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EmailWho is a "Yiddishe Mammeh"? Perceived Parental Rearing Behavior in Children of Holocaust Survivors
Natan P.F. Kellermann
Chief Psychologist, AMCHA, Jerusalem
July 10, 2000
Mothering involves feeding and loving one's children. If women do it well, they are "good-enough" mothers (Winnicott, 1979). If they do it too well, they are "Yiddishe Mammehs." Similarly, fathers can be either sufficiently or excessively protective and restrictive. The good part of the parenting role is that mothers and fathers care a lot about their children. The bad part is that they might care too much and then become overly involved and intrusive. As a result, they then tend to enmesh their offspring in the crossfire of their own emotional problems and bind their children unto themselves in a manner that makes it difficult for the children to gain independence. Such over-anxious parents sometimes take out on their children the ill treatment that they have experienced during their own childhood or later in life, for example during the Holocaust.
It has long been assumed that the extreme traumatisation experienced by Holocaust survivors has had a detrimental effect on their capacity for parenting. Typically, Holocaust survivor parents have been regarded as too anxious, depressed and pre-occupied with mourning their multiple losses to be able to provide an adequate maturational environment for their children. As a result, such mothers and fathers have been thought to pass on their emotional burden to their sons and daughters thus creating child-rearing problems around both attachment (Klein-Parker, 1988) and detachment (Rose & Garske, 1987). During the past thirty years, almost 400 papers have described the process of intergenerational transmission of trauma from Holocaust survivors to their "Second Generation" offspring (Solkoff, 1992; Danieli, 1998; Kellermann, 1997; Krell & Sherman, 1997; Baranowsky, et. al, 1998).
Much of this literature, however, is based on anecdotal evidence, on single-case descriptive reports and/or on empirical studies with methodological limitations, which make generalisations of their findings highly problematic. Thus we still do not know if Holocaust survivor parents actually were very different in their child-rearing practices from other parents. The purpose of the present paper is to further discuss this issue in order to attempt to verify the above assumptions by more objective means. After a brief overview of the anecdotal, descriptive and empirical literature on parental rearing behaviour in Holocaust survivor families, the summary of a preliminary comparative pilot-study will be presented and its results discussed.
Holocaust survivors as parents.
The characteristics of Holocaust survivors as parents have been described in anecdotal, descriptive and research reports. Anecdotal reports tended to ascribe much of the behaviour of Holocaust survivor parents to the culture of any traditional Jewish home in which the basic attitudes towards children were generally characterised by overfeeding, worrying and parental sacrifice. For example, Jewish parents were often depicted as asking their children: "What have you done? What are you going to do? You will bring me to the death! Are you warm enough? Have you had enough to eat? Take just a little more of this good soup!" As described by Zborowski & Herzog (1952) in their anthropological description of a typical Jewish home; "All the sacrifice, all the suffering, all the solicitude pile up into a monument to parental love, the dimensions of which define the vastness of filial indebtedness" (p. 298). But the stereotype of the "Yiddishe Mammeh," familiar in many Jewish families, took on a new meaning in the anecdotal reports of Holocaust survivor families. Here, the overt messages were described as containing a more desperate and anxious undertone. For example, regarding food and eating: "Don't leave food on your plate, because ... then and there, we had nothing!" Regarding trust; "these people are all anti-Semitic, they would kill us immediately if they could." Regarding coping with difficulties: "It could be worse, you know. What do you cry about?" Or; "You have to do more if you want to survive. You have to be strong!"
Such anecdotal reports were later replaced with descriptions of single case studies, interviews or questionnaire surveys of self-selected groups. Thus, sketches of "typical" Holocaust survivor families emerged over time (Danieli, 1988) in which such families were depicted as more or less dysfunctional in terms of structure, relational patterns and the handling of intimacy, control and conflict (Freyberg, 1980). The home atmosphere was described as being weighed down by tension, sadness, conflict and distrust of strangers and/or extensive worries of something-terrible happening. Attachments were found to be tighter and family members were perceived as more closely engaged with separations being more difficult than in other families (Barocas & Barocas, 1980; Podietz, et al, 1984; Bar-On, et al, 1998). According to Metzger-Brown (1998), such caretaking patterns were assumed to hinder the healthy development (and differentiation) of self in the second generation. Further, Holocaust survivor parents were depicted by Almagor & Leon (1989) as either too involved and overprotective, or too neglectful and indulgent, too rigid or too permissive, often with huge unrealistic expectations of their children. Finally, Davidson (1992) concluded that parent-child interactions in Holocaust survivor families were characterized by over-anxiety, intense emotional investment in the child with idealization and over-identification (p. 93).
Being based largely on clinical experience with children of Holocaust survivors in psychotherapy or on survey studies without a control group, such generalizations were criticized for painting an overly grim picture of Holocaust survivor parents in general. Therefore, empirical controlled studies started to appear in the 1970s that attempted to investigate Holocaust survivor parenting also in the non-clinical population. Over a period of twenty years some objective evidence started to appear. These studies were more or less focused on two main areas: (1) over-involvement and over-protection by Holocaust survivor parents with the resulting lack of individuation, separation, differentiation and autonomy in the children, sometimes described as family "enmeshment"; and (2) enforcement of control, "strictness" and disciplinary issues (cf. Arindell, et. al, 1994). These two areas were investigated in these studies with some of the prevalent and well-known self-report measures that required subjects to score their parents' behaviour on various dimensions of parenthood as remembered during childhood. Four such instruments were employed, while a fifth instrument Ü EMBU (Perris, et.al, 1980) includes much of the same factors (rejection, emotional warmth and overprotection), but has not yet been used in second-generation research.
1) The Parental Behavior Inventory (Schaefer, 1959) focused on three major bi-polar dimensions of parental child-rearing patterns that repeatedly emerged as especially influential: 1. The warmth or hostility of the parent-child relation (acceptance-rejection), 2. The control or autonomy of the disciplinary approach (destructiveness - permissiveness), and 3. The consistencies or inconsistencies that parents show in using discipline. In research on the second-generation, this instrument was used by Rosenberger (1973), Gay, Fuchs & Blittner (1974), Gay & Shulman (1978), Last & Klein (1984), and by Gross (1988). For example, basing their findings on a small group of 6 patients in a youth clinic, Gay, Fuchs & Blittner (1974) found that Holocaust survivor parents rated high in positive involvement and child centredness, but also created difficulties for the children when moving out from home. Because of the small groups of investigated subjects, however, this early research cannot be regarded as representative of the larger population.
(2) The Semantic Differential instrument (Osgood, Suci & Tannenbaum (1957) included three factors: 1. Potency (fast-slow, strong-weak), 2. Tension (happy-sad, calm-agitated), and 3. Attractiveness (hot-cold, gentle-harsh). This instrument was used by Keinan, Mikulincer & Rybnicki (1988) with 47 offspring compared with 46 control immigrant subjects and by Felsen & Erlich (1990) who compared 32 offspring with 30 control subjects in a nonclinical setting. Neither study found significant differences in the children's perception of parents.
(3) The PBI: Parental Bonding Instrument (Parker, 1988) included two sub-scales: 1. Care (affection, understanding, warmth), and 2. Over-protection (control, intrusion, infantilisation, encourage dependency). This instrument was used by Halik, Rosenthal & Pattison (1990) and by Zilberfein (1996) but neither of them found significant differences in the mother-daughter relationship and/or in maternal protectiveness.
Similarly, (4) Weiss (1988) found no significant differences between survivor and control families in the degree of parental permissiveness as measured with the Cornell Parent Behavior Inventory.
To sum it up; when using reliable and valid measures of perceived parental rearing behaviour, the above-mentioned studies did not find significant differences between Holocaust survivor parents and other parents. Neither did Leon, Butcher, Kleinman, Goldberg & Almagor (1981) with a different instrument, nor did Zlotogorski (1985) and Sigal & Weinfeld (1989) regarding enmeshment. Thus, we are faced with a clear discrepancy between descriptive reports of dysfunctional Holocaust survivor parent's behaviour that empirical evidence cannot substantiate with more objective means. This discrepancy has in the past been explained as an effect of differences between clinical and non-clinical populations. Others have attributed the discrepant findings to various flaws in research methodology (e.g. Solkoff, 1992) that may have limited the generalizability of the findings from the empirical research.
Constructing a New Holocaust Survivor Parenting Questionnaire:
From the literature on transgenerational transmission of trauma as well as from the literature on perceived parental rearing behaviour, several categories of parental behaviour were identified. These included both many of the repeatedly found general aspects, such as rejection-acceptance, disciplinary approach and (over)-protection and/or (over)-involvement as well as some more specific aspects of Holocaust survivor parenting mentioned in the literature, such as excessive parental expectations, guilt infliction and anger regulation, role reversal with parents, parents being too busy, and actual Holocaust-related issues, such as being related to as a replacement of a relative who perished in the Holocaust, being influenced by parents' Holocaust past, feeling that a burden had been transmitted upon them, and having absorbed the inner pain of their parents. For each aspect, a few items were written to convey a phenomenological manifestation of each aspect, including various versions of some items found in previous questionnaires. These items were then translated into Hebrew and examined for content validity by twenty psychotherapists working in a treatment center for Holocaust survivors and the second generation. Each item was written on a card and given to these judges who were asked to indicate their relevance to the process of transgenerational transmission of Holocaust trauma. Items with poor correspondence and/or unclear content were discarded or re-written.
Thus, a total of 30 items were collected to cover divergent aspects of parental rearing behaviour which respondents would be asked to rate on a five-point Likert-scale for mothers and fathers separately.
The pilot-study.
This is only a brief summary of this study (the full report is submitted for publication).
Participants. Two groups of participants were asked to complete the above-mentioned parenting questionnaire. They were told that the purpose of the study was to investigate how children of Holocaust survivors (Second Generation) and how children in general (Controls who reported that their parents had no personal experience of the Holocaust) view their parents. A total of 310 questionnaires were thus completed. The reason for the inconsistencies of rated mothers (159) and fathers (151) was that some had no memories of one parent (usually their father). Both groups included self-selected, mostly well-educated and apparently non-clinical, well-functioning Israelis who were similar on various demographic characteristics, such as sex, age, marital status, number of children and parent status.
Factor analysis yielded four primary factors: a seven-item "transmission" sub scale, with a Cronbach alpha coefficient of .89, a seven-item "affection" (or emotional warmth) sub scale with an alpha coefficient of .87, a three-item "punishing" (or rejection) sub scale with an alpha coefficient of .75, and a three-item "over-involvement" (or over-protection) sub scale with an alpha coefficient of .73. Items included in each subscale are presented in Table 1.
TABLE 1
Items included in each subscale
Transmission
1. I felt that I had to protect my parent
4. I felt responsible for the feelings of my parent
11. I felt guilty when my parent was unhappy.
13. My parent transmitted his/her burden onto me.
23. The past of my parent had an influence on my life.
24. I felt like a parent to my parent.
26. I absorbed the inner pain of my parent.
Affection
8. I felt that my parent accepted me.
14. My parent showed me that s/he loved me.
15. In times of difficulty I could get help from my parent.
21. When I was sad, I could get support from my parent.
22. My parent respected the fact that I had different opinions than he/she.
25. My parent hugged me.
27. I could trust my parent.
Punishing
3. My parent punished me.
12. My parent hit me.
28. My parent shouted at me.
Over-involvement/protection
9. My parent was too involved in my life.
19. My parent warned me of various dangers that might happen.
20. My parent was afraid that something might happen to me when I was far away.
Results
When analyzing findings of mothers and fathers separately, both Holocaust survivor mothers and fathers tended to rate higher on transmission than other parents. Except for a higher rating on the punishing factor for Holocaust survivor fathers, no other significant differences were found between the two groups. Holocaust survivor mothers were not rated higher on over-protection, than other mothers. As expected, mothers in general (Means 18.9) tended to transmit more than fathers (Means 15.3) do and tended to be more over-protective (Means 9.0) than fathers (Means 7.2), but no significant differences were found on the other two factors for the entire population.
Discussion
Taking into consideration the various methodological problems in this pilot-study, the present findings should be clearly looked upon only as a tentative first step in investigating Holocaust survivor parental rearing behavior. It is still unknown how meaningful the findings of the present study are after all the calculations have been carried out. For this reason, and given the new questionnaire, and the mixed sample, this might suggest a promising direction for future research. The questionnaire seemed to be a valid measure of Holocaust survivor's (and perhaps other traumatized population's) parental behaviors; people understood it and it is worth repeating it with more controlled populations.
The clear-cut discovery of a salient transmission factor in the present questionnaire is in itself an important finding. This factor includes items that depicts children feeling more protective and responsible of their parents, as if they were themselves parents to their parents. The past of the parents has a major influence on their own lives, they tend to absorb the inner pain of their parents and they take upon themselves a kind of burden from the past of their parents. Such manifestations of transgenerational transmission of trauma may be characterized as a kind of role reversal with the traumatized parent and conceptualized as "defensive caretaking," (Metzger-Brown, 1998), "narcissistic parenting" (Rosenberger, 1973), "enmeshment," (Zlotogorski, 1985; Seifter-Abrams, 1999), "engagement" (Podietz, et al., 1984) or "parent-child role diffusion" (Zilberfein, 1996). Through "invisible loyalties" (Boszormenyi-Nagi & Spark, 1973), children feel protective of their parents, thus adopting the role/s of "parental/parentified child" (Miller, 1981). Whatever terminology used, it seems that the exaggerated commitment of children to their parents, repeatedly described in the extensive descriptive literature, but hitherto not substantiated in empirical studies, could be corroborated by the present pilot-study.
As for the comparison of the perception of Holocaust survivors with other parents, the present pilot-study indicates that, except for Holocaust survivors rating higher on transmission, differences in general child-rearing practices such as affection, punishing and over-protection seemed to be small, if taken as a whole. Thus, the assumption that Holocaust survivor parents are viewed by their children as dysfunctional was not confirmed by the present study. Contrariwise, the present findings indicate that Holocaust survivor parents are viewed by their children in a positive light. This supports earlier findings by Halik et. al, (1990), Zilberfein (1996) and Leventhal & Ontell (1989) that Holocaust survivor mothers and other mothers are similarly caring and protective. In short, they are all viewed as Yiddishe Mammehs, whether they were scarred by the Holocaust or not.
Despite their devotion and largely successful child-rearing behaviour, however, Holocaust survivor parents apparently were unable to prevent the Holocaust from having a significant impact also on their offspring. Above all, the present study seemed to underscore the repeated observation that transgenerational effects of parental Holocaust trauma indeed exists and that, unfortunately, the Holocaust is still alive and thriving in the conscious and unconscious minds of the offspring.
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