Growing up in the scenic Santa Cruz valley as a child, I had witnessed mothers having to run errands, leaving the younger siblings in the care of the eldest; that phenomenon worked well in that era as it was considered safe and the best thing to do at that time. But because a number of parents continue to raise their kids in a world that no longer exist, what was at that time known to be a well accepted practice, is now being questioned by some of the older siblings entrusted with such a responsibility.
Just recently there was a case involving a 36-year-old mother who is alleged to have been murdered by her 18-year-old son; preliminary investigations into that incident revealed that the youngster felt burdened by having to parent his younger siblings on an on-going basis
I have said previously in this column as well as through my work at the IWRN, that parents need to step back and re-visit how they engage with their children particularly as they progress through their teenage years; parents need to understand that as children navigate towards becoming young adults the do as I say philosophy may longer work, as during this transitional period, due respect must be given to their time and space, and they also begin to question situations.
It is extremely unfair to burden children with your responsibility, as by so doing, you are depriving them of opportunities to advance their personal growth. In fact, the concept of objectifying your children should never exist as even if they’re your children, there is no need to objectify and continuously tell the world that’s my child and nobody can tell me how to raise him/her. Such behaviour denotes sheer ignorance and confirms that those so guilty are completely out of touch with positive parental-child engagement.
Research studies have shown that sibling parenting is an example of a family dysfunction that occurs in families that consist of several siblings, where parents appeared to be very neglectful on multiple levels.
The pattern is also likely to occur in families where the eldest child is female; the studies also revealed that parental neglect in large families, may emerge from a number of places including but not limited to depression, alcohol or substance abuse; mothers who had been bullied and/or abused by violent husbands who felt it necessary to ensure, that their wives were persistently pregnant even if they live in abject poverty, and also in situations where there is strict adherence to religious beliefs. In the circumstances just described, child care duties fall automatically in the laps of the eldest sibling, whose lives are severely tarnished and unfulfilled. Such dysfunctional situations are recipes for highly turbulent sibling relationships after all the siblings have become adults.
Dr. David M. Allen, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee, United States, and the author of the book “Coping with Critical, Demanding and Dysfunctional Parents” cited three reasons that contribute to sibling discord. The first is that siblings are angry at the neglectful parents, but they protect their parents from those negative feelings by displacing them onto the older, mother-substitute sibling; displacement is a defence mechanism that had been originally described by old-fashioned psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
Analysts tend to think of it as something people do essentially for themselves in order to protect themselves from feelings they find unacceptable internally. Secondly, the older sibling having no real power in the family and being ill-equipped to be a parent, becomes verbally or even physically abusive to the younger siblings; according to Allen, the younger siblings resent the older one for two reasons—the abuse, and the fact that the older sibling is not the one they wanted taking care of them in the first place, and the third reason is the fact that in situations in which the older siblings is a male who is a few years older than the younger siblings, the younger ones are female, and there is no parental supervision— as is often the case, the male sexually molests the girls.
Allen also alluded to the fact that these type of problems often lead the younger siblings as adults to isolate or even completely exile the older one from the rest of the family.
Because the challenges of life are becoming more and more voluminous, parents must exercise greater levels of responsibility both in family planning as well as ensuring that each of their children is provided with an enabling environment to thrive and grow successfully and not place parental duties on the shoulders of their children.
Adriana Sandrine Isaac-Rattan is president of the Int’l Women’s Resource Network/Communications Consultant
Email: intlwomensresourcenetwork@gmail.com.