Presentation

I am Argentine, a physician, a specialist in psychiatry and a family therapist. I teach on the Refresher Course in systemic thinking directed, at the Faculty of Psychology of the UBA, by Dr Dora Schnitman, where I am in charge of the themes of diversity, gender and family violence.

I also work — and this is the subject of the present article — in the Programme for the democratisation of family relationships coordinated by Dr Beatriz Schmukler in Mexico. There I act as an adviser to the Programme and I belong to the group of professionals who are writing a series of guide-booklets (**) on various themes, which we want to help the women and men who coordinate social programmes in the field to carry out the exercise of reflecting on their own ideas.

What does that mean? Democratising families and the professionals who assist them

It is something like managing to loosen the beliefs on which we base ourselves, we who intervene in matters of psychological and social care, in order to take decisions and accompany processes in our professions, and which go well beyond what we learned in schools of professional training. These beliefs also derive from what we learned in our families and in our communities.

Which beliefs are we talking about? Above all those concerning “the family” and the roles that we, mothers and fathers, play within it. Our capacity to perceive and to act is largely framed by our beliefs, and not precisely by their most conscious and most elaborate aspects, but by their most automatic and most spontaneous ones.

In my professional practice I come up against this observation almost daily: there are great differences in the quality of the accompaniment and of the help that we can offer to those who come to consult us — us and the other agents of the social or health services — depending on whether or not we are trained to examine and to question our beliefs, and to promote the forms of communication that we propose in this programme in order to achieve the democratisation of families.

Some of these beliefs settle in us more rigidly than others, and it is precisely those that we need to modify. By way of examples of very fixed and very frequent beliefs:

If such are our beliefs, we shall operate in a way very different from the one that would be ours if those beliefs “loosened”, if we doubted that they were so true, and if we then approached people and their singular situations with fewer certainties, from ways of looking that appreciate their resources and respect their needs.

I think we shall understand better this concern that brings us together through cases and examples from real life and that, in turn, as we examine them, working them through will allow me to develop the two other themes that are central to this Programme: the question of the value of the forms of conversation within families, in so far as they produce climates and agreements under conditions of equity between their members, and the debate, which may remain open for later, on the function it falls to us to fulfil, we who work in the social field (including education, health and culture), in the light of ethical principles.

The case

Mrs Morales asks for a meeting with the social workers of a residential institution for adolescents with behavioural difficulties, where her two children have been placed: a boy of 14 and a girl of 12. The history of this placement is as follows: fourteen months earlier, the two children had been reported as belonging to a gang of adolescents that was committing offences in the neighbourhood where they lived with their mother. The judge who took up the case then decided that the adolescent brother and sister would take part in the residential programme for “minors at risk” of the institution mentioned.

Today, the professionals in charge of the programme had discussed the case of this brother and sister, finding that both had benefited from it and that the elder was now in a state to go back to living with his mother, while they thought it preferable that the little girl should stay in the institution two or three months longer. They had sent a letter to the mother to inform her of this news, and found themselves facing a mother who was asking them for a meeting and who seemed very far from enthusiastic at the idea of getting her children back.

In order to understand the importance of the changes in the attitudes and in the ways of looking of those who intervene, we shall describe the scenes that brought it to light.

The meeting requested by the lady took place in a tense and uncomfortable climate. The adolescents seemed to be in another world. The social therapists were making great efforts to convince the mother that her children had frankly improved and that she should prepare herself to receive them again. The mother, very carefully turned out, looking at her watch (she had warned them that she had a very strict schedule for arriving at her workplace, where people were very rigorous and where nobody knew about her family problems), sat very stiffly and somewhat hostile.

A supervisor had been called in by the institution to advise it, because those in charge and the social therapists were very put out by this mother: they had not felt her to be welcoming towards her children. The impression of the social workers was rather that the mother had attitudes of rejection towards her children. As the uncomfortable climate persisted and nothing was improving in the meeting, the supervisor asks for a break in order to reflect. When the social workers and the supervisor leave the room, the latter sees the mother and the young people embracing each other warmly. The effect of this scene of tenderness was remarkable. It immediately produced a change of appreciation in the supervisor who, on going back into the room, sits down beside the mother. The mother, in her turn, also responds to the supervisor’s affectionate approach and begins to tell them that she lives in a very bad and dangerous neighbourhood, where her children had become attached to other very marginal young people involved in criminal activities, and that in a few months she was going to obtain housing somewhere else: that was where she wanted to receive her children again. But that for the moment she was afraid that, if they came back, the situation they had already been through would repeat itself, and that this great collective sacrifice would have been in vain. The social therapists and the supervisor went on with the conversation with the mother, now in a tone and a climate of joint search for the way to take the next steps in order to make these plans a reality. The climate of the meeting relaxed and turned into a shared coordination of the stages to be accomplished.

Reflections on the “case”

My working through of this “case” sets out to identify the conceptions of the social therapists and of the supervisor as to the mother’s place in the family, and the possibility of coming into contact with various, not so conventional aspects of a woman who is at once the mother and the father of her children, who needs to get ahead and who, in order to do so, has to work long hours every day and cannot look after her children as she would like to, and who uses the services of a public agency to have them looked after while she consolidates the plan that will improve her children’s living conditions.

When the social therapists and the supervisor manage to reduce the criticism and the negative judgement directed at Mrs Morales, they also manage to build with her a collaborative relationship that will concretely benefit the adolescents the agency is looking after. Mother, social therapists and supervisor can now become allies and share an objective on which they will join their efforts.

In the initial communicational exchange, it is obvious that the mother had perceived the hostility and the criticism of the professionals and that she was defending herself by confiding to them neither her real reasons nor her needs. The supervisor’s subsequent shift to an understanding and appreciative attitude produces another kind of conversation, this time a fruitful one.

This example also serves us to reflect on the “functions” that we, the various social agents, fulfil. To criticise, to judge mothers (and fathers, when they are there) is easy. Very often the agents are young and do not yet have the experience of motherhood or fatherhood. And even when they are more mature and have children themselves, the roles of parents, particularly that of mother, are roles so demanding and so complex that it is easy to look at them from the outside and judge them negatively.

The next step in this direction consists in believing that the function of assistance is fulfilled by taking the parents’ place. We may think that we would do things better than they do and that, therefore, the best option for the children would be, in such cases, the one that we, the professionals and the institutions, offer them.

And that is where we would be mistaken. The families, the fathers and mothers that each person has may not be wonderful and may make many mistakes, but they are not for all that disposable bonds, on the pretext that they could be replaced by those who would do better. The needs of families very often lie in the possibility that we accompany them at the moments when they have difficulty in exercising their functions and in carrying through their work of bringing up children. Moreover, accompanying and facilitating conversations and procedures are very difficult and very complex functions, far more so than taking the place of the family actors and pushing them aside. They require accepting roles that are not the leading ones on the stage, recognising the capacities of the members of families, trusting them and looking for good strategies to support them and help them change what does not serve them.

Conclusions

That is what the Programme for family democratisation is about: accompanying the agents and the promoters of social programmes so that they broaden their conceptions of “families” and of “gender”, so that they train themselves in the field of communicational skills in order to generate equities, to learn to stop violence, to open more democratic paths in conversations and in organisations, and so that they enrich their functions for the benefit of the people they assist.

We hope that these proposals will produce more democratic consciousnesses, tending towards a better quality of life and helping to prevent the psychosocial problems that settle on inequities, as all abuses do, and in particular family violence.

Perhaps here in Argentina we too shall have the chance to develop a programme with similar characteristics, one that supports us in obtaining more democratic families.