Guest Post The Relationship Between Family Dysfunction and Bullying

"Bully" - the Movie

With all of the attention that has been cast on cyber-bullying in recent years as social media continues to explode, as well as the release of the new movie Bully, the issue of bullying on the whole has once again made its way to the forefront of everyone’s minds. It’s certainly not a new topic, but one that surfaces in waves over time, ebbing and flowing in and out of the spotlight, and a topic that begs the question of what really factors in to turning a kid from being a normal child to a bully? There are several potential answers to this question, but dysfunction within the family is a great precursor, and these five examples show how:

1.      Violence at home equates to violence at school

When children are exposed to violence at a young age, whether the violence is directed toward them or towards another family member, they grow up with the preconceived notion that you are able to obtain what you want through violence. This can lead them to believe that the behavior is acceptable, and results in them performing the same actions on others that they’ve learned at home.

2.     Bullying is an outlet for emotional abuse

In addition to physical abuse in the home, emotional abuse is another stepping stone that guides children to adopting a bullying demeanor. When a parent is constantly condescending to their children and is continually battering them and making them feel worthless, kids learn to project this emotional distress on others. Through bullying their peers they are able to release pent up anger that they’re harboring from a less than functional home life, thus temporarily releasing them from the strains of emotional abuse.

3.     Bullying as a way to gain control over some aspect of their life
Being raised in a home where there is an apparent lack of self-control by family members can cause children to want to exercise control over something outside of their home life. Growing up my brother had a friend that was constantly trying to assert his dominance over the other boys his age. He would regularly throw toys at them and tell them how stupid they were. Eventually we found out that his father had zero self-control at home, and while he was obedient at home he projected these pent-up feelings on his friends that were more submissive. This desire to gain control can manifest itself in the form of bullying peers that are perceived as weaker and thus easily dominated.

4.     Bullying as a way to assert self esteem

Children who are raised in hostile and volatile home environments usually suffer from feelings of low self-worth and self-esteem, and can turn to bullying to feel as though they are powerful. These feelings of power can give a false sense of self confidence, and even arrogance, even though in reality bullying is usually a product of having no actual self-assurance. Most of the kids in schools that are known as bullies are deeply unhappy but refuse to admit that fact out loud and are too scared to turn to anyone for help. Instead they act overly confident to compensate for their negative feelings and self-image.

5.     Subliminal encouragement from parents

Parents can end up being subliminal encouragers to bullying as well, even though they may outwardly condemn the behavior. Any indication that the parent actually approves of the bullying, be it through a slip of a smile or a glimmer of approval on their face, can fuel a child to continue with the behavior because they feel they are making their parents proud in some way. The same boy mentioned earlier was never truly punished by his father for being a bully, and so he had no reason to stop with his behaviors. Instead his father silently asserted the behavior thus justifying the boy’s actions. [DA: see my post of February 11, 2011 about the role of Avenger].

There is no easy way to define why children turn to bullying. The causes behind it are complex and varied, and there are likely several underlying stressors that have led kids to turn to his behavior. All we, as the general public, can do is bring as much attention to this issue as possible and help to discourage kids from continuing to behave negatively towards their peers.

Author Bio

This guest post is by Christine Kane, a graduate of Communication and Journalism. She enjoys writing about a wide-variety of subjects including internet providers in my area for different blogs. She can be reached via email at: Christi.Kane00 @ gmail.com

Immigration and Family Dysfunction

In psychotherapy with American patients who are repetitively self-destructive and self defeating, we attempt to create an emotional/historical family tree (genogram) that looks at the events and personalities in earlier generations that seemed to combine to create the ongoing dysfunctional family roles and interactions that we see in the present. These stereotypical interactions, the subjects of many of the posts in this blog, both trigger and continue to reinforce my patient’s problematic behavior. The behavior is a family role that helps to stabilize the way the family functions to a degree, at least over the short term. 

A good example was presented in my discussion of the resentful female caretaker role in some Mexican-American families, described as part of my post about borderline family dynamics.

A frequently ocurring historical factor seen in many of my patients’ genograms is the immigration of parents, grandparents, or even great-grandparents to the United States, particularly from countries that have more traditional, collectivist social structures. The process of immigration to American, depending to some extent on the reason for the move, often led to situations in which children seem to have one foot in their traditional culture and the other in American culture.

Such kids go to school along with typical, individualistic American children and will try to fit in, but in doing so their behavior may upset their parents, who see their children becoming, in their view, licentious and/or disrespectful. These parents tend to socialize mainly with other adults from their own ethnic group, who all maintain some of their “traditional family values.” 

Nonetheless, the adults are also exposed to the American siren song of “living with all the gusto you can,” to quote an old beer commercial. Yet they feel far less free than their children to succumb to its charms. 

Meanwhile, they are often dependent on their children to help them interface with the larger American culture when they have a need to do so. Their kids speak the language, so to speak, and are more familiar with it and therefore can negotiate it more easily than their parents.

This can set up a situation in which the parents seem to push their progeny to become acculturated, while at the same time objecting vociferously if they dare to do so. The potential for double messages and the creation of ongoing dysfunctional behavior patterns is very high in many of these cases.

One of the worst examples of same that I heard tell about was the case of a female physician from India who did her post-medical school training (her residency) here in the States after her family emigrated here. As with most of her ethnic group, her parents had made specific arrangements for her marriage with a suitable suitor from her caste and ethnicity back home.

The only problem was, the woman had fallen in love with another American doctor who was not of her ethnic background, and was planning to marry him. 

I only heard about this second hand, so I cannot vouch for any of the details of this story, but what I heard was that she ended up committing suicide.

Due to my interest in the genesis of dysfunctional family dyanamics, I was pleased to see a seminar at this year’s annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) about this very type of phenomenon, entitled Accultural Family Distancing:  Developmental and Clinical phenomena for Children of Immigrants. It was put on by Drs. Dawn Sung, Andres J. Pumariega, and Shashank V. Joshi.

Since I use the term distancing in a different, although somewhat related sense, I prefer the more general term “acculturation gap” in discussing this. 

Research in this field is obviously a highly complex endeavor and therefore quite difficult to do, and that research which has been done is, I sense, not informed by family systems theory, let alone by my unified therapy perspective. The studies that have been done show somewhat mixed results.

After attending the APA session, which did seem to have a point of view that was similar to mine, I located two studies, [Hwang et. al., Child Psychology and Human Development 40(1), Mar. 2009; Farver et. al., Journal of Family Psychology 16(3), Sept. 2002] - one with Asian-Americans and Latinos, and the other with Asian Indian families - which support the idea that this acculturation gap does seem to create family conflict and psychological stress.

I found a third study using Mexican-American families (Lau et. al., Journal of Family Psychology 19(3), Sept. 2005) that did not show that. Interestingly, the latter study had the rather surprising finding that more problems occurred when the member of the younger generation was more aligned with the traditional culture than the parent!  Sometimes the patterns that I see on patients’ genograms do seem to show that a role reversal pattern does occur in a lot of families. The underlying game being played, to use an analogy, is often quite similar, but the players change sides. The pattern is much like that of a modern family characterized by an aggressive, careerist wife and a submissive and subservient househusband.

My own presentation at the APA meeting centered on how social psychological factors such as the ones discussed in this post are often completely ignored in research about the nature and treatment of dysfunctional personality traits within individuals. Many of the sessions at the meeting were attuned to the current prototypical “nothing but biology” mentality. Now thatis crazy.