Apparently so!

Peter Kramer is one of the authors I read over and over and over.

Today I’m rereading Against Depression, and also thinking about one of my core topics of interest, locus of control (the degree to which a person feels in control of his life circumstances).

Identity and self-esteem are built around two fundamental psychological questions:

• Am I a “good” person?
• Am I in control of my life?

Depressed people generally feel less in control of their lives.

I’ve been writing a lot lately about the roles of parents in their children’s development and mental health. I work every day with parents and children, and I become involved in their concerns.

I am especially touched when kids have serious problems. The parents suffer so much and so badly need support. I’ve been involved with many families where a child was severely physically or mentally ill. It’s frustrating and so unfair to see all the support parents get when their child has a physical problem, but the scrutiny and relative lack of sympathy when it’s a mental disorder.

It’s also dangerous, because so many mental illnesses take root during childhood and adolescence. Treating mental illnesses in adults is so much harder than treating them in children, and the best case is not letting illnesses take hold at all.

I’ve been saying that parents don’t cause mental illness in their kids and explaining why I think this.

Do you know this beautiful poem? Here are the first two stanzas:

On Children
Kahlil Gibran

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

You may give them your love but not your thoughts,
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow,
which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.
You may strive to be like them,
but seek not to make them like you.
For life goes not backward nor tarries with yesterday.

People respond differently to relatives and non-relatives. Children’s brains quickly learn who is related to them and who isn’t.

I love Garrison Keiller’s collection of Good Poems.

I just reread this favorite Gerald Locklin poem; it’s in the chapter entitled “Trips,” but I suddenly saw it in terms of relationships and commitment:

i envy those
who live in two places:
new york, say, and london;
wales and spain;
l.a. and paris;
hawaii and switzerland.
there is always the anticipation
of the change, the chance that what is wrong
is the result of where you are. i have
always loved both the freshness of
arriving and the relief of leaving. with
two homes every move would be a homecoming.
i am not even considering the weather, hot
or cold, dry or wet: i am talking about hope.

So many of us jump from relationship to relationship, hoping that “what is wrong is the result of where we are.”

We get hooked on “the freshness of arriving” into a new relationship … and “the relief of leaving” a less-than-perfect one.

Welcome to an ongoing discussion of the causes of mental illness. I’ve been saying that bad parenting is not to blame.

Jo wrote this helpful comment:

Please cite additional researchers besides Judith Harris who support this research or who have found it to be true. I really think you are digging to support an opinion and leaving 98% of the peer reviewed data based research out of the loop. There have been a variety of studies that have controlled for genes that have found the environmental impact to be dramatic on the development of mental illness, especially personality disorders.

And Jo is entirely correct! Genetics account for roughly 50% of developmental impact and environment accounts for that other 50%.

But “environment” and “parenting” are NOT the same thing!

A single gal pal of mine bemoaned, Why do I keep choosing men with problems?

To date real people is to encounter human problems. There’s no escaping this fact. The perfect partners we dream of simply don’t exist.

But which issues are fatal and which ones workable? How do we sort out the genuine red flags from the merely yellow?

There’s a heck of a lot of advice out there about who to avoid, not settling for a less-than-perfect relationship, etc., etc.

But at the end of the day, if we want to be coupled, this means committing ourselves to some real human being with real human flaws. Including some major flaws.

I’ve opened up this huge topic of Do parents cause their kids’ mental illnesses?

I’ve been saying: No.

You can imagine the number of comments I’ve received on this. And although many readers have disagreed with me, every single comment has been thoughtful, intelligent and respectfully expressed. They all deserve my response!

I’m going to do this by beginning back at the beginning. Over several upcoming blog posts, I’m going to retrace for you the sources upon which I base my statements.

Control is one of the most important of all psychological issues. Starting at birth and continuing throughout our lives, we grapple with the question: What do we have control over, and what don’t we?

The dilemmas of consciousness and of Self have control at their center. What is my “Self”? It is this thing that I am in command of, the ship that I steer, the life that I direct.

Feelings of control are critical to psychological health. Locus of control and learned helplessness are central developmental and therapeutic topics. A recent Scientific American article points out that “Feelings of control are essential for our well-being.” Even something as small as giving nursing-home patients control over watering the plants in their rooms (vs. not giving them the means to care for their plants), resulted in patients’ increased physical health and emotional contentment.

I’ve gone out on a limb recently as I insist that we stop blaming parents for their kids’ mental illnesses and other problems. Yet I believe strongly (and more and more research is emerging to back me up) that parents are rarely if ever the source of their children’s disorders.

Besides the importance of getting the science straightened out, I’m extremely concerned that when we point fingers of blame at parents, we’re:

• causing tremendous hurt to people who are already suffering
• inhibiting them from reaching out for the help they and their children need
• deflecting responsibility from schools, communities, public health institutions and the the rest of us!

No.

I opened a big can of worms recently with my post Are Parents to Blame For Their Kids’ Problems?

Thanks to Freud and Dr. Benjamin Spock, our whole culture takes it as fact that bad parenting is the root of psychological issues.

But it’s turning out to not be true!