While we have seen earlier that issues of enmeshment versus autonomy and dominance versus submission are both present in most incestuous families, it may be that the balance is different when the children are preschoolers than when they are of school age or older.

So far, we have seen that the social factors and the marital relationships bear considerable similarity among the incestuous families of pre schoolers and older children, while the child victims may be quite different as a result of different levels of physical, emotional, cognitive, and psychosexual development. What about the dynamics of the fathers and the mothers in families with preschoolers?

Second, the preschool child generally has very little knowledge about sexual activities, is not cognitively able to understand moral rules, and is most often unaware of the taboos and stigmas attached to incestuous behavior. As a result, the preschooler is likely to experience less shame and sense of responsibility than an older counterpart might, especially prior to discovery of the incest and the fuss that ensues.

The marital relationship also seems to be similar along some relevant dimensions in families of preschoolers and families of older children, although there are possible significant differences, which are discussed later. The two major characteristics of the marital relationship in incestuous families little communication or intimacy, and an imbalance in the power status of husband and wife are frequently found in the families of sexually molested preschoolers.

If we examine which factors involved in sexual molestation of older children apply also to incestuous relationships with preschoolers, it appears that certain categories of factors cut across age groups, while others may be quite different with molested preschool children.

The family systems approach that seems to provide the most useful concepts for understanding the dynamics of the incestuous family is structural family therapy. The most relevant concepts from this approach are "boundaries," "subsystems," and "functional roles."

In sexually abusive families, as mentioned earlier, there seems to be a great deal of social isolation. Not only does this mean that the parents relate to very few other people, increasing the frustration of their poor relationship; it also decreases the chances of the husband's using more common means of dealing with sexual frustration, such as visiting a prostitute or developing an extramarital affair. Instead, he develops a "family affair."

The family systems perspective on incestuous families has been explicated in two different ways. Descriptions of common relationship dynamics found in incestuous families have been given, and family patterns in incestuous families have also been extrapolated from theoretical formulations in the family therapy literature. Both of these approaches are discussed here.

Mothers in incestuous families where the father is the perpetrator have been the subject of much speculation, yet this group has actually been studied much less than either the perpetrators or the victims. While a profile is presented here, it should be noted that with the increase in awareness and reporting of sexual abuse as well as in treatment programs, this is only one common profile of many different ones that exist.

Psycho dynamic formulations have generally been made regarding particular traits, historical events, or underlying personality dynamics that characterize the various participants in the incestuous relationship. A myriad of speculations have been proposed with regard to what the father, the mother, and the child are like in an incestuous family.