
While Padilla had been concerned with the type of music her son listened to, further talks with her husband in the presence of Sachs led her to decide that her real stakes in the argument were rooted in two “must-haves” not far from her husband’s.
She wanted to make sure the music her son listened to was free of profanity and did not degrade women, since the example he set would be followed by his four younger siblings.
Padilla and her husband ended up with a compromise: Her son could listen to the music he wanted provided it was free of curse words and wasn’t within her earshot.
“Even if I don’t agree with my husband 100 percent of the time, we have to pick our battles,” Padilla said. “Somebody has to back down.”
Other parents run into trouble, said Sachs, because they don’t have a system of boundaries and authority in place. She prefers to work first with parents and then with parents and children together to get to the root of such problems.
“I think the biggest thing for kids is consistency, and I see a lot of parents who make an allowance or a privilege contingent on doing chores or completing tasks, but when the chores aren’t done or the task isn’t completed, they give in,” said Sachs. “That’s a place to start, setting some firm boundaries, and when the parent begins to feel they have some authority back, I bring in the kids.”
Sachs works with families to ensure that they are communicating effectively and openly, often by teaching them the best ways to share hurts, disappointment and frustrations without blocking out the other party.
Too frequently, she said, family members resort to “you” statements like, “You made me do this,” or, “You always do this,” instead of using more approachable “I” statements like, “When you did this, I felt angry.”
Using “I” statements helps others to relate to the injured party’s point of view, said Sachs, because speakers who use that pattern take responsibility for their own feelings and avoid bristling the defenses of the offending party. The whole process can significantly reduce tempers in the session, and the calmer atmosphere allows patients to feel safe about expressing views they may not have otherwise shared.
Kimberly Nielsen, a marriage and family therapist and coordinator of family and children’s programs at Community Solutions in Morgan Hill, has benefited from the process before.
While working in a school setting, Nielsen was counseling the family of a girl who had been refusing to attend school. When she sat down with the entire family, she discovered that there was an imbalance of power, with the girl’s stressed-out single mom relying heavily on the eldest son to parent the younger children. The girl had not been attending school because she was rebelling against him.
“It came out that the brother didn’t want to take care of the kids, and it was a bit much for him,” said Nielsen. “He said he wanted to work and be on his own a bit more, which was something he’d never expressed. We talked about how the 13- and 14-year-olds could be a bit more responsible, how they could take on some of the responsibilities with the younger children and about giving mom back some authority.”
Truancy, it turned out, had been just one of the problems in the family. The girl’s issue with attending school disappeared, along with the anxiety her younger sister suffered from, when other issues in the family, like the imbalance of power and the mother’s undiagnosed depression, were treated.
“Frequently the mentality is you send your child to school and they get fixed and sent home, but it doesn’t work that way very often,” said Nielsen. “You have to be open to other options.”
If a school teacher or counselor recommends family therapy, don’t take it personally, said Tamashiro. The experience should be a learning process for parents and their child.
“Nobody’s trying to say your child’s crazy,” said Tamashiro. “Nobody’s saying you’re a bad parent. It’s a tool to help your family function better.”
Since her family started going to see Dr. Sachs, Padilla has seen favorable changes in herself and in her family.
One of the most important things she learned was that the immediate problem wasn’t always the real problem. Sometimes she or her husband had reacted excessively to a situation based, instead, on past personal experience.
“It may not have been an issue with the kids. It may be an issue with my childhood or my husband’s childhood,” said Padilla. “And there were other things besides that. There were things in our marriage that were big issues – trust issues – where you begin to build walls. Maybe it used to be a cute little picket fence that you could still get in and pay a visit to, but now there’s this big brick wall that you can’t get past to your heart, and that affects other things in your life.
“It all boils down to choice,” she added. “Am I going to choose to keep up the brick wall or am I going to choose to take it down?”
