When We Were Young
“I don’t want you to LEAVE. Please. Please.”
Saying goodbye to children is up there with the hardest goodbyes that exist. How do you really explain to children that sometimes a person just needs to leave? That nothing lasts forever? That comfort can keep you stuck, no matter how safe it feels? That growth requires change? That the only life you can save is your own? AND that distance or a goodbye does not mean love is gone? You do your best, and you hope for the best.
To me, that is the crux of children’s work: you hope for the best. Every now and then, you’ll get to see a difference straight away, but most of the time you don’t. I always told my trainees that all we can do is hope that many years down the line, they will remember something about the sessions: what it felt like to be in a safe space, to have someone be congruent with them, to have someone listen without an agenda, to be able to express anything without the world around them collapsing, to being okay with not being okay, to be treated like the human child that they are, rather than the human child someone else wants them to be.
“Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.” – Alice Miller
I never wanted to work with children for this very exact reason: whilst I remembered my childhood fairly well, with mostly pleasant memories, I did not have an emotional connection to it. On the outside, that may come across as cold, detached, disconnected, pragmatic, calm, even aloof. On the inside, well, I honestly never quite knew what was going on there for most of my life. The idea of being frozen resonates with me, given that freeze is my primary survival response. And so, whilst I always connected well with young people, and have been doing youth work since I was a young person myself, there was something about the under 10s that, frankly, always scared me. I struggled and pushed through my first clinical placement in a primary school and counted down the days until it was over. At the time, I believed my work was going to be with adults and their trauma. The more complex, the better, thank you very much!
But in the Spring of 2017, I came face to face with burnout in such a way that I had to stop working. A few months later, as I considered leaving therapy as a profession, a good friend of mine pointed me towards a job. She said something along the lines of “I know you don’t want to work with children directly, but this would be to manage a service in a school, and most of the clinical work is done by trainees.” This sparked my curiosity and tickled my ambition. Being a manager sounded good, it had status, and I’m a sucker for status, I must say. My life choices didn’t depend on this job for anything, so I applied without any expectations. Within a few weeks, I’d been hired. It was the fastest, and also hardest, turnaround between application and start date I’ve ever experienced.
On my first day at school, feeling quite excited to have my own office for the first time, my manager told me: “this is not just your office Ryan, this is your school.” Give me macro responsibility for something, and I’m there! Over time, this school also became a home. And it’s always hard saying goodbye to one’s home.
“The way we interact with our children is the single most important factor that will determine their behaviour and their mental health. We are responsible for the exponential growth in psychological disorders in our children. Our children are fine. It’s us who have to change.” – Joe Newman
I first came across the work of Joe Newman, after a 6-year-old child threw a pair of scissors at me, missing my face by mere inches. I’d done my first 6 months at the school and was about to be reminded of that very important lesson in therapeutic work, and in life: you really can’t save anyone, just because you want to, or because you feel that you can. Not because people are beyond saving, but because it’s no one’s job to save anyone by themselves. And sometimes, we just don’t have the skills, abilities, or ideas to help. In the past 3,5 years, there were a handful of children I wasn’t able to help. It hurt my ego and confidence not to know what to do, but it humbled me greatly to acknowledge my limitations. It also angered me greatly to see the cracks and chasms of the systems I worked in.
Newman’s work has a simple message: there has been a seismic shift in parenting models, from discipline to expression, from thinking and considering others, to thinking and considering oneself. This combines with several other cultural shifts around technology, psychiatry, and working patterns, as well as the lack of progress and investment in education and social care systems, to form the current storm of over-diagnosed, over-prescribed, or perpetually-still-waiting-for-an-assessment children. I found his language simple and anyone who can explain childhood development in an accessible and pragmatic language always has my vote. I can see that it’s not for everyone, but I took a lot of it on board. Mainly the power imbalance between children and their parents in the modern world. I think that in an effort to go against the rigid parenting of previous generations, and with the advent of children’s mental health awareness, many parents have found themselves taking even more roles on board and now feel the pressure to also be their children’s therapists.
It's pretty obvious, I guess, but I didn’t quite envision that so much of children’s work would also be about parents. And to compound the shift in parenting styles, the growing imbalance of work-life patterns, the illusions of social media, and the quick-fix mindset around mental health; I think there is also a massive gap in parenting support. At first, parenting can be a profound shift in identity. And then on top of that, you are basically signing up for a life-long experience of having someone else mirror back to you all the things you haven’t looked at in yourself. It’s sometimes very isolating, and what I saw happen is that school playground dynamics continue into parenthood. Who are the popular parents, the quiet parents, the weird parents, the messy parents, etc? Everyone is thinking everyone else is doing a much better job than they are, and no one ever really speaks the truth about the difficulties of being a parent. I spent most of my time helping parents acknowledge and accept that their feelings were okay, and valid, and really quite normal.
But going back to the point above, it really isn’t up to children to change for adults. They are just children. They are growing up, learning, their brains are still developing, and we put so much unnecessary pressure on them! All this rhetoric about “In my day, we just got on with it” is often quite valid, but if we were to really look at that, how did that turn out for everyone? I mean, let’s look around at our world right now. How did “getting on with it” turn out for everyone? The other big rhetoric is the “attention-seeking” variety. Whenever a child does something which an adult disapproves, they must be just seeking attention. Someone clever came up with the notion that what children are really doing is seeking connection, and this always makes people think twice about a child and their behaviour. But I also love deconstructing what we mean by the things we say, and let’s be honest: aren’t we all attention seeking? Isn’t all of life just a continuous effort to be seen, to be heard, to be cared for, to be loved? What is that, if not seeking the attention of others around us? So much of our behaviour is about this: “Do you see me? Do you hear me? Do you care what I have to say? Do you love me?”
And yes, children are dramatic too. And that’s because the world is literally a drama for them. Their brains have not developed enough to understand or acknowledge nuance. I’d argue the same goes for millions of adults these days. I remember being shocked in the first few months of my new role. Why were they, in fact, so dramatic? Why was everything the end of the world? Frankly, because it is. For children, that is. They will be friends with someone one day, and not the next. And then they are friends again. And then they won’t. This back and forth in their friendships may occur several times in one day! And that’s when I realised: I really don’t remember that about my childhood. And I don’t think most adults do. We might not really remember when we were young, because we have the capacity to reflect and critically think about our past, and we didn’t have that capacity at all as children. We look back with an adult perspective, but that’s not accurate at all. Our perspectives as children change into our perspectives as adults. And I always thought that this is the biggest problem when working with children: adults find it hard to really relate to what children are going through. Especially when you consider generational and cultural shifts and differences. Because there are things that were okay when I was a child, which are not okay anymore. And so, we need to keep up with the times.
A few final thoughts on children:
Children won’t always tell you how they feel, but they will show you through their behaviour.
They may be resilient, but also more sensitive/intuitive, and ultimately more vulnerable. They mostly learn from example, rather than information.
Celebrate child’s strengths and differences: acknowledging these in challenging times, improves motivation and emotional wellbeing.
Have open conversations about feelings: by modelling how to share feelings, your child will be more likely to proactively ask for help. Do you ever share how YOU feel?
Collaborate with your child to come up with their own personal solutions: this gives them agency but also feels supportive.
Let them experience their feelings fully: it’s important to acknowledge that everyone has feelings and that’s okay. Try not to rush to minimise or rescue.
Make yourself available to listen: children often open up when they’re relaxed, so try not to pressure them. You may want to create rituals where you have regular opportunities to share and connect.
Things to look out for:
Sudden changes in behaviour
Negative thoughts and low self-esteem
Arguing and fighting
Sleeping and/or eating difficulties
Avoiding school/over-attachment to parents
Physical aches and pains
Finally, and without wanting to be dramatic myself, working through the pandemic broke something in me, which needs time and nourishing to heal. Supporting hundreds of children and families, whilst coping with my own life challenges, was ultimately too much for me, and this precipitated my departure from this role. A role that I have absolutely loved, where I have learned more than I can express in one blog post, where I have felt at home, where I have met wonderful people, and which I will always remember with great love and gratitude.
And even though I’m leaving school work for now, and I’m specialising in a different therapeutic field, I’m happy to continue working with children and parents in private practice. Please find me via Self Space. I’ll be taking a break now, but will be back in September.
References:
The Drama of Being a Child: The Search for the True Self, by Alice Miller
Raising Lions: The Art of Compassionate Discipline, by Joe Newman