Bringing Up Parents

When a child in an apparently normal family of good reputation develops such habits as setting fires, stealing, truancy, vandalism or sexual misconduct, the chances are that he was stimulated by his parents' unconscious approval. This is the conclusion set forth in the A.M. A. Jour nal by two psychiatrists, the Mayo Clinic's Dr. Adelaide M. Johnson and the University of California's Dr. Stanislaus A. Szurek, after a ten-year study. Their explanation: in such cases the parents have not been able to resolve their own antisocial impulses, so they cannot deal firmly with their children's. In fact, they get vicarious satisfaction from them. The result is tacit approval and implied encouragement of the budding delinquent.

On the surface, delinquency in "good" families (where slum conditions and juvenile gangs are not a factor) seems hard to explain. But where the two psychiatrists were able to study both child and parents, they reported, the child's "defect" was always traceable to one parent or both.

"A child's conscience is made, not born," and during his first six years of life, his conscience is molded chiefly by the parents. A defective conscience in the child is often allowed to develop "so that the parents unconsciously can achieve pleasure by permitting the child to misbehave seriously." And a child is only too quick to sense parental pleasure.

Such sanctioning ranges from encouraging a child to lie about his age, so as to enter a movie at cut rates, to more profound forms of implied approval, e.g., "inordinate maternal curiosity regarding daughter's experiences with boys . . . misguided, too exciting discussions about sex . . . encouragement of display of undue degrees of nudity at home." In many "respectable" families, an attitude of "frankness" about procreation "is carried far beyond the needs of the curious child . . . [and] much of this spuriousness is perpetrated in the name of Freud, who [advocated] moderation and restraint; the parent was to answer the child's specific questions about sex but not deliver a lurid oration . . . He never encouraged exhibitionistic displays of nudity."

Treatment for the parent in cases where his bad influence is more or less conscious is usually impossible, say Psychiatrists Johnson and Szurek. Where the influence is unconscious, the parent can be helped to understand what he has been doing. This may lead to parental shock and neurosis, but, say the researchers, such conditions can be treated more easily than antisocial behavior, which can be transmitted from generation to generation.

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