Jean-Pascal Assailly - Child Psychology

Parents are like lighthouses at sea for children: they play in the area lit by their presence (Anne-Marie Fontaine).

The main developments have been:

– the influence of the transformation of the status of women in society: access to education and then to salaried employment from the 19th century, to equality and then to contraception in the 20th century. This has led to a drop in the birth rate (two children per French woman today compared to 2.47 in 1970);

– the outdated institution of marriage: since the abolition of marital control and of the distinction between legitimate and natural children, more than one child in two (59%) is born today to unmarried parents, compared with 6% in 1972; the number of marriages per year has fallen from 400,000 in the 1970s to 240,000 today. Couples who marry do so much later in life (37 years for men, 35 years for women). Finally, the development of civil unions (Pacte Civil de Solidarité, PACS) and the facilitation of divorce are two recent elements of marriage being seen as an outdated concept;

– changes in the status of the child: the popularization of child psychology since the 1970s (Dolto’s “the baby is a person”, “the king child”, etc.) has modified parental educational strategies and parent–child relationships.

To conclude, fewer children, who are more wanted, and more autonomous but more fragile couples, hence:

– the increase in divorces and shared custody: with feminism, we have seen an increase in the rights and involvement of fathers and, after a separation, we accept that the father–child bond should no longer be broken; shared custody judgments are now pronounced in 21% of divorces and, in the other cases, an agreement is obtained between the father and the mother on custody;

– the persistent inequality of paternal and maternal roles: despite these societal evolutions, mothers continue to assume the parental role for 30 minutes more per day on average than fathers;

– the diversification of the family model (such as mixed, single-parent, homo-parent and multi-parent families).

There is therefore no naturality of the family, as there is with animals; we are in the symbolic and the cultural (abandonment, adoption, heritage, name).

With these evolutions, what will remain of the Oedipus Complex? This was built around the father–mother–child relationship, but already in 1921, the ethnologist Malinowski had questioned its universality, by observing the numerous variations of family structures, the influence of patriarchy and the lines of transmission, for which the Oedipus Complex is only valid within the framework of Roman law, Christian morality and the Viennese bourgeoisie. Thus, in certain cultures, the prohibition of incest does not relate to the mother but to the sisters.

Thus, from 1950, Lacan, in his structuralist perspective, no longer spoke of the father in the sense of pater familias , but of the paternal function. This function is present even in the absence of the father and can be very well assumed by the mother. In certain traditional father–mother–child families, however, this function is not assumed at all.

Then, in the 1970s, Lacan added that “there is no sexual relationship”, nothing allows a priori the harmony of complementarity between men and women. Would the Oedipus Complex finally only be the impossibility of jouissance and the obligation of lack? In single- or homoparental families, inseminations and surrogacy signify this as being impossible. The Oedipus Complex is only one of the possible forms of the impossible.

Child poverty is a serious public health issue. For example, over 13 million young people under the age of 18 currently live in poverty in the United States and 20% of French youth live below the poverty line.

The impact of social background on educational performance is now well known following sociological studies in the aftermath of the Bourdieusian theory of social reproduction, so there is no need to belabor it here.

Decades of research have also highlighted the adverse effects of child poverty on multiple dimensions of mental health, including depression, anxiety, behavioral problems and substance abuse. Indeed, children and adolescents from low-income families are two to three times more likely to develop mental health problems than their more affluent counterparts.

The Millennium Study showed a significant protective effect of higher family income on behavioral problems at age 11. Maternal distress is an important mediator in the relationship between income and child behavior and explains the maintaining of the effect through childhood and adolescence because of its impact on the child’s emotional self-regulation.

The French term “parentalité“ appeared in the 1990s, to correspond to the American “parenting” and the “parentage” of Quebecers, to define the way that parents educate their children, their educational styles. Since then, thousands of scientific studies have been devoted to it, countless manuals since the famous Dr. Spock in the United States and numerous radio (since Françoise Dolto in the 1970s) and TV shows (“Les Maternelles”). It is hard to find a more relevant and media-friendly subject. Finally, support for parenting is a concern and a worry for political leaders, because it is obviously assumed that if parents are failing in their educational missions, other institutions will have a hard time redressing the balance.

There is a consensus in this field that “extreme” educational styles, the Charybdis of authoritarianism and the Scylla of laxity, both result in negative consequences for the child’s socialization, health, safety and education. As Buddhism teaches us, we must again find “the middle way”.

We propose to call this “middle way”, described as “authoritative” in Baumrind’s (1985) three-dimensional classification, “negotiated authority”: “this is what you should do and I will explain why”. Persuasion is achieved through dialog, not physical punishment; these parents provide love and limits. Negotiated authority is a combination of affection and behavioral control, because authoritarianism also involves behavioral control, but without the affection.

Authoritarianism, itself, can take two forms: physical (coercion through beatings, physical punishment and very severe discipline) and psychological (psychological control and intrusion into the child’s autonomy through blackmail, manipulation and lying). In mothers, physical punishment may be associated with a perceived lack of control over the child: those mothers who “cannot do it anymore” will stick to this defensive educational style.

Overprotection and psychological control of the child, which block his or her autonomy, play an important role in the genesis of anxiety in children and adolescents; they induce the idea that the world is dangerous; they reinforce avoidance behaviors and impair children’s skills and self-confidence. Sometimes the measure of overprotectiveness is more related to the anxiety level of the mother than to that of the child.

The educational style adopted by a parent depends on beliefs that are in turn dependent on their own gender and educational background. Fathers tend to have more traditionalist views than mothers, especially when the child is a boy. The higher the educational level, the more likely the parent is to adopt negotiated authority and progressive views.

The educational style adopted by parents also obviously depends on their personalities. For example, parents with weak internal personality cohesion and low emotional control skills are less likely to adopt negotiated authority.