Lose your job, save your family
by Mira and Charles on November 15th, 2009When I [Charles] was a kid my dad was unemployed a lot. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on the impact of unemployment on mental health. I know what it’s like. And now, with the spike in unemployment over the past year, new data is coming in showing that being unemployed can hurt more than your bank account—it can hurt your whole family. It’s just like when one person comes home with a cold and pretty soon everyone is sick. In the same way, unemployment’s effects start with the breadwinner and ripple out to spouse, kids, and everyone else. The kids are at risk of becoming depressed, anxious, performing poorly in school, getting into trouble. About 20 million kids are at risk of this.
But is doesn’t have to be this way. Unemployment can be a wonderful opportunity for everyone, particularly the kids, to learn lessons in resilience that can have life-long benefits.
So where do the problems come from?
The most common reactions to unemployment are
- Anxiety and stress: “I’m afraid we’re screwed and I don’t know what to do about it.”
- Depression and discouragement: “I’m sure we’re screwed and I don’t know what to do about it.
- Low self-esteem: “We’re screwed and it’s all my fault—I’m just no good.”
- Role confusion: “I don’t know who I am any more, and no one else does either.”
Mom or dad may not want to give these messages, but they do. The bright, optimistic gloss they put on things doesn’t and can’t last long. Times are tough. People don’t usually have a big financial cushion.
And with mom and dad feeling this way, soon the kids do too. The central way the disease is spread through the family is that kids only know what things mean by picking up cues from their parents. If dad thinks they’re screwed, the kids will too. If dad doesn’t know who he is anymore, the kids won’t know who he is anymore either.
When you become unemployed, you become flooded with messages that tell you you will not be OK. Of course you’ll feel rotten if you believe that. But the antidote isn’t to brainlessly think that everything will be wonderful and a great new job is just a week away. This kind of positive thinking actually produces more negative thinking when it’s disconfirmed by reality.
Here’s the solution, and it grows out of basic resilience training
You need to focus on the core resilience idea: “One way or another, we are going to cope with this, and because we love each other and help each other we will be OK no matter what happens.” Take this idea to heart. Let it drive every other thought out of your head.
Then you focus on the ways you’re going to cope. You make plans. You make decisions. You create new rules for who does what.
And you TALK about what you’re doing to cope and about how you’re good at coping as a family. And you TALK about how you will be OK as long as you have each other. And if you want to, you can talk about how one day everything will be OK, no matter what happens in the meantime. In other words, you become a family-sized support group for strengthening the core resilience idea. This will deal with those 4 most common reactions to unemployment.
By doing this, mom and dad give the kids a lesson in resilience: how you bounce back by focusing on the positive things you can do to cope and on the ways you will be OK. Kids see their parents as copers and feel reassured. Parents see themselves as copers and feel reassured too.
And if mom or dad have trouble getting with this program, they need to talk to someone—a friend, pastor, advisor, member of a support group—who will help them develop this resilience focus.
This is way do-able, but you have to do it.
For more help on how to cope, check out The Emotional Energy Factor for lots of ways to cope emotionally and Our Love Is Too Good to Feel So Bad for lots of ways to prevent life stress from hurting your marriage.
