This morning I once again dreamed about being marooned on a deserted island somewhere. Woken early by what I can only presume was a baby elephant somewhere in my house, I was not in the best of moods. There were arguments over breakfast, college letters to deal with and a 20 minute discussion about the whereabouts of one child’s trainers. The same discussion I seem to have had every day this week. The same discussion I expect to be having for the rest of the academic year.
It got me thinking about the question of what three things you would take with you to a deserted island. The first answer that popped in my head really took me by surprise.
If I had the chance to be stranded on an island, I would have done it eleven years ago. And my three luxury ‘items’ would have been my boys. Somehow, I also would have managed to smuggle my wife onto the island with us. I’m not stupid enough to think I could have managed those early days of fostering alone – and neither am I stupid enough to think that she won’t read this post and give me earache for taking them and not her!
You see, the fantasy for me is not to escape to a place without them but to escape to a place where they might have stood a higher chance of thriving instead of just surviving. A place where the demands placed upon them would be less, along with the demands placed on us as parents.
One of the hardest parts of our foster-adopt journey has not been parenting our children, but parenting them within a society that neither understands them nor is helpful to their healing process. On so many occasions I have been told that all my children need is a loving home. This is simply not true. Children who have experienced trauma need so much more than one or two people who love them ~ although that does in itself offer great possibility.
An African proverb asserts that it takes a whole village to raise a child. I would argue that it take a whole society to truly provide healing for traumatised children.
This month’s focus has been on therapeutic parenting. In my experience, foster and adoptive parents trying to be therapeutic in their approach encounter two major problems in British society.
Lack of Understanding
Advances in brain scanning has led to a huge growth of knowledge about how we humans develop. It’s an area of significant research currently and I suspect will remain so for a long time yet. We know so much more now about the impact of poor environments and poor parenting on a child. It is this growing body of knowledge that underpins therapeutic parenting.
Sadly though, this information often remains in the hands of academics and researchers.
The majority of people in British society do not understand our children. They often think they should be grateful to be fostered or adopted and that love alone is sufficient in parenting them now. When I tell people that my children have been with me for 11 years, I am often given a look that says ‘and they still behave like that?!’. These days I respond with a knowing smile and think ‘yes, haven’t they made huge progress’! But it’s taken me so long to get to that point.
I have lost count of the number of times that strangers have interfered when I’m trying to deal with a child’s behaviour. Goodness knows how many dirty looks have been shot in my direction – there must have been at least 50 the day I lay on a supermarket floor with a child refusing to get up for half an hour. On numerous occasions I’ve been asked “aren’t you going to do something?” and I think ‘well, I’m controlling my anger and at the moment that means I’m doing quite a lot’!
One woman told me ‘you should be ashamed of yourself for bringing kids like that to a public swimming pool’. I’m afraid I lost my cool that day. In a rather snappy tone, I asked her why she thought fostered children shouldn’t be given the same experiences that more fortunate children had. I watched my shame move to her. It felt momentarily satisfactory but was ultimately unhelpful.
I have, on many occasions, felt judged by society for parenting therapeutically. But I can handle that. I made a choice to foster and adopt. I love my children and see the great stuff in them that strangers might not. The way we parent is right for our boys and I see the huge progress they have made as a result.
But my boys cannot always handle it. Society places huge expectations on children and I think lots of young people struggle with this. Even more so does the child with safety and shame needs.
I believe that if society was more educated, then people would be more likely to show compassion.
Lack of Safety.
Above all other things humans are driven towards safety. We have a biological need to be both physically and socially safe. People thrive in relationships and environments that feel safe and nurturing. It is our basic, fundamental need.
And yet society does not always feel safe. On a global level we can see this and our 24hr access to news and social media perpetuates the view that we have plenty of things to fear. There’s the Brexit deal that could go badly. Terrorists that might strike again. Environmental issues that doom our planet. And of course Donald Trump still has access to Twitter which is surely going to lead us into another war!
When we work from a basis of fear we tend to overlook the good. Our focus becomes on avoiding harm. There is much to celebrate about our society. Many good things to report on. But these don’t sell newspapers (do people still buy newspapers?). Anyway, my point is, that the lack of balance in the media makes this world appear more unsafe than it truly is.
Achieving a sense of safety is the first goal of therapeutic parenting. Children who have already experienced being unsafe do not need to be bombarded with images of an unsafe world. For the first five years our boys lived with us we never watched or listened to the news channels when they were in the house. They simply couldn’t tolerate items about violence, murder, theft and more. Now we watch the children’s news shows and give them time to talk about what they see.
If we want our children to have best chance of developing internal safety then we are best to limit their awareness of some parts of our world, in the short term at least.
Final Thoughts.
Parents often find that as well as battling with the demands of parenting, they also battle against society’s influence, structures and expectations. This doesn’t make therapeutic parenting impossible but it does make it a lot harder. Books written on the subject tend to focus solely on what happens within the family dynamic – and therefore within the family home. But our home life is not all that shapes us. Society has an impact far greater than we may realise and it is usually a non-therapeutic one.
It is perhaps for these reasons that many foster and adoptive parents avoid social situations, supermarkets, public libraries etc. The downside of this being that they become more isolated, and isolation of course promotes feelings of not being safe too.
I only have two real answers to this issue.
First, let’s educate. Let us help people to understand poorly attached children and how best to support them.
Second, let’s all do small acts of kindness every day that make our world safer and more loving for our children…. and for us.
Fi
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