 No matter how caring a mother is, at some level her ability to support her children will have been affected by her partner’s violence.
Why is it hard to parent when there is domestic violence?
In order to understand this, it is important to broaden our view of what it is like to live with domestic violence.
These are not homes where the ordinariness of life is occasionally punctuated with incidents of violence.
Living with domestic violence means that children grow up with a mother who may be verbally and emotionally abused, socially isolated, struggling financially and feeling fearful much of the time. The whole family is focused on the abuser’s potential to be angry and violent.
Women have described many ways in which their parenting has been affected by violence:
1. In order to stop or lessen the violence, women may set themselves and their children enormously high standards to be good, to be quiet and not to cry.
2. Women often use themselves as a shield from the violence, in order to stop the children being hurt.
3. Women are often called hopeless mothers or house-keepers by their abusers. This can affect their own view of their parenting abilities and sometimes results in a lack of respect from their children. This may make it difficult to manage their child’s demands.
4. Women living with violence often feel depressed, frustrated and powerless. These feelings may be expressed through their disciplining of their children. They may doubt their own judgement and parent their children inconsistently.
5. Some women feel reluctant to discipline their children because they associate control with their experience of domestic violence. They may adopt a protective and permissive parenting style to compensate for the abuser’s harsh discipline, or to make up for the absent father.
6. There is often a difficulty for mothers to deal with their perception of the children’s similarities to the abusive father, particularly if boys become aggressive and abusive themselves.
7. Some women use their children as confidantes or allies to help them cope with the abuse.
8. Mothers escaping violence may have to move their children from home to home and school to school. Without personal security and continuity of environment, their children may be disadvantaged emotionally and intellectually.
9. Children living with violence are affected by the inconsistent and confusing emotional climate of the home. They may not learn about consequences or boundaries for appropriate behaviour. This can make it hard for mothers to set limits on behaviour.
10. Many women experience difficulties post-separation. Children may act out the violence they have seen, blame her for causing the violence, blame their mother for leaving, or blame her for lack of contact with the father.
11. Children often become specific targets for abuse after separation, the tendency being for then to move from being the secondary victim to the primary victim (Rendell, Lynch & Rathus, 2000).
What can women do?
The strategy is to raise women’s awareness of the impact of living with domestic violence.
We must place responsibility for the violence solely with the abuser. It is empowering for women, children and young people to understand that many of their behaviours and emotions are ‘normal’ reactions to an experience of violence, and that they are shared by many others.
Some women have lived in abusive situations from birth, and may feel that they have been very familiar with these behavioural effects of violence all their lives, to the extent that they perceive these effects as their own personality or temperament.
Attending domestic violence counselling, parenting groups for single parents, self-esteem groups, or domestic violence support groups can all help to understand and recover from the effects of abuse and control.
Reading books on, or searching the internet for “effects of domestic violence” or “parenting after domestic violence” may also help. Many websites contain stories from women who are healing from these effects.
|
| |
