Growing up in a dysfunctional family can have a great impact on children. These children are known to adopt one or more of these five basic roles, “the good child”, the family hero who often assumes the parental role, “the problem child”, the family scapegoat blamed for everything, “the caretaker”, who holds the family together and takes responsibility for the family’s emotional well-being, “The lost child”, the inconspicuous and quiet one whose needs are often ignored or hidden, and “the mascot”, who uses comedy to divert attention from the increasingly dysfunctional family system. Marina seemed to have taken the role of the “lost child”. As a result of her trauma she became completely silent, refusing to talk. Like other children from dysfunctional families, Marina ends up distrusting others, and has difficulty forming healthy relationship with others. As she herself stated, “silence is my fortress, but it is also my prison”. This shows that Marina has difficulty communicating with others, and feels safer by staying silent, yet feels “imprisoned” by her silence. Children like Marina often have low self esteem and feel angry, depressed, and isolated from others. These children may also “grow up too fast”, or lack the ability to be playful. Take Marina for example, when “prep started off in pretty wild fashion.” She stated, “I don’t know what to think when that kind of stuff happens. I can see how it’s funny and all, but it makes me nervous too, as though there are no rules any more, no order, no structure.” This shows how frightened Marina was of chaos, and that she would prefer order. In the diary, she also hinted that the accident with her father might have changed her, as she mentioned, “God, a year or two ago I would have been running across the desks, pouring milk on everyone’s heads”, implying that she used to have a rather playful personality.
Children from dysfunctional families often carry their experiences with them throughout their whole lives. and may develop similar family relationship patterns in the future. Counseling centers are set up to assist in these children’s recovery, where groups of people with similar experiences work together with professional counselors. These centers have a range of counseling services to help children or even adult children from dysfunctional families to cope with past experiences of growing up in a dysfunctional family. In cases of traumatized children, psychological treatment is given in the hospital. Marina, a character from “So much to tell you”, depicted her experiences in the hospital, “All in all I was in about four different wards in the hospital. But it’s the psychiatric one I remember the most vividly, ‘cos I was in the longest, of course, but also because it seemed to make the biggest impression; I don’t know why. Partly it was the shame of being in there. Partly it was all the weirdos and freaks…Partly it was the group therapy too…I got used to hearing people analyse themselves and other people, and talk pretty openly about themselves, and I suppose after a while I started doing that inside myself.” Despite the fact that Marina “was getting nowhere at the hospital”, it appears that the group therapy did have an effect on her, encouraging her to analyse herself and others. Research found that children from dysfunctional families are better off in a natural environment, where they could interact with other people and have new chances of forming healthy relationships. Marina was hence put in a boarding school Warrington, to see if she could “learn to talk again.” Gradually she began opening up to the students and made friends.
Divorces are often a result of family dysfunction. The main reasons for divorce are lack of communication with between partners, and constant arguments. The book “So much to tell you” includes an example of this. Marina’s parents have had constant fighting, as previously mentioned in this essay. “I mean, he worked so hard to make money so we could have things – skiing and clothes and nice houses and cars – but on the other hand I never got to see much of him, and he didn’t get any time to enjoy all the things that he was buying.” This reveals that Marina’s father concentrated on working to earn money to provide for the family, but as a result he does not communicate much with the family, causing him and his wife’s relationship to fail. In addition to that, society had changed from male domination to the modern ‘power of women’. Marina’s mother clearly was in control, and especially with the new family law of ‘no fault divorce’, where one doesn’t need a fault as a cause of divorce, she could conveniently walk out of the marriage and claim half of her husband’s inheritance. This was mentioned in the diary, where Marina appeared to be sympathetic towards her father, “Nobody understood him, least of all my mother. He just went mad because he’d worked so hard to get everything and then she was going to take it all off him and walk away with it, just like that, really cool.” This was blatantly the cause of Marina’s father’s harsh act, the attempt to throw acid at his wife’s face. Divorce rates had reportedly rise since the rule of no fault divorce was make, and the statistics of divorce are rather high, as Marina discovered about her dormitory mates while they were discussing about their families, “That’s three out of eight in the one Dorm that [have parents that] are split! 3 out of 8!”
Dysfunctional families are families with strained relationships and constant fighting. Divorces are usually results of increasing dysfunction of the family system, and have reportedly been rising over the years. As John Marsden had cleverly portrayed in his book “So much to tell you”, dysfunctional families can greatly impact children, often causing them to grow up with emotional disorders. Health services such as counseling and group therapy are provided to help children such as Marina, the main character from the book, to cope with their past experiences. Dysfunctional families are alarmingly common in today’s society and appear to be increasing each year. Who knows, maybe in the future one day it would be more common to have a dysfunctional family rather than a non-dysfunctional one.