“Crystal” was a really cute kid who had been in foster care off and on for ten of her thirteen years. She had decided to become a pediatrician so she could help other kids. But Crystal’s IQ was below average, and she was two years behind in school and had never successfully completed a mainstream science class. It was ludicrous to encourage her, and yet that was what was being done. Crystal could have conscientiously told her mirror how smart she was and her social worker could have reinforced this dutifully, but it simply was not constructive.
As one might expect, Crystal did not achieve her goal or even one less lofty. How much better off this girl might have been if her caseworkers had focused on recognizing her talents and encouraging her to seek success where she had a chance of finding it.
When I was in the eighth grade, Sister Mary Albertus said that I was very smart because I was a good student who consistently earned high grades. Sister was always quick to point out my academic successes. She also refused to let me bundle and band the sales-tax stamps that the class collected. She said my fine motor skills left a lot to be desired. I concluded that I was smart but inept, that I was good intellectually but challenged when faced with practical physical application. It was not a useful idea.
When I went to work in the cake factory, I wanted to be the first female supervisor. I was going to move up the ladder and increase my income while working with my mind and my influence rather than my back. But I quickly recognized that I had to achieve some basic job success to be respected by my future supervisees. So I set about learning how to run the machines and meet the production-line standards.
During my very first shift as the first woman to run the big packaging machine on the Boston Cream Cake line, I almost cut off my finger. The paper got caught in the automated feed, and I was so frustrated and so anxious to do a good job that I started the machine without getting completely clear of the cutting blade, and my little finger was sliced. My supervisor wanted me to go to the hospital, and I flat out refused. In the morning, I went to Lucille, the plant nurse, who thought stitches were probably in order. I explained to her that I couldn’t fail as the first woman on the job. Lucille applied some butterfly bandages, and I returned to the line. I never became the best in the plant, but I got good enough to set a few records, and the guys respected me for how hard I tried.
With each successive machine I learned to run, each job I mastered, I became more confident. I became the first woman to supervise the manu-facturing floor. In fact, they had to change the job title, which had been “foreman” until I came along.
Ultimately I earned my undergraduate degree attending school part-time while working full-time at the plant. When I left the plant, I was the day supervisor in charge of safety and training in the packaging department. I was the chairperson of the Manufacturing Safety Committee for seven food processing plants across the nation.
I think this is a good illustration of how a sense of competency can be built on successive achievements. Valuing one’s talents and personal competency are not ingredients that some guru pours into your psyche. A sense of competency is developed. It can be likened to a major construction project. The foundation has to be reinforced with the right materials, and the walls have to have the correct supports. As challenges are successfully met, confidence and ability grow.
My oldest foster daughter, Shelly, was sixteen when she came to live with us. I hadn’t put up a Christmas tree for several years, but Russ insisted that we recognize having a child in our home again and put up one.
The truth is that he really liked a fresh-cut Christmas tree, and he had missed the tradition. So off he went to select the very best tree, which he hauled in and wrestled into the tree stand. It was large and grand.
Through the years, the custom in my household had been that the kids put the lights on the tree, and I’d join them for the decorating part. So I brought in the lights, untangled them, and told Shelly to put the lights on the tree and to call me when she was ready for me to help decorate. I was in the kitchen baking Christmas cookies when Shelly called me into the family room where she was working on the tree. It was a horrible scene. The lights were bunched in wads and stuck haphazardly all about the branches.
Whereupon, in my best “social worky” manner, I snarled, “Darn it, Shelly, if you didn’t want to put the lights on, why didn’t you just tell me?”
She didn’t answer right away. Then as one lone tear slid down her cheek, she said, “They never let me decorate the tree because I’m so klutzy.”
That incident taught me a lot about assumptions, expectations, instructing, guiding, listening, and more. It hurt my heart.
That first Christmas, Shelly and I took the lights off and put them back on together. We decorated the tree, and then we baked cookies. Each year, Shelly did more by herself and did it better. Today Shelly and her children decorate a beautiful tree without any help from me.
Shelly was sure she could not do anything right. When she came home from school while at her former foster home, she was not permitted to enter the house until another family member arrived. Shelly was sixteen years old and had to sit outside because she was not trusted in the house alone. It was not a question of honesty. They knew this child wouldn’t take something that didn’t belong to her. They simply felt she was likely to have an accident or make a mess if left on her own. Shelly had lived with these people for thirteen of her fifteen years in foster care, and they still treated her like the hyperactive toddler she had been when she first came to them. They did not value her, and she did not value herself. She had no basis for believing in her own ability.
I am very proud of Shelly. She continues to struggle with issues of confidence and competence, but she has come a long way.
You can encourage a sense of worthlessness, just as you can help cultivate knowledge of competence. Fostering resilience operates at a deep human level that includes inter-connectedness, positive role models, and opportunities for participation.
We need first to respect and respond to the humanness of all people. I have a poster that says, “He didn’t look like I look or talk like I talk but when he cried he cried like I cry and when he laughed he laughed like I laugh.” We are all fundamentally more alike than not.
Children need to feel that fundamental rapport of the human connection. When we live in parochial sameness, we build walls. When we label others, we show our approval of labeling.
There are powerful reasons for change.
The headlines scream of school atrocities. Parents and teachers are struggling to handle an increase in bullying among the young.
Our kids are prancing around in clothes with some designer or manufacturer’s name emblazoned on their chests or backs or butts. Those are labels. Kids love them because they believe they tell everyone that they are cool, that they are affluent. Those labels are symbolic of what is going on with our young people.
By the way, I don’t mean just teenagers. Look at the tots. They, too, are designer clad.
When we move from the symbolic to the cultural and societal labeling, it gets uglier because the human connection is lost. The human connection is that crack in the wall that allows us to see each person where she is. It is the oldest of the social worker’s constructs. Begin where the person is. Meet our children where they are. Teach them to meet the other guy where he is. Strip the clothes of the labels, and, by the way, I would encourage a literal interpretation of that. Get rid of the designer labels. Tell your kids about other cultures, and I don’t mean the sanitized popular versions. I am talking about cultural descriptions that, for example, have gone from vilifying to sanctifying the indigenous people of the United States, speech and the written word about African Americans that oversimplify both their history and their role in today’s society, and the impossibly generalized view of anybody not American as somehow inferior – all these ill equip our youth for any meaningful understanding of life beyond their own neighborhood.
Express your respect for
the rights of other people and their cultural norms. We don’t always have to agree, but we need to respect. Try different foods, and go to different places. Connect your children to the humanness of others.
Our children need positive role models. I am writing this at a time when the United States of America has unilaterally invaded a sovereign state on the basis of totally unsubstantiated evidence. Our financial leaders are, for very good cause, being indicted right and left for misuse of their positions. Sports and entertainment celebrities are in the headlines for drug abuse, sexual harassment, and cheating.
You could make a case for the dearth of positive role models, but you would be only partially correct. Twice a month, month after month, youngsters at a weekend retreat have been asked, as a classroom exercise, to identify the person they most respect or look up to or want to be like. It is not the president of the United States or the football quarterback or the movie star that is routinely cited. More often than not, it is mom or dad, followed by grandparents and teachers.
If you cheat on your income tax, set your radar detector so you can exceed the speed limit, take the towel from the Holiday Inn, you are being a role model. Young people have often acknowledged to me that these practices are wrong. But when I push them on it, they admit they think the mistake is in getting caught.
If you sincerely want to contribute to your child’s sense of competence and resilience skills, you need to begin with your own behavior. I raised my sons during the 1960s and 70s. I remember when my Daniel confronted me about smoking. I gave him a big song and dance about adult behavior and mature physiologies. This can be an appropriate response at times. Certainly enjoying recreational sex with your spouse is, and should be, an adult activity. But smoking cigarettes is harmful to your health no matter what age you are, and I didn’t tell Danny that. First I modeled an unhealthful behavior and then rationalized it in an attempt to justify my injurious habit. I didn’t quit until the doctors told my mom Doris that cigarettes were killing her and my fourteen-year-old son started stealing my cigarettes. My beloved Doris, who became the mother I chose to fill the hole in my heart, died four years later, but it took Daniel twenty years to quit.
My Aunt Eileen was one of my most powerful role models. She was an independent woman with strong, unshakable ideals. My contact with her during my formative years was sporadic, but my sense of womanhood was inherently tied up with my image of her. She will always be one of the most intelligent persons I have ever known. She taught me to ask why and expect answers. She didn’t preach. She practiced. That is what a role model does.
I don’t think it is possible to grow in confidence and a sense of achievement without opportunities to participate. We deny people that prospect when we overprotect and overindulge them. I refer particularly to the parenting approach prevalent in American society today. Children are blatantly overindulged and flagrantly underemployed. Don’t get me wrong. I am not promoting sweatshops or child labor. I mean that children are no longer considered contributing members of families. When our grandparents were parenting, the economy was largely agrarian, and all the family members, adults, oldsters, and youngsters, worked to provide for the family. In ensuing generations, the work ethic has eroded. The sense of personal entitlement that permeates today’s society begins at home. Our children need to participate in the work of living.
At the shelter for runaway and homeless children, periodically we’d take in one of what my staff would call “the royalty.” This was a young person who came to us alleging parental abuse, when she was, in fact, the abuser. Usually a parent woke up one morning, realized that the home was harboring a parasitic young person, and required this youngster to make some small contribution to the household. The mother might ask her daughter to clean the kitchen or some other equally odious chore. The princess then fled to our shelter. On more than one occasion, we arranged for the princess to visit our weekend attitude-adjustment retreat. Usually mom’s requirements did not seem as outrageous after a weekend of classroom, exercise, and community service.
Parents of these children were grateful for whatever small improvement there was in their children’s attitudes. The problem is that work is so often viewed as punishment rather than a privilege. I once visited a residential facility for adolescents that took a very different view of work. It was based much more on what the real world is like. The young residents had some basic required chores that had more to do with personal space than anything. Beds had to be made, bedrooms maintained, and laundry done. Beyond that, there was a variety of opportunity in the work life of the community. Participation earned extra privileges and money. A young person who broke rules lost the right to work. Certainly this is more like the real world where poor performance or rule breaking will result in loss of job and income.
When I speak of the opportunities to participate, I don’t just mean chores at home, at school, or in the workplace. Our children need the opportunity to help provide for the greater good. Community service is more than an altruistic exercise. It is a fundamental need of humankind. We get as much as we give.
At one point, I had a Girl Scout troop of preteens. It was Christmas, and I decided that we would go Christmas caroling in the housing project that was restricted to the elderly and disabled. The area was clean, though shabby. The weather had turned brisk, and, as anyone who knows me can tell you, I am not a singer. But as we approached the first door, I began to sing, accompanied by eight reluctant backup singers.
We were embarrassingly inept, but the tiny gray-haired lady who came to the door didn’t seem to notice. Tears flowed down her wrinkled face. Her tremulous voice gave expression to her gratitude for our gift of company and music. My girls came alive. They went from door to door eager to sing and laugh and talk. Not all the residents were as appreciative as the first lady, but it didn’t matter. My girls knew they were giving a gift. Their sense of competency grew that day because they had the opportunity to participate.
The ability to perform effectively is developed by successive achievements. It is one source of personal resilience.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Someone in a Child’s Life
I was a lucky little girl. I had my intact family and my mother until I was twelve years old. My mother thought I was great. She held me and talked to me. She told me and she told others that I was an important, valuable person. No matter what came later, I had my mama in my early years. The last two years of her life, I spent a good deal of our valuable time being mad at her. She was sick a lot, and she kept saying she was dying. That infuriated me. She wasn’t going to die. People don’t just die, and besides, none of the adults, not even my dad, acted as if she were dying.
When she did die, I was mad as hell … at myself, at my dad, at the doctors. I was moody, depressed, and not sure how to go on living. My mother had abandoned me.
There has been a lot of research that suggests that the early child/parent attachment predicts the quality of functioning in later life. My own history and the anecdotal evidence of my years of social work certainly corroborate the research of Drs. Erik Erikson, John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, Ann Masten, and Douglas Coatsworth. These represent some of the best of the body of knowledge concerning attachment and trust.
In his book, The People of the Lie, Dr. Scott Peck describes a disturbed child who is brought to him for therapeutic counseling. The little boy is demonstrating aberrant behaviors. When Dr. Peck attempts to work with the parents, they patiently explain that it is his job to “fix” the child, not theirs. These people were wealthy, educated professionals, and a model child was necessary to their image, but not to their lives.
The ways in which parents talk and interact with their children define what the children think about the world and themselves. These parents demonstrated zero affection and gave only marginal attention while using distinctly different words to describe their family life to the rest of the world. The disparity between reality and the parental fiction had to produce a profoundly di
storted world view. The little boy was raised by paid employees, who unfortunately didn’t stay long. The little boy and his parents did not continue as Dr. Peck’s patients. Dr. Peck believed the mother and father were truly evil people, and I agree with him.
In some ways, their emotional abuse was more damaging than some of the overt physical abuse that I have observed. Compounding the damage, society saw these people as ideal parents, increasing the likelihood that their little boy grew up believing he had no real value. After all, he saw that his parents didn’t care for him and everyone else respected them. Children need the affirmation of a parent’s love and acceptance.
Now, with all that said, research also indicates that a child can increase in feelings of competency as long as there is at least one significant adult in the child’s life. If Dr. Peck’s little patient had had a nanny who attended to his physical and emotional needs continuously and affectionately over the long term, he may well have been a much healthier, happier child who could become a well-adjusted adult.
I was a lucky little girl. Throughout my teen years, I had not just one, but a whole convent full of remarkably strong women who cared for me and encouraged me. In general, the sisters of Notre Dame, who taught at my high school – several sisters, in particular – sustained me, encouraged me, and affirmed me.
Mary, my foster mother, barely liked me, but she provided for my basic needs and held me to high standards of social manners. I had really good friends who shared their mothers with me. Then, when I was seventeen, I found the woman who would be my second mother.
Doris Stilwell was the manager at a local drive-in restaurant where I secured employment during my senior year in high school. Doris had two young children, but had lost three – two at birth and a son when he was two. There was a hole in her heart, and she was always mothering the teens who hung out in her store. Well, this teen had as big a need as she did, and we attached. She loved me, and I loved her.
Girl Called Karen Page 7