Family Life Centre: Where broken homes go to be fixed

The Family Life Centre in Parkwood, a stone’s throw from Zoo Lake, Johannesburg, was once a sprawling suburban home. Today its immaculate garden is still intact, but it has a street-facing notice board that at times boldly advertises ‘Divorce Recovery” or ‘Effective Parenting”.

The place has an air of sadness. This, after all, is where troubled people go when, as family members, they are bereft of understanding or have reached an impasse.

The waiting room is as expected. Receptionists nattering, fielding calls. There are a few chairs and some mindless reading matter. At the top of the pile there’s a copy of Hello magazine that screams irony in this context: ‘Brad and Angelina make it a family affair as they plan their future together.”

The Hollywood star system makes marriage and parenting seem part of some bigger publicity scam. Icons Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie appear to defy the mundane. Complications in their high life could be scenes from a big-budget movie.

Inside her office I regard Family Life Centre director Liz Dooley, a woman who must have seen much dirt during her career. She is diminutive, well dressed and well rehearsed.

‘The South African family is variable,” she says. ‘There are units that are healthy, I mean emotionally. This is the old conservative family that provides food, security, nurturing and love. All those things — they’re not gone.

‘Then there are other families disintegrating for various reasons: poverty, illness, death, immigration or unemployment. All of these are impacting on the family badly, so the structure of the family is changing.”

I venture that with the change in power relations in South Africa white men must be feeling pretty stressed out, probably leading to violence at home. ‘Not only white men,” Dooley counters, ‘but black men too. As women’s empowerment gains momentum and black women in particular are put in important positions, they often earn far more than their men. That’s if their men are employed. So the disempowerment of men is affecting whites and blacks.”

Dooley says too few men are prepared to engage with or offer their services to social development organisations. Yet, if her work in dealing with domestic violence is to succeed, men are going to have to get on board. ‘Men relate better to men,” she says.

I ask her why we still believe in the family structure if it is so embattled, if it appears to be disintegrating.

Dooley says that while the traditional family is evolving — child-headed households, same-sex couples with kids and families of street children — the family formation is not a bad thing: ‘In small groups like the family group there is much power. People belong and that is what we need. We still need to belong.

‘Any group of people who come together and form a unit where they feel important is positive. It is a place where each person in the system is heard, gets a chance and is given the love they need to grow and reach their potential.”

Our conversation meanders in the direction of culturally sensitive counselling and Dooley says troubled couples often don’t want to talk to someone from their own group to keep things impersonal. The clue to good counselling is to try to get each partner to see the other partner’s point of view.

The clue to good parenting, according to Dooley, is ‘to love your kids unconditionally, which does not mean accepting bad behaviour. It means loving them in spite of it, so you deal with the bad behaviour.

‘Children have a lot of power in the family, more now than before. In the black community children are now often better educated than their parents, so the parents abrogate their responsibility because the children ostensibly know better than they do. I think it’s having a big impact on the power of the family. Children don’t have to go to school and there are long-term consequences: more violence, drugging, drinking and inappropriate behaviour.”

In case this makes you want to jump off the planet, Dooley looks into the future and says: ‘I am an eternal optimist. I think the situation swings right over to one side and then comes back again.”

The Family Life Centre has offices in townships and centres dotted around Gauteng. They are in part funded by the department of social development and Lotto

Liz Dooley is a widow and she gave this interview on what would have been her 49th wedding anniversary