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Violent tendencies learned early, says Bradley "There are a number of factors that influence violent behaviour," says Susan. "For the most part we're talking about children who have not learned the skills for managing their anger." This can happen when children who are inherently difficult to manage end up in a lot of conflict with caregivers who may have difficulty figuring out how to respond to them. "The kids can start acting out angrily, as kids will do to get their own way. Parents may react back in angry kinds of ways. And so you get a process going back and forth with high levels of frustration." Susan says it's especially important that parent receive support around parenting strategies to work with children. "If parents get support around parenting, and are enabled to avoid angry and adversarial positions with their kids, that diminishes the likelihood that there will be the build-up of frustration and consequent behaviours," she says. It's important, however, that parents receive parenting support and training that is actually helpful, she adds. "For years, people have offered guidance and support around parenting," says Susan. "There have been charismatic people who thought they knew about parenting. However, what we've found is that not all those approaches have been tested and may not necessarily be helpful." To address this, Susan initiated, in collaboration with more than 20 community agencies and other Hospital for Sick Children and University partners, a coalition called Parenting Alliance to develop, evaluate and disseminate information about effective parenting interventions. Although the coalition is now defunct, Susan says that it helped to increase sensitivity to effective parenting strategies. During her work with the coalition, she delivered workshops on evidence-based parenting interventions to ten centres throughout Ontario. Teaching parents effective parenting strategies is not the only solution to reversing patterns of violent behaviour in families, however, according to Susan. "Your low-income or poor mother who has no support and has a couple of kids under five often feels absolutely overwhelmed with the burdens of looking after the kids," says Susan. "If she doesn't have access to respite, to good child care, to other supportive adults, it's very easy for her to move into that rejecting, abusing situation." According to Susan, society needs to realize that there are many vulnerable children and families, particularly low-income families, to whom other types of support also needs to be provided - such as housing, parental leave, child care - in order to help them move out of the cycle of violence. Susan will be making an in-depth presentation on early parent-child interactions and how they can determine later violent - or peaceful -- tendencies, at the Wouldn't That Be Amazing forum on Wednesday, October 23. |
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