Recasting research into children's experiences of parental mental illness: Beyond risk and resilience

Children who live with a mentally ill parent are viewed primarily as being ‘at risk’ of developing a mental illness themselves and those who remain well are considered extraordinarily resilient. This particular risk/resilience discourse is embedded within larger contemporary discourses about risk and childhood. Childhood is seen as a critical period of development during which children need protection due to their physical and psychological vulnerabilities. In this paper, the implications of this dominant casting of children are explored and it is argued that the conceptual repertoire about those living with a mentally ill parent should be expanded. A critique of the literature that established the risk/resilience discourse is followed by a discussion of research about parenting with a mental illness within which children are surprisingly absent. Recent thinking about children arising out of the ‘new’ social studies of childhood is summarized to illustrate its resistance to the hegemonic image of children as passive, developing, ‘unfinished’ persons. A recasting of children as complex young persons who have competencies as well as vulnerabilities linked to their developmental stages, would lead to different lines of inquiry about children's experiences of mental illness in a parent.