A common fair practice of too many parents is to make their child a go-between when there is a quarrel between husband and wife. When parents avoid assigning the child this role, the child will designate himself without being asked. Trying the impossible and never giving up, as children often do, will always result in symptoms of some kind.

Children forced to endure parental fights or witness abuse of one parent by the other will experience emotional turmoil, including fear, become withdrawn (so they don’t have to take sides), or act as problem behavior For call the atention. yourself as a decoy and stop the threatening fight. Bed-wetting, for example, or nonconformity at school, can sometimes bring a truce and also provide a way to vent the inevitable anger a child feels as a result of what is happening.

If it is not the marriage itself that is the source of the child’s concern, it is often another type of unhappiness on the part of one or both parents. Any child who feels unhappiness, fear, or other distress in one of her parents will try to fix it. He will not only believe that he is capable, but will actually take it on as his own personal responsibility, often for life.

Children are not aware that their power is limited. Thus, the children undertake the task of rescuing the Mother or the Father or both. Trying to be a better boy or girl, do perfectly in school (or act out), be quieter or louder when mom is upset, go to bed earlier, stay up later, stop fighting with siblings, Starting fights with the brothers, trying something different, or trying everything harder, they will achieve their goal. When they fail, and they always do, they believe it’s their fault.

In one such case, I was the 30th doctor to a young woman. She came to me at the age of 19, she had never been out of a mental hospital for more than six months since she was 13 years old. She arrived with the firm expectation that she would admit her back to the hospital, as all the other 29 doctors had done.

When the whole family was called into the office, they all showed up except the father, who had abandoned them all a long time ago. The patient, however, in the back of his subconscious, kept hoping that repeated hospitalizations would bring him back. Through all these years the family had deteriorated through the loss of the mother’s ability to govern, with the result that they were sicker than the patient.

However, they did not need to deal with this fact because they kept their focus on the patient, who was fully cooperative. She was the final point in every matter discussed, and the family was entrenched in a process of avoiding their own problems by projecting them onto the patient.

During the entire first family session, the patient was the only one who was openly upset. She spoke emotionally, cried, complained, and argued, but the rest of the family remained serene as uninvolved observers. When all this was pointed out, that the patient was expressing all the emotion for them, they seemed unconvinced.

I suggested that the patient felt alone because she was the only one who admitted the pain, that she cried for everyone, that she suffered in their place. This arrangement was not fair, I argued, and was too much for the patient.

Finally, one of the brothers jumped up and ran to comfort her. Next, a sister followed; then, mother. After a while they were all crying and yet with great relief because it was good to have everything in sight.

The family dropped all resistance and denial and began to speak honestly about the true causes of their suffering. The patient was relieved of her obligation to continue as a mental patient. Instead, she began to guide her family into some insights into how they had all dealt with emotional pain in the past. She never returned to the hospital.

Mixing children into parental struggles is omnipresently destructive simply because children believe what their parents tell them, no matter how absurd. They try to adapt to the role assigned to them or imposed on themselves. The children will participate in each and every one of the follies.

The children’s dilemma is that there is no normal way to react to madness. If professionals could accept this fact, they could identify who really needs help in a family.