Schools are increasingly faced with the challenge of understanding how adversity affects children’s growth, writes Bronagh Starrs
Several generations ago, the school environment was a compartmentalised space where children carried their books and a simple lunch to each day – and even maybe a clod or two of turf for the fire. The world they inhabited was repressed and authoritarian; school was a place for learning lessons and where the expression of challenging emotional experience was not tolerated. Some children were anxious, neglected, depressed and abused. However, expression of this was not part of their behavioural repertoire, such were the times they lived in.
The recent dismantling of holding frameworks such as family and Church, the vast and deeply concerning psychological experiment of cyberspace, and greater cultural permission to express feelings, has created a radically redefined lifespace for young people. Today’s children show up at the school gates with all manner of psychological complexity and require more from the adults within the school community than a grounding in numeracy and literacy. Educators, in turn, are faced with the challenge of understanding how this adversity affects the children’s interpersonal, emotional and academic growth.
Childhood distress comes in many forms and common sources include physical, sexual, emotional abuse and neglect; witnessing acts of domestic violence; living with addicted parents; experiencing poverty, deprivation or homelessness; and being humiliated and isolated because of race, religion or sexual identity. Frequently, their distress involves caregivers and trusted adults, and occurs when they are learning to regulate emotion.
Fear becomes a chronic condition and stress responses produce brain changes in the developing child which in turn lead to academic struggles, attention difficulties, absenteeism, interpersonal challenges and anxiety. Many children are too scared to learn and are unable to trust their environment and the people in it.
Each child is motivated by fundamental yearnings to inhabit a body which is healthy, able and safe; to have a sense of belonging with others who care for and appreciate them; and to experience themselves and their world with benevolence.
If these yearnings are met, we can expect this child to have a sense of wellbeing, security and comfort: they have faith in themselves and in their world. Many children have experienced compromise to their yearnings for integrity and if the insult is severe, the result is a traumatised, dysregulated child.
Employing techniques and teaching specific skills to encourage self- regulation are important in creating a trauma-sensitive culture within a school, however, mindfulness is only helpful if accompanied by compassion.
We heal fundamentally through relationship and the single most important gift a school community can offer to each child is the creation of a space where people are safe. Rich contact is the opposite of trauma and when we deeply encounter another human being, even momentarily, there is healing and the possibility of belonging.
So many of the children in the care of teachers do not know what it feels like to light up a room, to be tucked in at night by a loving parent, to feel known to another human being and to feel like they have a voice. The impact of these experiences are lacking and they do not know what it feels like to be a loved person.
Challenges
Each school’s Catholic ethos challenges its community to refrain from defining a child by their traumas, limitations and behaviours and to create imprints of new possibilities, stirring the imagination towards the potential of what might be.
Translation of Catholic ethos into human lived encounter is to look beyond the child’s role as ‘student’ and see a human being who deserves to have a life worth living. This ethos calls us, not to make a difference, but to be the difference in a child’s life: “There is an ordinariness to the relationship, the dialogue, the learning, that conceals the power of the enterprise.
When we look back over our own developmental journeys, and identify what we received from the adult world that helped us get through (or what was missing that would have made a difference), we nearly always discover something simple and largely unintentional, but, by the same token, something profoundly human and reassuring.
Some senior member of the tribe stopped and took us in, got interested in us and thereby got us interested in ourselves, in ways we had not quite expected. Someone sought us out, found us wandering and alone, took us by the hand (however momentarily), and led us to the light.
Educators witness the transformative potential of their contact with children every day and neuroscience research now demonstrates that traumatised brains can be rewired through interpersonal integrity, which means rich, safe, personal, non-shaming contact. It is within the human-to-human encounter that the most devastating hurt can be felt. It is also through this encounter that we experience the most profound repair and joy.
Children are highly attuned to adult-world receptivity. Traumatised children are hyper-attuned to it. Bidding welcome to a child entrusted to your care is a tremendously hopeful endeavour.
Of course, this gift of rich contact is one which can be extended to the adults within the school environment, not only the children. The impact on educators of supporting distressed students should not be underestimated. Compassion fatigue on top of other professional and personal challenges can take their toll and it is important to practice mindfulness and self-care strategies, to take time for prayerful reflection and to know when to seek support.
Rich contact and belonging within the school community is vital for the adults, because if they do not experience welcome, nurture and respect, it will be virtually impossible to extend this to the children in their care. Overworked and overburdened as educators are, one cannot afford to be cynical and despairing. Our future depends on them.
Bronagh Starrs is Programme Director for the MSc Adolescent Psychotherapy in Dublin Counselling & Therapy Centre in partnership with the University of Northampton. Her latest book, Adolescent Psychotherapy: A Radical Relational Approach (Routledge, London), has just been published. She runs a private practice as a psychotherapist specialising in working with adolescents in Omagh, Co. Tyrone. This article first appeared in the December 2018 edition of Le Chéile, A Catholic School Ethos Journal published by St Mary’s University College, Belfast and is reprinted with kind permission.
