What happens when the family is in crisis?

We have seen how the situation of the issues related to the presence of SLD in a son/daughter, a brief outline of which is given in the previous section, generates anxiety in the parents and closure reactions that may prevent or impair the activation of internal or external resources. Management and taking charge of the education of a son/daughter with SLD can be difficult because of the special difficulties caused by the disorder, as well as because of problems affecting the resilience of the couple.
At this point certain problems and further reflection emerge, first: what happens in cases where the family is already fragile or weakened because of a separation/divorce or because there is only one parent? In such cases, is the management of a son/daughter with SLD still a sustainable task for the family? Moreover, insofar as it is known that the ways in which the family reacts to the difficulties presented by a son/daughter with SLD influence (positively or negatively) the evolution of the disorder, what happens when the resources for trying to tackle the situation positively are lacking in a family already suffering from the strain of a separation/divorce? Finally, in as much as the learning disabilities develop on a neurological basis, it is known that the evolution of the disorder and its actual impact on the functioning of the subject depend on personal and environmental factors: in particular, coping, attributive styles and emotionality of the subject are influenced by the «family atmosphere». But when a family context is characterised as hostile, unstable, what is the impact on the evolution of the SLD?

Answering these questions raised is not easy, also because there are no targeted studies on the subject[11]. It is however possible to sketch out some hypotheses.
As observed by Bowlby, parenting consists in "providing a secure base from which a child or an adolescent can start facing the outside world and to which the child can return safe in the knowledge that he/she will be welcomed, nurtured physically and emotionally, comforted if sad and reassured if frightened"[12]. When there is no "secure base" in a child with SLD, it is easier for their already fragile emotional structures to suffer the greater damage. According to this hypothesis, the impact on the evolution of the SLD in the event of a family crisis would be the weakening of emotional processes, which act as the reinforcement to the learning process.

As observed by Silvia Vegetti Finzi, the emotional life of children is sorely tested by the process of separation of the parents. There are always emotional repercussions[13]. And that these repercussions affect the learning processes is proved by the findings of Patrick F. Fagan and Aaron Churchill[14] regarding the relationship between parental separation and the educational achievement of the sons/daughters. According to what has been reported by them[15], at the secondary school level, the children of strong families have significantly better results than their peers, children of divorced parents. At age 13, for example, there is an average difference of half a year in the reading skills between the children of divorced parents and those from stable families. Children of divorced couples have a 26% greater probability of dropping out of secondary school compared to children raised in stable families.
The difference found in the academic performance between children of separated couples and children of couples living together refers to emotional variables. In particular, it is the emotional experiences of the parents that influence the emotional experiences of their children. As observed by Emery, children live the crisis situations of their parents on the rebound and their feelings largely reflect those of the adults themselves[16].

What has been observed so far induces us to reconstruct a further response hypothesis to the questions raised above, i.e.: a family crisis has a negative influence on the evolution of a SLD to the extent that the "family atmosphere" is conflicted. This is because a critical and confrontational divorce threatens to cause the family situation to collapse, pushing to the backseat the important needs of the child who is left to his/her own mercy without any point of reference, incapable of growing, learning and dealing with the usual and unusual difficulties of life, because the parent is sunk in his own tragedy[17]. It is not the separation (or the divorce) of the parents itself that has a negative influence on the evolution of the SLD, in as much as the level of conflict within the parental couple because of the harmful effects on the already fragile emotional structure of the sons/daughters with SLD.

Marital discord is also seen as the main cause of the discomfort experienced by the sons/daughters[18]. In a state of distress, children experience feelings of insecurity and fragility, which may lead to problematic behaviour[19], which may be social, emotional and behavioural[20]. Problems that seemed to have been overcome may also be reactivated, such as resumption or persistence of enuresis, tics, stuttering, anxiety and psychosomatic manifestations, relational problems[21]. Yet another hypothesis emerges from these additional notes: the family crisis may act as the cause of negative evolution of SLD, just as the way the reactive behaviour of the son/daughter with LD in response to the family crisis situation may be transformed into the cause of the family breakdown, especially when deviant behaviours develop due to distress caused by family discord.