Independent adults / Dutiful adult-children
A comparison of family systems in Ireland and England
“Wherever there is Ireland there is the family, and it counts for a great deal”
Ireland and England have long been foils and mirrors to one another. That what one is — in character and ethos— the other has to be the opposite. Presenting the Irish as the antithesis of the English has long been part of England’s colonial and othering project (e.g. if the Irish are emotional and indolent, the English are rational and industrious, and so on) and, likely as a consequence, in Ireland Britain routinely serves as our comparative opposite.
“If England had never existed, the Irish would have been rather lonely. Each nation badly needed the other, for the purpose of defining itself”
Declan Kiberd: Inventing Ireland — The Literature of the Modern Nation (pg. 2)
It’s in this role — as comparative opposite— that England makes a cursory appearance within some Women of Ireland Project interviews. And when it does, it is usually for discussing one particular topic: The Family. Or to be more specific, the family dynamic and the nature of the relationship between parents and children.
What we (I include myself in this) all seem to agree, is that ‘The Family’ is just different in England — that they have a completely different way of raising and interacting with their children, especially adult-children, than people in Ireland, and to those of us parented ‘Irish’ it can seem both mystifying and perplexing.
“I was at a wedding two years ago in England, and I got talking to a lady, and herself and her husband — very academic— and her son was off at college [i.e. university], and she said he was home for Christmas, and she hadn’t seen him [since] September, and she couldn’t wait for him to go back! And I was somewhat appalled because I used to — when my daughter went off, she went to Limerick to college… and I only seen her maybe every two months. And I just used to cry so much when she went back; I missed her so terribly…. I found it so difficult. [Whereas] when I was talking to this woman… and talking to everybody else [there], that’s just kind of the way it is [in England]; the minute you leave for university that’s kind of really it, you just come back [home] as a visitor. It wasn’t really that your room was kept or it hadn’t changed and Mammy was still pining for you. So there was a different level of how… we parent [in Ireland]… or how we grow or evolve as adult children… or don’t evolve — maybe that’s the case! So, I definitely seen a difference there [between parenting adult children in Ireland and England]”
Grainne (Women of Ireland Project Participant)
In this piece, as I witter my way through a, largely anecdotal, comparison of family-parent-child dynamics in England and Ireland, I am going to make some gross generalisations. I am going to do that terrible thing, for reasons of simplicity, of conflating absolutely everything discussed under a banner of ‘Irish’ and ‘English’, and reduce ‘family dynamics’ down to just a few simple patterns. However, I do of course recognise that:
“Family systems in any complex society cannot be reduced to a single pattern, a unique norm, a singular ideal, a common experience. Family systems (defined broadly as sets of processes for ensuring both biological and social reproduction within a society)’ are known to vary with class and ethnicity. There is also differentiation of family experience and family strategy for members of the same family, based not only on gender but also on sibling position, especially regarding older and younger, heir and nonheir”1
So, please excuse everything I am about to say when, if you are of either Ireland or England, it may not wholly, adequately or even slightly reflect your experiences as either child or parent, especially as the ‘English’ parts are really only reflective of the middling and upper classes — but sure let’s take a look all the same!
I’ve lived in Britain for over nine years, and during that time I’ve had a fair few conversations (predominantly with Italians, Greeks and Kiwis) which go something like this: ‘Do you notice that thing in some English families? How, it’s like, once their children grow up, they are treated sort of like any other person? The ties between them seem kind of loose, like the parent only makes themselves available to their child on their terms; they won’t just prioritise a dinner with their adult-child, it’s more like, yeah let’s do dinner in three Sundays time when I have a free afternoon in the diary”.
This seemed odd to all of us, observing from our perspective cultural backgrounds, because we have been accustomed to being our parents’/families’ priorities, adult or not. Our norm was of parental figures or family members placing family interaction, especially with their children, above all else —a near sacred event— and we didn’t see the same amongst our English friends’ families. For them, family interaction felt more like a case of duty, or ‘we all lead our own lives now so let’s not trespass on that too much’.
For me, from a very specific Irish perspective (specific being my own background and biases melded with my Irishness), what has always stood out to me is what I call a ‘distance’ between adult-children in England and their parents. And it only stands out as notable or ‘odd’ because it is so markedly different to what I see in Ireland — to what is the norm of parent-adult child relationships in Ireland.
If you have ever watched the TV series Motherland (21:00 mins in of Season 3, Episode 4) the interaction between ‘Alpha-Mum’ Amanda and her mother (played by Joanna Lumley), and the juxtaposition of their cool distance against the closeness and pride between Irish Mum Anne and her ‘Mammy’ is one of the best depictions I’ve seen of what I’m trying to explain.
In essence, the extremity of the distance in ‘English’ parent-child relationships only stands out when it’s stood next to the complete lack of distance in ‘Irish’ parent-child relationships. I struggle to word what I witness and sense into the world, so here’s a Venn diagram instead:
As children, parent and child occupy the conjoint space, the middle part of the Venn Diagram. But at some point, in adulthood, the English parent and child move outward, to their respective separate circles — their relationship is independent but still connected, or in its imbalanced form, emotionally detached. In Ireland, as we move into adulthood, we don’t generally move into respective separate circles, parent and adult-child remain in the central point of the venn diagram — the relationship becomes one of interdependence, or in its imbalanced form, co-dependence.
It’s the co-dependence in Irish families, and the depth of the tie between parent and child, which Women of Ireland Project participant Nat noticed after she moved to England:
“[When I had an English family to compare it to] I really began to see our [Irish] culture and the level of depth of our culture…. I remember noticing that the family unit is different in Ireland. That there is a level of what I can now see is co-dependency…. there is a co-dependent tie with the family unit here in Ireland….. [it’s] like ‘Oh jeez…The Family, The Family, The Family [before anything else]…. and it’s so contradictory because… your family are the ones [who] take the fucking piss of you, [but] they’re [also] the ones that you have this like pull to go to for [everything], you know what I mean? [Like] your family would be there for you…. like my Ma like fucking helped me set up my first house, you know, she brought me down loads of pots and pans and all that kind of stuff when she saw that I didn't have anything. Totally overboard she went!…..
….And what I realised when I went to England was that there was more of a middle ground. And that confronted me because I used to be like, but why is this person not doing this for this person if they're family? …... Or why has this person reacted this way to me slagging them off because we're family?…. The whole family unit was just totally fucking different [in England] and I just didn't get it…..
And then I fell pregnant with [my first daughter]… and I remember my Ma coming over… so she came down for a few weekends, you know, after [she] was born, and like actually helped, and I remember seeing the difference of how my Mam was, and my mother in law, who's English. I remember my mother in law letting me drive four hours to her house to stay 8 days after giving birth. Do you know what I mean? Whereas my Ma would be like, ‘Don't you fucking do that’! Right. So there's, it was just different to see. The level of intimacy, I suppose. I mean that's the right word —the intimacy between mother and child— and I just noticed that it was different. There was just a whole different kettle of fish in Ireland. And I didn't quite know what it was, but I knew there was something there. But I just didn't know what it was at the time”.
The family unit in Ireland is, indeed, a whole other ‘kettle of fish’ compared to England. In Ireland, there is an invisible bond of care from parent to child, and child to parent, that is freely given but also obligatory — it’s a contract that is maintained for life, not just childhood. It’s a duty. And when it’s in balance, it’s a beautiful bedrock of mutual support and safety but when it’s out of balance (which I find is more often the case) it produces an enmeshed family system.
So why is the family unit, and the dynamics between parent and child so different between Ireland and England, and how did we get here?
The answers (or at least one of the answers) lie in the very different ways Irish and English culture and society developed across the last two millennia, the effects of colonialism (of course!) and different approaches to land ownership and inheritance.
Alastair McIntosh, in his incredible book Soil and Soul (if you haven’t read it — do!) touches on how if we’re to understand England and all things ‘English’ (e.g. it’s class system, colonial dominance etc.) we should probably start with the fact that (and here he quotes folk singer Dick Gaughan):
“England is the most colonised nation in history”
Repeated waves of colonisation, starting with the Romans, followed by the Saxons and the Normans, shaped the fabric of English society, altering it utterly from the tribal indigenous Britons whose social system would have born a closer resemblance to the Gaelic-Irish way of doing things. When you think of England like this, I find the intensity of its historically world dominating colonisation makes a bit more sense — the colonised-coloniser set out to, well, colonise. (I think of the extensive use of symbols of the Roman Empire by the British Empire in the 19th century as some sort of latent and twisted Stockholm Syndrome!).
Each wave of colonisation also influenced the family system. Roman society was highly patriarchal, with the family unit organised around a paterfamilias — the oldest living male in the family who held autocratic authority over all other members of his family. In Anglo-Saxon society, there was a certain emphasis on independence on coming of age. Once a son reached maturity, he was no longer subject to his father’s authority, essentially freeing him up to go and establish his own household. In essence, filial obligation or duty was loosened by reaching adulthood. While under Norman rule, the practice of male primogeniture — the first born male legitimate heir inherits everything— was introduced and gradually became the norm. This meant that in every English family, one child would get everything while the others were effectively disinherited and had to make their own way in the world.
Such an approach to family and inheritance could not have been in starker contrast to that of Gaelic-Irish society; a society which was almost totally organised around complex systems of kinship until well into the 17th century (when English colonisation began to take it apart) and the vestiges of which I feel we can still see in the Irish family today.
In Gaelic Ireland family was everything. From social rank to where you lived was determined by ‘who your people’ were. People lived on clan lands, where ‘family’ was defined broadly according to the sharing of a common ancestor (which could go back several generations). A complex system of fosterage, with children sent to be raised in other households (i.e. of wider family, or political allies or, indeed, enemies), extended the range of the family beyond that of just blood. In extreme contrast to the Norman (and eventually very English) system of primogeniture, inheritance and the distribution of land and goods was overseen by a complex system of preferential and paritable inheritance. In short, while the preferred inheritor would get the most high-status goods (e.g. the cattle, the land, the house), all children were given something and set up in some profession that could support them.
Ultimately, however, no individual was seen as the ‘owner’ of the land — rather it was part of a Túatha, of large inter-related and inter-dependent kinship groups, and land and goods were shared out between people in ways which tended to utterly baffle the English who were used to systems of enclosure and clear boundaries which marked out ‘who owned what’ (a system necessary to enable primogeniture). E. Estyn Evans, commenting on the records Lord George Hill made about his tenants in Gweedore, gives some indication as to what preferential and paritable inheritance looked like by the 19th century:
“As Lord George describes the system, the plots had been repeatedly subdivided among co-heirs until they were sometimes reduced to a few square yards, and he gives an instance where a horse was shared by three men, each claiming one leg, with the result that the fourth leg remained unshod”2
Perhaps the most important difference between the family system that developed in England and that in Ireland is what happened when children came of age. Unlike the Saxon, and thus English system, a son in Gaelic Ireland maintained a lifetime filial obligation to his father and, seen as he would be living on clan lands, a lifelong duty to the wider family group. Women, on coming of age, remained under the authority of their closest male relative (husband, father, brother, uncle) and their first duty was to her blood-kin. In other words, on reaching adulthood, there was no separation from the family — the individual was duty-bound to it, and the family duty-bound to the individual.
These two very different systems of inheritance and completely different views on family obligation in adulthood are, I feel, the roots of why, still to this day, there is ‘distance’ between parent and adult-child in England but such a ‘lack of distance’ between parent and adult-child in Ireland.
“The Irish pattern of providing something —even if only a permanent home and useful vocation for the unmarried— for as many children as possible and the role of Irish children in forging links between and among family units through the institution of fosterage continued right into the twentieth century…. Such practice stands in marked contrast to the English family system, in which only one child was favoured with the inheritance and the others were “bought out” and more or less permanently dispersed”
Donna Birdwell-Pheasant: Family Systems and the foundations of class in Ireland and England
England’s family system (born from a mix of Roman, Anglo-Saxon and Norman influences) emphasised independence on maturity and an ‘heir and a spare’ philosophy which prioritised the security of the ‘family estate’ (whether that be a rented small-holding or thousands of acres of land) over setting all one’s children up. The heir got everything, and all the spares were expected to make their own way in life. The latter eventually became a strictly upheld moral principle associated with industriousness and a counter to laziness — no one wanted ‘lay-about’ spare children sitting at home bleeding away family resources. It was morally right that they, once grown, should forge their own path.
It was these ‘spares’ that would come to fuel Britain’s growing colonial enterprise, and later the Industrial Revolution; the children of elites became the adventurers, military leaders, bureaucrats and ‘entrepreneurs’ that drove British colonial expansion and capitalism, while the ‘spare’ children of the lower classes became the working class that fed the hungry machine of the Industrial Revolution, provided the man-power of the non-commissioned ranks of the military, or simply emigrated, helping extend Britain’s physical reach across the world.
“English children were expected to accumulate their own fund for marriage and independence, relying very little on their parents”
Donna Birdwell-Pheasant: Family Systems and the foundations of class in Ireland and England
In Ireland, the old traditions of paritable inheritance, filial duty and the centrality of the family to the whole functioning of society produced a very different set of social norms. Paritable inheritance meant that parents usually ensured that each child got something, or were set up in some way — that no one was cast out to make their own way in life. Think of the fairly common 20th century Irish family system of ‘one child for the priesthood, one a nun, one to get married, one to be sent abroad, one inherits the family home and stays on to look after the old-people’ — that is ancient Gaelic paritable inheritance updated for more modern times. Filial duty and the custom that your familial responsibilities did not end on reaching maturity, also meant that no matter what life an individual chose for themselves (or, was more often the case, was chosen for them by parents) they still had family obligations with respect to their parents and siblings.
Filial duty and a lifetime obligation to the family are deeply embedded in the Irish psyche and Irish culture — in many ways, they are Irish culture. With the rise of the nuclear family in the modern era, it transformed into parents maintaining a hold over adult-children and adult-children feeling a responsibility to care for parents, relatives and siblings. And when that gets out of balance, the co-dependency that Nat speaks of, and the ‘lack of distance’ I describe in my Venn diagram, takes hold.
In the Women of Ireland Project interviews, it’s the out of balance familial responsibility that is the most common. A large majority of interviewees describe a childhood typified by ‘parentification’ and recount traits typical of an enmeshed family (e.g. parents relying on them for emotional and practical support from a young age). As adults, so many women describe the expectation and responsibility they carry to ‘pick up the pieces’ or sort things out for their family, especially parents and siblings. Many also express how challenging it is to ‘give themselves anything’ when they’d been raised to put caring for others (specifically their family) before anything else. Others share stories of women in their family line who sacrificed personal, individual dreams so they could remain close to home and take on the responsibility of caring for ageing family members because that was seen as their duty. Some even pin-point specific moments in their life where they knew they just ‘had to leave home’ because the expectation that they would remain on to care and look after family was starting to close in on them.
Quite simply, there is a strong sense of duty, expectation, and responsibility to care for one another that never quite lets anyone inside the nest of an Irish family fully fledge.
Old Gaelic family custom, then, has certainly influenced the development of the Irish family system — we still live with the vestiges of it today. But so has colonisation — those English ‘spares’, when they adventured to Ireland, left an indelible mark on the shaping of the Irish family unit.
As Declan Kiberd describes, colonisation causes the family unit to sort of turn in on itself, to become more intense:
“Childhood in a colony….. there could have been few experiences as intense as that of family life in such a setting. The subject people owed no allegiance to the state, its courts, its police, its festivals, and so all energies which might in a normal society have been dispersed over such wide areas were instead invested into the rituals of family life”3
Two key components of English colonial policy in Ireland were the feminisation of the Irish male and the Penal Laws to circumscribe the power and influence of (Catholic) Gaelic men and, effectively, emasculate them. Beginning in the 16th century, the Gaelic-Catholic male was no longer considered the equal of a Protestant male in the eyes of the law, plus they were repeatedly depicted according to feminine qualities — they were weak and emotional. To assuage this, a sort of hyper-masculinity began to emerge and, unable to exert any influence within the public sphere, Irish patriarchy turned to the unit of the family to consolidate its power.
Across the following centuries, ‘The Family’ came to be seen as the bedrock of Irish society, and what it meant ‘to be Irish’. Central to this was the construction of strict gender roles; the male patriarch and head of the household, and the supporting, but subordinate, woman as wife and mother. ‘Irishness’ came to depend on men fulfilling the norms of an extreme masculinity — staid, stoic, authoritative, breadwinners— and women an extreme femininity — self-sacrificing, modest, martyr-like mothers.
If the only legitimate role women were given in society was that of wives and mothers, it’s no wonder that those who did became extreme ‘Mammies’ who ruled their domain with an iron fist (or a wooden spoon) and couldn’t let go of their only identity once their children reached adulthood. Cutting the apron strings would have been like cutting off their own life support. And if the only legitimate way that Irish men (historically speaking) could ‘be a man’ was through upholding the role of patriarchal head of the household, then it’s no wonder then if they too sought to continue to exert an influence on their children’s lives well into adulthood, or clung on to the role of authoritative patriarch longer than was healthy.
When you link all of these threads together, and also set them into the cultural soil of the old Gaelic customs of filial duty, family obligation and paritable inheritance, it’s possible to see why there is so ‘little distance’ between parents and adult-children in Ireland. It’s why there is so much weight to ‘The Family’ in the Irish experience, and why it stands out so sharply in the presence of the absence of that weight when we compare ourselves to ‘The English’.
England’s cultural roots favoured a system which fostered independence, Ireland’s experiences as both a tribal and colonised people fostered what anthropologist Nancy Scheper-Hughes has called ‘an extreme familialism’.
It’s that ‘extreme familialism’ which I see in so many women’s stories. I’ve heard beautiful descriptions of how the family supports and cares, of the sheer depth of the comfort and strength ‘Mammy’s kitchen’ provides, of the never-ending sacrifices generations of parents have made to ensure their children were ‘set up’ in life, and the fun and joy of a childhood spent running in and out of cousins’ houses. But that same family system can also have no boundaries. It can spill over, be invasive and fill the individual with shame and guilt for pursuing individual dreams over collective expectations. In Ireland, it’s like there is an invisible piece of elastic between family and child which, although it may stretch and extend, doesn’t break. That can be very damaging or, at least, is not supportive of raising children to be adequate adults.
But therein lies the dilemma, even with its potential for damage, there is a lovely comfort to be found in Ireland’s ‘extreme familialism’ and I’m not sure how many of us would trade it for England’s ‘extreme independence’?
Birdwell-Pheasant, D. (1998). Family systems and the foundations of class in Ireland and England. The History of the Family, 3(1), 17–34. https://doi.org/10.1016/S1081-602X(99)80233-4
Pg. 95 in Evans, E. E. (1992). The Personality of Ireland. The Lilliput Press.
Pg. 101 in Kiberd, D. (1996). Inventing Ireland: The Literature of a Modern Nation. Vintage.
Oomph... wow.... loved this! Once again, giving language and words to something previously undescribed but I can feel and resonate with all of this. I can see it in my own family, extended family and even in the families of UK based friends and ex partners. Makes so much sense.
Wonderful to be able to peek into the compare and contrast of both countries and cultures. Fab!