By Sally Prebble, PhD

We often tend to imagine (usually in a guilty or self-blaming way) that the challenges and difficulties we experience in our families are unique to us.

This is often expressed as a form of self judgement (e.g. "I'm just not as organised/patient/capable as other parents..."), with reference to our own or our child's mental health or neurodiversity ("We have a lot of ADHD/depression/anxiety/PDA in our family"), or sometimes in relation to the idea that our family troubles are caused by our child's challenging behaviour (e.g. "He always been a really difficult kid.")  

These individualised explanations are encouraged by a medical model that focuses fairly exclusively on individual, biophysical mechanisms for illness, and a self-help industry that emphasises personal agency and individual solutions to any kind of life problems.

When we apply these ways of thinking to our families, we are left imagining that any and all challenges we face must be due to something located within us, or within our children -  brain chemistry, neurodiversity, learning disabilities, or mental health being prime examples.

If we could just fix these, our family life should work smoothly...right?!

But there are limitations of individualising our family struggles in this way. I want to explore some of these, and how understanding the wider social and historical context of family challenges can offer us more insight (and some practical solutions) about how we can move out of stuckness.

Individual explanations for family challenges

I was chatting recently to another mother in a park, who was reflecting on how challenging family life was for her. By way of explanation, she shared: "My daughter is always very dysregulated because she is autistic. Our whole family is at her mercy."

Her words have stayed with me, partly because I have deep sympathy and personal experience with similar challenges, and partly because her explanation seemed to locate the source of the family's problems with her child.

It's not that individual explanations have no value. Understanding your child's (and your own) unique challenges, sensitivities and needs can make it easier to identify specific strategies that might be supportive. Advances in our understanding of neurodiversity, mental health, trauma, brain chemistry and neurodevelopment over the past couple of decades have been very illuminating in this regard.

In isolation, however, these individual explanations fail to capture the scale and extent of the difficulties this mother and her child were experiencing, along with so many other families. In large numbers, parents are really struggling to cope, and a narrow focus on individual explanations does not seem to be serving us well to find solutions or move out of the pain we are stuck in.

Part of the difficulty is that individual explanations tend to encourage individual solutions, with typical "treatments" focusing on what can be done to the child (for example, with medication or individual therapies), rather than a wholistic focus on what can be done to restore the wellbeing of the whole family. 

Unfortunately, individual approaches alone are unlikely to support our children or families to move out of their challenges, because they miss the wider context of the problems so many of us are facing in this particular moment in history.

Understanding the wider context

Our children are growing up in a world that is busy, loud, overwhelming and often not meeting their needs for rest, creative expression, play, autonomy, choice, deep social connection, love or affection. 

In the case of this particular child, sitting beside us in that park with the glow of an iPad lighting her face, an understanding of her larger context might include:

• A school system that is not meeting her needs for support and care.
• A family schedule that is overwhelming her energy and exceeding her capacity.
• An economic system that means both her parents are both working long hours, often stressed, and lacking in support, capacity, time for rest and self care.
• A break down in familial and community ties meaning that her before and after-school care are provided by staff who she has no personal relationship with.
• A world where screens are dominating her own and others' attention, with friends and family members struggling to remain present with her.
• An intergenerational history of attachment challenges, meaning that neither of her parents (or their parents) received the care and connection they needed as children and therefore struggle to provide this for her.

The reality for many of us who care for children is that we are ping-ponging between our own lack of capacity to cope and managing our children’s dysregulated behaviour. There is a vicious, self-perpetuating cycle that is keeping many families stuck; and our children's individual challenges are best understood within this bigger picture. 

Certainly, it is important to take stock of our own and our children's individual needs and circumstances; but this information is only going to help us to find lasting solutions if we expand our focus beyond things that can be done to our children and explore ways we can bring about a shift in the wider context that their lives are unfolding within. 

In the video below, I examine a time in my own family's life when a number of individual challenges were cropping up for us. I explore how it is possible to make small, practical changes so that the wider environment can start to support and lift your family up rather than perpetually pulling you down.