We all have chips and cracks in our families: Broken Homes and Dysfunction

In spite of the fact that so many families have one parent in the household there is still a lot of stigma around being a single mom. According to the "Marital Status and Living Arrangements: March 1998 Update" by Terry A. Lugaila at the US Census Bureau:

"As of March 1998 Current Population Survey, 19.8 million children under the age of 18 lived with one parent-this translates to 27.7 percent of all children under the age of 18."

When I first was divorced I didn't hear the words "broken home" or dysfunctional all that much. They seem to have become catch-all phrases in the last 20 years when the rate of divorce became high. When I first heard Oprah Winfrey use the word broken home, I was appalled. She of all people should know better!

When I read the term in an article by Marian Wright Edelman, founder and president of the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), who had been an advocate for disadvantaged Americans for her entire professional career (www.children's defense.org.) I was more than appalled. I wrote to both women. I never got a response.

When I worked as a Social Worker for the Head Start program, the word dysfunction was used for most everyone and everything! During that 10-year period, any family not working the way society seemed to think they should work was deemed dysfunctional. We gave the label to ourselves quite easily. Movie stars were suddenly from dysfunctional homes as were various community leaders.

My home was never broken nor was it ever dysfunctional. I was divorced from my children's father after 7 years of marriage and during those 7 years I never thought of our family as dysfunctional. After my divorce I still didn't see us as dysfunctional.

I was a single mom like many others. I had my reasons for becoming divorced. It is my belief that divorce is often a solution to a problem. I believe that divorce may be the solution to marital discord, battering or substance abuse. Divorce may not be the problem at all. It may be the solution. (See my article)

When we refer to children with divorced parents as coming from broken homes, we create the potential self-fulfilling prophecy for children that implies they are not right or good; that they are broken and need to be fixed. This is where the word dysfunction comes in and if I don't like the term broken home, then it would make sense that I think the word dysfunction is a harmful one. If a child is broken, they aren't functioning right. If they aren't functioning right, they are dysfunctional. But is the child dysfunctional? For that matter is the home with only one parent not functioning?

I worked with single parents (through divorce/separation, choice, or chance)) and as a divorced parent (now remarried), I can assure you that many, many homes with single parents are far less "broken" than the homes of my friends and relatives with two biological parents in them. In turn many of them are functioning very well. But I have a problem with the word dysfunction even with families who are having problems. I hope people/parents especially who are divorced don't see themselves as broken or dysfunctional.

In order to help you do that I am going to do what we call in Social Work, reframe the way you see your family and world.

Let’s define it first:

Dysfunction: impaired or abnormal functioning

Function: to carry on a function or be in action; to produce an appropriate effect

Normal: a form or state regarded as the norm; standard: constituting or conforming to a standard especially as established by law or custom (http://www.yourdictionary.com/)

So dysfunction seems to mean that a person or thing (Perhaps the coffee grinder that you just bought doesn’t work, it is impaired, or it doesn't perform like expected and you say it is dysfunctional.) is not doing what they are supposed to or intended to do. I don’t have a problem with using the term for a thing. In fact, it is appropriate. The Salton coffee grinder I bought was dysfunctional. It was a black and white case of not working. It did not grind the coffee.

We are now getting into one of the reasons I have for not liking nor using the word dysfunctional. Rarely can a person’s life be put into a black or white category. There are too many variables, too many contingencies, and too many facets of time to be static enough to be called dysfunctional.

An example:

I ran into a woman I used to know and was surprised her husband wasn't with her. I found out that one day he decided he didn’t want to be married anymore and moved to New Orleans! According to this woman it came as a total shock. Rarely does that happen. It can. Some people are very good at hiding secrets; but in any case he left. This was a family, when I knew them, which looked perfect. Perfect in the sense of functioning normally. Perfect in the sense one would never think of them as dysfunctional. Mom and Dad were professionals with good careers; but they were never too busy to come to school events or be the coach of the soccer team.

The children, a boy and a girl, 2 years apart, were wonderful. Polite, bright, attractive, athletic children with what seemed like a perfect life. They were brought up in an upper middle class suburb, in a nice house with a swimming pool.

So I ask you, when in time did this family become dysfunctional, if you were to use that word? Were they always so, but they pretended for the outside world. Did they just stop functioning when dad left the house?

An example:

Mom is a wonderful parent; dad is an alcoholic. This might be a perfect case of what would be called a dysfunctional family. But is it? Is the whole family unit dysfunctional? Is it dysfunctional because mom is an enabler and won’t leave her husband? What about the children? Are they dysfunctional by virtue of being products of a dysfunctional home? What if they seem to be doing all right? Is the family still dysfunctional or does it become so when the kids start getting into trouble?

I will throw this thought out: Dysfunction (like normal) doesn’t exist. What exists is a continuum of functioning. You can think of a line with 1 to 10 drawn on it and use that to visualize what I mean. In the first case, the family functioned very well for a long time and you could put that family’s function down from the years 1978, lets say to 1998, as 1. Perhaps there were signs somewhere in 1999 that things weren’t ok, you could put 1998-1999 as a 6 on the continuum of how they are functioning. And finally, in the year 2000, you could put them at number 10 because they are not functioning well.

Let me say before I go on, that I am not saying they aren’t functioning well because dad left and thus the family must be falling apart. That might not be the case in many, many scenarios like this. In this case, though the mother is having a great deal of trouble dealing with his leaving and the daughter is having a lot of psychological problems related to his leaving. So I am saying they aren’t functioning well. That may and probably will change and we could then in 2001 put them back to a 4, for example. But to say that this is a dysfunctional family is not, in my opinion, accurate or fair. Nor, when it comes right down to it, do I think it even makes sense to use the term.

Let’s take the alcoholic dad. That family is clearly not functioning well. The children are in trouble and I am sure mom is not happy when dad comes home drunk at night or doesn’t come home at all. They would be at a 10 and perhaps have been there for many years. But mom leaves him and takes the children. Without dad, they are doing great. They are all in counseling, going to support groups and the children are happy. This family is now functioning very well. I wouldn’t call them dysfunctional, would you?

I would much prefer the child of an alcoholic to say, “I grew up in a family that wasn’t functioning well; that had a lot of problems because my dad drank” rather than "I grew up in a dysfunctional family." Certainly there were parts of her life that weren’t dysfunctional. She should be able to see something good in her past and should be encouraged to do so. To be caught up in that term may mean never getting rid of that monkey on her back. It may mean never forgiving and moving forward.

I hope this has given you some food for thought.