CARING FOR THE POORLY MOTIVATED – PARENTHOOD
Men who feel inadequate, and who are unable to compete with their peers because of lack of skills and training, may put great emphasis on their ability to get their partners pregnant, some talking of their plans to have a football team. Condoms are mocked; they split and tear and cannot hold back their powerful sperm. Sometimes it seems that there is a continuous battle being waged between the sperm and egg on one side, and the contraceptive methods on the other. ‘If you’re meant to have a lot of kids then even that Pill can’t stop you,’ said one woman who helped the process by forgetting a few Pills. Thus masculinity and femininity are often defined in a stereotypical way firmly linked to the ability to have children.
Parenthood is often idealized in an attempt to give children what the parents themselves did not have. The problem lies not in the intentions, which are often very well meaning, but in not being able to address the real needs of their children. Sometimes the children are expected to parent the parents, and are denied their own childhood. In other families any form of separation – weaning, walking, the negative phase of ‘the terrible twos’ – is experienced by the parents as rejection, and is resisted. A replacement may be sought by having another baby. As one mother of five children put it, she wanted another now her youngest was four because he no longer needed her; he could walk and talk. Being a separate individual with different needs in such families is felt to be too threatening, and importance is given to being the same, of one mind. Family therapists have described these families as emotionally enmeshed.
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