the persistent inequality of paternal and maternal roles: despite these societal evolutions, mothers continue to assume the parental role for 30 minutes more per day on average than fathers;
– the diversification of the family model (such as mixed, single-parent, homo-parent and multi-parent families).
There is therefore no naturality of the family, as there is with animals; we are in the symbolic and the cultural (abandonment, adoption, heritage, name).
With these evolutions, what will remain of the Oedipus Complex? This was built around the father–mother–child relationship, but already in 1921, the ethnologist Malinowski had questioned its universality, by observing the numerous variations of family structures, the influence of patriarchy and the lines of transmission, for which the Oedipus Complex is only valid within the framework of Roman law, Christian morality and the Viennese bourgeoisie. Thus, in certain cultures, the prohibition of incest does not relate to the mother but to the sisters.
Thus, from 1950, Lacan, in his structuralist perspective, no longer spoke of the father in the sense of pater familias, but of the paternal function. This function is present even in the absence of the father and can be very well assumed by the mother. In certain traditional father–mother–child families, however, this function is not assumed at all.
Then, in the 1970s, Lacan added that “there is no sexual relationship”, nothing allows a priori the harmony of complementarity between men and women. Would the Oedipus Complex finally only be the impossibility of jouissance and the obligation of lack? In single- or homoparental families, inseminations and surrogacy signify this as being impossible. The Oedipus Complex is only one of the possible forms of the impossible.
1.9. Social class, family income and poverty
Child poverty is a serious public health issue. For example, over 13 million young people under the age of 18 currently live in poverty in the United States and 20% of French youth live below the poverty line.
The impact of social background on educational performance is now well known following sociological studies in the aftermath of the Bourdieusian theory of social reproduction, so there is no need to belabor it here.
Decades of research have also highlighted the adverse effects of child poverty on multiple dimensions of mental health, including depression, anxiety, behavioral problems and substance abuse. Indeed, children and adolescents from low-income families are two to three times more likely to develop mental health problems than their more affluent counterparts.
The Millennium Study showed a significant protective effect of higher family income on behavioral problems at age 11. Maternal distress is an important mediator in the relationship between income and child behavior and explains the maintaining of the effect through childhood and adolescence because of its impact on the child’s emotional self-regulation.
1.10. Parenting and parenting styles: how do we find the “right balance”?
The French term “parentalité“ appeared in the 1990s, to correspond to the American “parenting” and the “parentage” of Quebecers, to define the way that parents educate their children, their educational styles. Since then, thousands of scientific studies have been devoted to it, countless manuals since the famous Dr. Spock in the United States and numerous radio (since Françoise Dolto in the 1970s) and TV shows (“Les Maternelles”). It is hard to find a more relevant and media-friendly subject. Finally, support for parenting is a concern and a worry for political leaders, because it is obviously assumed that if parents are failing in their educational missions, other institutions will have a hard time redressing the balance.
There is a consensus in this field that “extreme” educational styles, the Charybdis of authoritarianism and the Scylla of laxity, both result in negative consequences for the child’s socialization, health, safety and education. As Buddhism teaches us, we must again find “the middle way”.
We propose to call this “middle way”, described as “authoritative” in Baumrind’s (1985) three-dimensional classification, “negotiated authority”: “this is what you should do and I will explain why”. Persuasion is achieved through dialog, not physical punishment; these parents provide love and limits. Negotiated authority is a combination of affection and behavioral control, because authoritarianism also involves behavioral control, but without the affection.
Authoritarianism, itself, can take two forms: physical (coercion through beatings, physical punishment and very severe discipline) and psychological (psychological control and intrusion into the child’s autonomy through blackmail, manipulation and lying). In mothers, physical punishment may be associated with a perceived lack of control over the child: those mothers who “cannot do it anymore” will stick to this defensive educational style.
Overprotection and psychological control of the child, which block his or her autonomy, play an important role in the genesis of anxiety in children and adolescents; they induce the idea that the world is dangerous; they reinforce avoidance behaviors and impair children’s skills and self-confidence. Sometimes the measure of overprotectiveness is more related to the anxiety level of the mother than to that of the child.
The educational style adopted by a parent depends on beliefs that are in turn dependent on their own gender and educational background. Fathers tend to have more traditionalist views than mothers, especially when the child is a boy. The higher the educational level, the more likely the parent is to adopt negotiated authority and progressive views.
The educational style adopted by parents also obviously depends on their personalities. For example, parents with weak internal personality cohesion and low emotional control skills are less likely to adopt negotiated authority.
On the other hand, a parent’s educational style is also an effect of the child towards the parent: the parent reacts to what the child is. Thus, the “norm” in modern Western families, at least those of the middle class or bourgeoisie, is negotiated authority, since the media and their environment now tell them that this is the best strategy. Parents therefore prefer to use this strategy, at least as long as they are not confronted with a type of child that thwarts it (e.g. a child with a difficult character), in which case they will then be forced to change their strategy.
This is probably why, while ordinary physical violence (slapping, spanking, etc.) is decreasing, because it is more stigmatized, more serious physical abuse does not follow this trend (when parents are overwhelmed). There is an interaction between the parents and the child: parents using the authoritarian strategy most often have children with difficult characters (at least in the middle and upper classes). Meta-analyses on this subject show that the relationship between the mother’s educational style and the child’s temperament is a two-way street: the parent’s perceptions and attributions strongly influence their educational style.
The longitudinal relationship between parenting and child behavior problems is thus bidirectional, so negative parenting can influence behavior problems as much as the reverse. For example, maternal emotional rejection at kindergarten entry predicts an increase in behavior problems at the end of kindergarten, and then behavior problems at the end of kindergarten in turn predict an increase in maternal emotional rejection at the beginning of first grade. For fathers, there is a bidirectional relationship between hostility and behavior problems. These phenomena are analyzed as “developmental cascades”; we have also proposed the concept of “spiral causality” (Assailly 2017).
Furthermore, the reciprocal influence between practices and problems evolves differently in mother–child and father–child dyads, depending on the dimensions studied.
