Enmeshment in the Family 

Affilia, Vol6, No.2, Summer 1991, PP.28-44.  

The central thesis of this article is that the ideology and structure of the U.S. family generates excessive parental dependence on children for validation, self esteem, and, in some cases, intimacy; and that this dependence is the cornerstone of enmeshed parent-child relationships. The article concludes with a discussion of alternative approaches to child rearing. The empirical base for the analysis is the author's clinical experience and in-depth life history interviews with 48 Caucasian men and women of diverse ages and classes. 

Family enmeshment, the tendency to engage in overly involved, overly close emotional relationships, is a standard feature of many American families. Sociologists lend abundant support to this observation. Although they may not use the term enmeshment, they present compelling evidence of the wide distribution of an intense, highly involved, highly charged relationship in the dominant form of the American family, typical in the middle class and significant segments of the working class (Harris, 1983; Lasch, 1978; Laslett, 1979; Poster, 1978; Sennett & Cobb, 1973).

Despite the prevalence of enmeshment, feminist clinical theorists have shied away from the topic, primarily because they fear that such analyses end up blaming the mother. The practice of blaming m others for family problems is widespread not only in the mass media but also in the clinical literature. As Bogard (1987) has argued, the male bias in clinical theory has generated a tendency to label women's preferred interactional styles as pathological or dysfunctional. It seems that mothers are targets of blame for family problems not only because of the male bias in clinical theory, but also because of a bias against the social analysis of family life. framework of clinical theory, because mothers are assigned primary responsibility for the emotional life of their children, when family problems arise, the finger of blame is inevitably pointed at them

Identifying the theoretical biases does not eradicate the need to examine the implications of enmeshed parenting. Enmeshed relationships, this author believes, compromise family functioning, for they blur boundaries between generations and create a hothouse atmosphere that can stifle children's development.

But if this pattern of relationship is widely distributed in the general population, is it correct to identify it as undesirable? It is this author's contention, however, that the frequency of enmeshed relationships in American families indicates not the normality of these relationships but, rather, defects in the structure of child rearing. The family is a socially constructed institution, and malfunctions stem from this social base. The identification of these social roots is essential if these malfunctions are to be corrected. The aim of this article is to provide a basis for such solutions by analyzing the social and ideological sources of family enmeshment. Intimacy

The dominant form of the American family is characterized by small size, isolation,  privateness, and exclusive parenting. This constellation sets the stage for highly intense, highly involved family relationships. But that is only a partial picture; these characteristics form a configuration, a combintion of factors that generates excessive parental dependence on children--for validation, for self esteem, and, in some cases, for intimacy. This socially induced dependence is the corner stone of parental enmeshment with children. Of course, there is nothing surprising about parents' dependence on children. People tend to feel dependent on those they value most, and children are especially precious as a source of pleasure, meaning, and a sense of continuity, but that inherent dependence goes awry when pare;nts rely excessively on children for self esteem.

In addition, the  literature, evidence for this thesis comes from two sources. One is clients in the author's clinical practice who, because of inense involvement in their inner lives, highlight the processes under study.  The second is in-depth,life-hoistory interviews with 48 Caucaian men and women, married or in live-in relatinships, diverse in class and age(26 to 44 years old), from the Anchorage, Alaska area. These people are paert of the sample of an study of gender psychology.They were selected for this subsample because they represent both traditional and innovative coparenting approaches to child rearing. Because this research is but one source that fuels this analysis, it shall not be presented in the form of a traditional research report.
 

SOURCES OF FAMILY ENMESHMENT

Cultural Norms

Collective forms of child  rearing have characterized most cultures throughout history, but in the United States, family ideology emphasizes personal rather than social responsibility for raising children.  This doctrine inevitably beets a child-rearing system in which one or at best two parents are held exclusively responsible for children's development and well-being.  Under these conditions, any perceived flaws in the children's characters or behavior are inevitably attributed to defecs in the parents.

Although cultural ideology about the family influences both sexes, women, as principall caretakers of children, are more pro fondly affected. Women's induction into the role of primary parent evolved with the rise of industrial capitalism. During that transition, the picture of mothers changed from one of indifference and neglect to that of Madonnas (Aries, 1962). During the Middle Ages, parenting was not women's chief occupation; women were active participants in the economic work of the household (Beard, 1946). When the economy shifted from an agricultural base to an industrial base, when work and family became separate spheres of activity, women were left at home as dependents without economically valued roles. woman's natural calling developed. This ideology served to attach women to mothering as their central occupation

With advances in education, social science, and psychoanalysis in the 20th century, the concept of motherhood expanded; . Mothers came to be considered essential to the survival of their children. The notion of maternal indispensability received abundant ideological support not only in the academic literature on mother-child bonding. The latter body of work, a large part of which is based on studies of mammalian mothers and offspring, underlines the severe damage that infants and children experience when they are separated from their mothers (for a review of this literature, see Chess It was then that the ideology glorifying motherhood asin the mass media, but also& Thomas, 1982). Investigators have attributed the most serious disorders, such as schizophrenia, child battering, and even death, to faulty mother-child bonding.

Even in this day of dual-career families, the concept of maternal indispensability persists with dogged tenacity. The majority of mothers interviewed for the author's study, whether they were career women or full-time homemakers, believed that their children needed something that only they could give them. this conviction. The remarks of Tricia, a 35-year-old attorney and coparent of a toddler, are typical:

   I feel like it's real important for the child to have one primary parent to bond to in early infancy and I don't think John(husband) agrees with me, but I am convinced that person should  be the mother.  I know other people who wouldn't agree with me either, but I beloieve it so strongly.  I think because if I didn't I'd feel a tremendous loss.

Tricia's child was hardly past infancy.  Mothers of latencyh-age children disclosed a similar binding belief.  Mary Lee, a part-time librarian and mother of a seven-year-old son revealed the intensity of her need to experience herself as indispensable. 

   I shocked myself when I realized I was fostering Mikey's dependency, like I needed it to feel needed.  I knew I had to stop it. Then my thoughts leaped to having another child until I realized, I don't want another child. I couldn't believe it, how much to feel needed to feel good about myself.

Once the motherhood ideology becomes internalized into women's psyches, as dependent on children for repeatedly confirming their indispensability.

That parenting is less central to men's definition of self than it is to women's does not mean that fathers are not deeply invested in their children's development and, particularly, in how their children tum out. Both parents may agonize when their children show signs of sodal or emotional disturbance, especially when these signs are overt and publicly discernible. Jean and Randy, parents of a teenage son who was sentenced to a drug rehabilitation program, gave painful testimony to this distress when they recounted a crushing experience with the program's counselors. "Before they even knew anything about us, they said we were were obviously a dysfunctional family," said Randy. obviously we hadn't given our son the love he needed or he wouldn't be in this mess." In essence, Jean and Randy were subjected to a verbal thrashing for the crime of having a child with a problem.

Reporting a study of British school children, Newsom and Newsom (1976, p. 400) vividly described parents' vulnerability to their children's behavior:

   If a child behaves badly in school, it is the parents who will be blamed, not the teacher. Nor is this just a question of naughty or anti-social behavioir; if the child is unhappy or shy or over-assertive or too passive or lacks confidence, the first suspecdts are the parents who must have made him that way.  And if by chance the child's behavior is different at home and unsatisfactory only at school, parents far too often are met with polite disbelief rather than an interest in why that should  be.

   Parents are in fact chronically on the defensive over their parenting because the responsibility laid on them is not only limitless but also supremely personal. Our children are a walking testimony for the sort of people we are--doubly so  since they advertise both their heredity and their environment.

When children reach adolescence and young adulthood their increasedir  capacity for defiance heightens parents' fears of embarrassment and humiliation. Studies on disturbed adolescents have verified this parental susceptibility (Levi, Stierlin, & Savard, 1972; Stierlin, Levi, that parents, especially fathers, often experience severe emotional stress when their children enter adulthood. Some of the men interviewed for this study recalled such distressful responses by their fathers. "He banished me from the house just because I refused to cut my hair," lamented a 43-year-old teacher when recalling his rebellion during the youth movements of the 1960s. "He didn't speak to me for two years when I dropped out of school and wouldn't take a regular job," repined a 39year- old fireman who also had been an activist during that period. Repeatedly, men who in their earlier lives had repudiated the values their parents held most dear described some extreme reactions, far more severe by their fathers than by their mothers. Fathers' disappointment in their children has even been identified as a contributing factor in studies of their sudden deaths (Greene, Goldstein,&Moss, 1972).

The cultural prescription for exclusive parenting translates into a charge of exclusive parental responsibility for any failing in the child. And this mandate ineluctably renders parents highly dependent on children for certifying their competence.

Most of the people who were interviewed for the study did not suspect their parents' vulnerability to their behavior, but a few showed a keen awareness of it. Listen to this poignant remark by a 27-year-old man who was a physical education teacher:

   I  could have devastated them,like becoming a transvestite or an alcoholic lying in the gutter. It was an enormous burden of responsibiliy  I wasn't malicious. I didn't want to destroy them. and I felt so guilty for being someone or possibly  doing something that could shatter them.

Several women revealed a similar anxiety that their life choices would invalidate those of their mothers. Thirty-one-year-old Sally, a bookkeeper, related a long history of anxiety on this score.

   She(mother) told me over and over again that the most wonderful thing in her life was having children. but then she never had anything else. In the years when I didn't want kids I felt a lot of guilt about what it would do to her. I worried itg would crush her. I'm still not sure if I had Carmen(daughter) for me  or for her.

Thus, the onus of responsibility laid on parents evolves into a yoke of guilt on their children. It was an enormous burden it would

OCCUPATIONAL STRUCTURE

Although women constitute a significant part of the labor force, their sense of self is still rooted in family relationships (Bachman, 1987). Men's identity, on the other hand, is fundamentally tied to their work roles. And an occupational structure that deprives the majority of dignified and meaningful work exerts continuous pressure on men to depend on their families and children for a positive identity. In penetrating analyses of contemporary family life, Sennett (1978) and Harris (1983) elaborated on this theme. They contended that widespread proletarianization, with its limited opportunities for most people to worried Andan widespread it would . Jones 35 find status, significance, and self-respect in work, promotes men's dependence on wives and children for their self-esteem. The Industrial Revolution, Harris (1983) stressed, gave children a new and significant cultural meaning as an alternative source of sense of significance for parents

This is not to overstate the case for the dehumanizing effects of work in industrialized nations. Even in routine jobs, individuals can gain some sense of competence and value  (Jones, 1976; L.B.Rubin,personalcommunication, March23, 1989). Nevertheless,  half the men interviewed for this study acknowledged a serious lack of meaning and satisfaction in work. Did these men, as Harris suggested, depend principally on their children for a positive identity? This sample is skewed by the presence of fathers who share parenting. Unlike the majority, these coparenting fathers' first priority is the family, and thus they are dependent on their wives and children for self-esteem. But some of those who did not hold this priority still found themselves turning to their children as a major source of feelings of competence and worth. The remarks of Dick, a 35-year-old cook, are illustrative:  "I really don't count on being told by Lisa(daughter) that I'm a good dad and that she  loves me. And I'm real dependent on Doris(wife) for telling  me I'm an okay dad, too."  Thus, one sees how the deprivation of dignity and  meaning in work combine with cultural pressures to foster parents' dependence on their children for feelings of worth.

FRUSTRATIONS OF INTIMACY

Additional factors trigger women's dependence on their children. One factor is marital frustration. Given the high rate of geographic mobility, with its attendant isolation from kin and community and the competitive structure of the work world, marriage and family often represent an individuals chief hope for intimate relationships. When it comes to marriage, these high hopes are often quickly dashed. The disappointment generally strikes a deeper blow to women's hearts than to men's. 36 Affilia Summer 1991 Closeness in relationships is central to women's sense of self and significance. For a lifetime, women were promised the reward of in promoting it. Although men may start relationships with similar aspirations, they tend to reorder their priorities, emphasizing the world outside the family. This divergence is the source of intense marital conflict..  In Intimate Strangers, Rubin( (1983, p. 65) furnished a searing description of how husbands and wives experience this difference:

   "He doesn't talk to me," says a woman. "I don't know what she wants to talk about," says a man. "I want to know what he's feeling," she tells me. "I'm not feeling anything," he insists. "Who can feel nothing?" she cries. "I can," he shouts."

Clearly, husbands and wives generally define intimacy in different terms. To wives, intimacy  means attentiveness, verbal sharing, and emotional support.  To husbands, intimacy has more to do with practical and financial support as well as with  sex (Cancian, 1987). "When I tell him I'm upset, he jumps right in  with a solution, like I should get right up and do something about it. He doesn't understand that all I want is a sympathetic ear," complained 27-year-old Helen. Raising his arms in a gesture of despair, her husband Jim said, "I tell her to do what I tell myself to do, but that's not what she wants to hear."

These critical gender disparities are part of the reason that family sociologist Bernard (1982) spoke of two marriages family: his and hers. And in the area of intimacy, hers is significantly less satisfying than is his, as research has repeatedly shown (Bernard, 1971,1982; Rubin,1983; Steil When their illusion of intimacy bursts, wives often experience a profound emptiness or "black hole," as some women who were interviewed described it. They accelerate demands for their husbands to be more communicative and more responsive- to fill that black hole with closeness. When their demands fail, they may seek compensation from friends, but frequently women depend on their children to satisfy their intimacy needs. In a clinical session, 33-year-old Thelma, a full-time homemaker. wjp was ,more conscious of this displacement than were most women in the nonclinical sample, cogently described thisdependene.

   Thelma: I suppose Tom [her husband) and I should go out sometimes by ourselves, without the kids. He wants to. But I hate to leave Chuckie with a sitter. He's only 26 months old. I'd just be thinking about him all the time I was gone anyhow.

    Author: What would you be thinking about?

   Thelma: About how hard it is for him when I'm not there. [A huge grin spread across her face.] He won't let anyone but me take care of him. He just kicks up a big fuss unless Mommy is doing it.

    Author:  It sounds like he  makes  you feel very special.

   Thelma: Yes, I need that. Because I don't feel like I mean anything special to Tom. Something is just missing in our relationship. He comes home every night and he does his share of chores. But he's not very affectionate, and he doesn't like to talk about emotional things, the things that are on my mind. There's just not much intimacy. I'd like to feel important to him like I do to Chuckie. 

 When husbands are emotionally remote and children clamor for their mothers' attention, it is small wonder that mothers look to their children for intimacy

 But, one may ask, what is wrong with mothers relying on their children for intimacy? It is certainly important for mothers to be sensitively attuned to their children. But maternal attainment occurs in a one-sided interaction in which an adult guides a dependent child. In contrast, intimacy is a peer relationship. To treat children as peers clouds the generational boundary and deprives children of access to guidance by adults. It also encumbers children  with the weight of their mothers' needs.

FRUSTRATION OF MASTERY

Women's suppression of their interest in mastery and accomplishment in the world outside the family is another wellspring for their over investment in their children. The subject of mas - mas 38 Affilia Summer 1991 tery has not attracted significant attention in clinical theory probably because of the influence of psychoanalysis, with its focus on unconscious processes. However, this author believes that the desire for both mastery and connection are basic to human nature, already present at birth.

There is a continuous and potentially creative tension between these two desires. The literature on androgyny and beyond androgyny amplifies the importance of both sexes developing and integrating the mastery and nurturance sides of their natures (Bern, 1974, 1977, 1983; Cancian, 1987). Historically, Western societies have severed mastery and connection by gender and have treated this division as natural, universal, God given. The culture maintains this segmentation with norms that reprove the adoption of the wrong side by either gender.

This cleavage of mastery and connection by gender is not a simple matter of destrOying one part; the disowned part reemerges often in disguised forms. Barney, a 31-year-old car salesman, furnished an illustration. He demands that his wife keep him company virtually every evening. When he was probed for the feelings underlying his mandate, Barney acknowledge intense fears of being alone. "1 just feel all at odds when I'm by myself, like I don't know what to do or where to tum. wife. Rather, in the language of strength and independence, he conveyed his need as a demand, as an assertion of his rights as a husband. Similar to other men who were interviewed, Barney defined emotional neediness as a weakness, a trait he disparaged because he associated

Many of the wives who were interviewed were aware of their husbands' contradictory behavior. Often they played along with the guise, and some went even further, deliberately concealing their competencies to protect the image of their husbands as strong, independent, and accomplished. A conscious masking of competencies was revealed in an interview with Charlotte, a 26-year-old wife of a construction worker who It feels awful." But Barney never confided this fear to his it with femininity.is regularly absent from horne. Although Charlotte made a conscious choice to hide her accomplishments from her husband in order to prop up his masculine image, she still yeamed for his recognition of her abilities:

   Felt sort of crazy.   I mean  I always change my tires.  I drive on icy streets in subzero weeather. I take care of everything when he isn't home. But when he's here,I figure heneeds to feel I rely onhim. So like when we have a flat tire I just sit in the car pretending I don't know how to use a jack or a lug wrench and then I give him a big pat on the back when he's through. I don't know what else to do. But I wish he knew what I could do.

Charlotte's frustration arose not from suppressing her desire for mastery, but from hiding it from her husband. other women, especially those who were less aware of their aspirations, the author observed a tendency for them to displace their buried desires onto their children and husbands. In relation to children, this transference usually took one of two related forms-either lliving vicariously through the children's accomplishments or investing all their creative energies and, consequently, their self-worth into the activity of mothering. In both cases, the mother's adaptation threatened to create an emotionally suffocating atmosphere for the children.

CONCLUSION

These are some of the critical social forces that foster parents' over investment in their children. And clearly, such enmeshed relationships hamper family functioning. Yet, in the United States, little consideration is given to alternative arrangements for child rearing. The belief that exclusive parenting is the correct and only effective way to raise children is widespread and deeply entrenched. the family. As a result, publicly supported programs focus on maintaining, rather than changing, the structure of parentingon perfecting the small, isolated family unit, rather than on examining alternative possibilities. The family-resource move It certainly pervades public policy on move 40 Affilia which has recently gained popularity, is a case in point. Although this movement recognizes the excessive burdens on parents and addresses many of their problems, its central thrust is still "to empower and strengthen adults in their roles as parents, nurturers, and providers" (Weissbourd 1989, p. 21).

One of the most compelling and significant challenges to the status quo advocate shared parenting as a remedy for the potential emotional Crippling that boys and girls experience in a mother dominated child-rearing system (Chodorow, 1978; Dinnerstein, 1976; Ehrensaft, 1987; Held, 1984). They maintain that shared care taking will provide children with both of whom integrate work and family roles, the private and public realms. Coparenting, they assert, will foster in boys and girls the development ofboth sides of their natures: relationship and autonomy/ mastery.

Does this solution affect the propensity toward enmeshment? The proponents of shared parenting certainly assumed that it would. However, the author's interviews with coparenting couples refute this assumption. Given the organization of work, fathers in these families could take equal responsibility for child rearing only than on their careers. Once they made that choice, their children became a more central interest than their work. The mothers, even though they had careers, also maintained a child-first priority. The difference in the coparenting families was two rather than one intensely, if not overly involved, parents. study of coparenting couples, Ehrensaft (1987, p. 209) found a similarly high risk of over parenting and over involvement.

   And the potential fallout [of shared parenting] for the children is an overinvolvement even more extreme than the over investment of the 1950s mother who had nothing but her child to live for and was forced to channel small human being. The consequence for the co-parented child can be a feeling of emotional suffocation, accompanied by squeamish or avoidant reactions to the parents. loving, but undaunted and perpetual scrutiny.  In no way can this be beneficial for the child's development of authonomy or is or her ability to reegulate the level of distance or connectedness to another human being.

Because shared parenting is a design for change within the framework of exclusive parenting, it will not necessarily  diminish enmeshed relationships. To achieve that end requjires looking beyhond the nuclear family, an endeavor that is difficult in the face of prervailinhg cultural ideology and its expression in psychological theories that emphasize the exclusive role of parents.  Yet abundant research ahs called these theories into question.  One example is Bettleheim's (1969) classic study of Israeli children who were rised in children's homes on a kibbutz but visited their parents evenings and on weekends.  Bettleheim found these children to be as emotionally table as those raised in the United States.  Similarly, studies of non-Western cultures, in which diffuse forms of aprenting are the rule, suggest not only that these systems are not deleterious, but that they may have imporant advantages such as greater stability and warmth in mothers(Greenfield, 1981).

 Most of the people interviewed for the study echoed the conventional ideology about the family. They gave little thought to diffusing parenting beyond the extended family circle. In response to questions about solutions to the problems they encountered as parents, nearly everyone in the sample, after mentioning the need for adequate day care and after school care, referred to their keen desire to live closer to their extended families or greater support from them. They mourned the passing of the 19th-century extended family embedded in a pastoral, rural community, but gave little thought to alternatives for the 21st century.

There are many possibilities for experimenting with alternative family arrangements that have the potential for reducing enmeshment. Examples are fictive and surrogate parenting and grand parenting programs. Regarding the latter, consider the potential resource in the growing population of aged persons, if family members were nearby, to have 42 Affilia Summer 1991 many of whom have a complementary need to be connected to a family. from kin is even greater than in other parts of the United States, fictive families are a relatively common occurrence. For example, a 40-year-old woman in the sample has shared holiday meals with the same group of friends of different generations for the past 15 years and refers to them as "my family." The author is familiar with other families in Anchorage in which two generations of adults have informally adopted each other as family substitutes. They, too, refer to these relationships as family, conferring on them some of the same privileges and obligations that they do with blood relatives.

Cross-culturally, there are many models of diffuse parenting that can serve as a foundation for experiments in alternative child-rearing arrangements. Even in the contemporary United States, pockets of experimentation, such as communes, exist.

The cultural mythology about motherhood, so deeply inscribed in individuals' psyches and structural change Ideology and structure are in dialectical interaction, and changes in one create tensions in the other. This article has attempted to address that tension by stimulating awareness of the need for innovation in the child-rearing system. 

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