˜When we’re born, then, our brain is ready for the world-or at least a world. It rushes out to greet it, gets to know it, then prunes itself down, specialising itself for the particular culture in which it finds itself. Much of the environments influence over who we turn out to be takes place in childhood and adolescence, periods in which our brain is in its phase of heightened, developmental plasticity.
Will Storr - Selfie
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“She keeps hitting me, which I find really, very frustrating” she said to me, talking about her wonderful little 3 year old girl.
The same little girl that, without fail, calls out my name and practically rugby tackles me to the ground for a hug every time she spots me from afar. The same little girl that always seems to be so happy and cheerful in my care. The same little girl I couldn’t imagine hitting her mother in frustration or anger.
I think one of the reasons I feel so passionate about understanding little ones, is because I’ve spent much of my life feeling extremely misunderstood.
It’s kind of a feeling of wanting to right some wrongs.
I’ve rarely felt understood, so its important to me to help make others feel so, to the best of my ability.
“When she does so” I reply, “Without getting angry or showing your frustration, do you acknowledge the way in which she is feeling, and let her know you’ve heard her? It’s highly likely she’s reacting in such a way with you, because it’s the place in which she feels most safe to do so”
And, so that chat really got me thinking, so much so I’m sat here writing another of these things.
Now before I go on to say all of the things I will say in this blog, I always feel the need to address the fact that the words that follow are merely my thoughts from 15 years of life with little people. I’m not specifically qualified in any particular way nor am I suggesting that anyone shouldn’t disagree with anything I write. (In fact I do love a good challenge to my thought patterns, so if you feel you must, then I encourage you to go ahead).
Generally speaking, whenever I find myself in a situation where I’m speaking to others about their little ones, one of the things I find myself stressing to them, is to stop identifying themselves as ‘adults’ and them as ‘children’.
(Yes I realise we are adults, and they are children) but it’s as if we are, in a sense, mechanically trained robots, and function in completely different ways.
We don’t.
In my practice with little humans every day, the first and foremost thing I do, is try to relate to them as if they are little versions of me.
I attempt to think how I would feel in such a situation, and it helps me to emphasise and brainstorm the how’s and why’s to their actions and behaviours.
So when I’ve popped myself into their shoes and have an idea of why they could be behaving a certain way, i’ll acknowledge it.
“I know you’re upset because….” “I can see you’re angry because….”
And you’re possibly thinking, it sounds silly to be talking to even an 8 month old, in such a manner, but I do it anyway, because like all else, I believe if we’re to practice healthy habits with our youth, to help them grow into secure adults, it’s where we must begin. At the very start.
The upmost thing children want is to know they have been heard, it’s really that simple.
We often don’t listen effectively to our little people, because we have in our own minds, an idea of how our lives should go. And with most of us living such fast paced lives, it really is, most of the time, a very sad reality that our children behaving in certain ways, at certain times, is an inconvenience to our lives.
So we try to quieten them and hurry them up, for our convenience, in order for us to keep up with our commitments or plans. We’re forever in a rush, we’re forever not listening effectively, thinking about the things we must do next, places we must be.
And our children are aware of it.
Now I believe by simply acknowledging our little ones behaviour, they are already feeling in a safer place then they initially were.
But we can’t just simply acknowledge their behaviour and ‘poof’ we have a more secure child.
Yes I know, I made you think I had all the answers to your little peoples needs. (Even I’m still figuring all of that out) Parenting, is and always will be an ongoing learning process, but we have to start somewhere.
So moving on. I think one of the most significant contributions to todays mental health crisis is that were not listening to our children and allowing them to express their emotions. Were suppressing them.
So, I advised said parent, to ‘after acknowledging her emotion’, let her know that it’s okay for her to feel them, we’re not saying anger is a bad emotion, it’s perfectly okay to feel ‘angry’ or ‘frustrated’, what isn’t okay is the way in which she’s expressing it. And Instead I suggested, to show her that there are alternative ways to do so, ‘Here is a ball we can kick, some drums that we can bang’
I don’t think its a coincidence that most of our artistic influences suffer from mental health issues. It’s an outlet for them, for us, in order to express how they feel, in productive and un harmful (not always) ways.
Do it now, think about the relief that you might feel from anger when banging a drum as hard and loud as you want. How much better we would feel when that emotion isn’t left to sit and fester, but rather expressed in a way that isn’t harmful to ourselves and to others.
We’re encouraging our youth to harbour thoughts, words, feelings and emotions that need to be let out.
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‘People are more educated and literate than ever before. Violence has trended down for decades, possibly centuries. Racism, sexism, discrimination, and violence against women are at their lowest points in recorded history. We have more rights than ever before. Half the planet has access to the internet. Extreme poverty is at an all time low worldwide. Wars are smaller and less frequent than at any other time in recorded history. Children are dying less, and people are living longer. There’s more wealth than ever before. We’ve, like cured a bunch of diseases and stuff’ … Because for all the good news being published today, here are some other surprising statistics: in the united states, symptoms of depression and anxiety are on an eighty year upswing among young people and a twenty year upswing among the adult population, not only are people experiencing depression in greater numbers, but they’re experiencing it at earlier ages, with each generation. Since 1985, men and women have reported lower levels of life satisfaction. Part of thats probably because stress levels have risen over the last thirty years. Drug overdoses have recently hit an all time high as the opioid crisis has wrecked much of the United States and Canada. Across the U.S population, feelings of loneliness and social isolation are up. Nearly half of all Americans now report feelings of loneliness and social isolation are up. Nearly half of all Americans now report feeling isolated, left out, or alone in their lives. In the 1980’s, when researchers asked survey participants how many people they had discussed important personal matters with over the previous six months, the most common answer was three. By 2006, the most common answer was zero’ Mark Manson- Everything is fucked, A book about hope.
Zero.
The most common answer was zero.
And going by the statistics stated before, I can’t imagine that has risen in the last 13 years.
Because of this, I think that todays society likes to believe they have a good tolerance to people suffering from mental health problems, They’ll share a post on social media, and raise money for a cause, but generally, I think we’re still programmed to feel ashamed to speak up when were struggling and when we see a cry for help, it’s our default setting to class it as ‘attention seeking’.
Now I have a funny relationship with this too, because it is something I see far too often in my line of work.
“They’re doing it for attention”
Translated means, “They’re doing it for ‘nothing’, ‘to irritate me’, ‘to annoy me”
Now children don’t behave in ways because they can think so coherently as to understand their actions will affect us in a certain way. They don’t.
They may do something we don’t understand the reasons for, and therefore deem it as attention seeking, but the need for attention is a problem in itself.
There is a need in there, an underlying reason for them to seek it.
And most of the time, children don’t care which way they receive that attention, whether it be good or bad. It’s for a reason we’re presently unaware of (or ignorant to) that is making them cry out for our attention. And they’re relying on us to at least try and understand what that is.
Cue our sigh of inconvenience
It’s the same for us adult’s. When people behave in way’s that we deem ‘attention seeking’ we simply categorise this as a negative trait, when it is rather a cry for help. We are so wrapped up in our own lives and ways of thinking, that we dismiss that every single other person on the planet has experienced life in a completely different way, resulting in us all behaving in ways that are coherent to our upbringing.
Now I’m not excusing some behaviour, I believe us adults have the ability to reflect and analyse and communicate, so as to try to at least rectify their needs. Children do not.
I remember a few years ago a 2 year old boy in my care ran over to me very upset. He’d been hurt in an interaction with another child, and when we had gotten past the initial cause he began very quickly to wipe his eyes.
He then said in a proud voice “I’m okay Stacey, Big boys don’t cry”
Big
Boys
Dont
Cry.
I’m sure its something we’ve all been told, or said, or have heard being said to our youth.
And it pulled so heavily on my heart, because in telling our youth that ‘big boys don’t cry’ were suppressing their need cry, to feel sad, to be seen as vulnerable.
“No, I told him, big boys do cry”
That statement and a couple of others, I try to stay away from as much as possible, ‘You’re okay’ is another one, which is relatively hard to do because we always want to protect our youth, to reassure them.
But if an adult friend was to approach me crying because of something that had happened, I would never dream of replying with ‘Oh you’re okay’ because they clearly are not.
Now I’m aware after reading all of my rambling you’re thinking ‘Yes Stacey, but that all seems all well and good, and soft of you, but we must make our children tough and resilient in order to cope with our hard world’
I don’t believe this is the case. I think children are born resilient, it is us that compromises that. I believe children must understand there are consequences to their actions if their behaviours are consistent negative ones, but we must not be ignorant to the reasons behind their behaviours.
If I communicate effectively to a child that a consequence will occur if they continue to behave in a certain negative way, and I believe they understand, I’ll follow through with it.
The girls at work like to laugh at my ‘cross voice’ apparently not much really changes. Because I don’t believe it really should. Just a raise of the eyebrows, a change in my tone. I don’t believe that children listen more if we raise our voices, shout or get angry, I think they adapt to this being the norm. And more than anything, we teach them that it is an okay way to behave.
I’ve often observed an angry parent shouting at their child to be quiet.
How does that even work?
Im allowed to be angry and shout, but you aren’t.
No, a child will absorb far more through observation than through our words.
I listened to a podcast from Fearne cotton and Phillippa Perry titled ‘How we should talk to children, so that they can find their own happy places?’ Phillippa is the author of a book you might have seen on the shelves in your local book shop called ‘The book you wish your parents had read (and your children will be glad that you did)
She begins by saying what we have with our children is a relationship, which just like any other relationship, is half them and half us. So if were going to look at a child’s behaviour, it’s no use just looking at your child’s behaviour, if there is something you don’t like about the way in which your child is behaving, don’t just look at the child, look at you. What are you bringing to this relationship. What assumptions are you bringing to it. What parts of your upbringing are you bringing forward into the one with your child?
Unpack that stuff first.
She encourages us to think about the ways in which we respond to our children’s behaviours and ask ourselves why it is that we are reacting in ways that may not be very productive in the moment.
What feelings does some behaviour trigger in us?
Maybe its triggering emotions that we’ve felt as children, and their behaviour is threatening to us, so we close down, instead of feeling with them.
But when we feel with them, you soften, and you find yourself on their level, and you find yourself having a moment of connection, and then you don’t have to try so hard, because thats all they wanted anyway, was a moment of connection.
With most people the patterns that our parents lay upon us, that they may have experienced from their parents, we carry those and often repeat that pattern with our children.
When we’re open to reliving those feelings, alongside our little ones, we realise it’s not as scary as we initially thought.
I could discuss this podcast for a very long time, but I suggest you just listen to it, it was wonderful to listen to.
I guess the things I’m trying to say through all of this is that I think we could learn a lot from the little people in our lives, and enjoy life trying to figure it all out along side them.
That, instead of suppressing, and wrapping up, and hurrying and quietening our youth, maybe we can emphasise and provide them alternative productive ways to express themselves, we can trust them and their innate abilities to be resilient, we can slow down and try to see the world from their eyes, rather than our own.
Maybe we can challenge our perceptions and our priorities, and in doing so help to provide them with a safe secure base in which they can venture off into the world.
Working with children brings out one of (if not) the best versions of myself, and over the last few weeks, I’ve thought about why that might be.
Children are so present, they’re so vulnerable, and curious, they’re extremely straight to the point and non judgemental, they allow you to be whoever you are, and accept and love you for it. And I’m so grateful for every high and low that my 15 years of their ups and downs and ins and outs.
I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Maybe a little less poop and vomit, but hey, we can’t have it all can we.
That will be all for now
Love always
Stacey