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Listen to this
Kids are often angry with their parents, frustrated with them when they can’t get their own way before they are two years old, so on through all stages of growth, and seriously at odds with them as they play out the edges between freedom and compliance during adolescence. And when they are angry they reach into their quiver of arrows with knowing accuracy. They may scream and refuse to eat when they are young; they may tell us to get a life and say that we don’t care about them when they are older.
It is little help saying that all this is normal, part of the territory. We are in turn frustrated, embarrassed and angered by our own children from 0 to 18 and beyond. And hurt. After an altercation (do we even remember what they were about?) we are thrown into self-doubt (did I do the right thing?) or recrimination (that will show her that I mean what I say) or detachment (I just don’t care anymore). And because of our attachment, we hurt.
And then we reach out again. After an hour or two of appropriate seething and a restorative cup of tea we know that between us and our children there is something bigger than the dispute, bigger than the hard words and the slammed doors. Probably the greatest gift we ever give to our children is this knowledge that, after all, they are still our children. The shape and content of our love changes over time, but they are still our children.
The children we work with in our programs are not our children. The futility and fear they experience is exponentially greater than that of our own kids. The pain and rage they direct at us is undeserved and meant for someone else. They are already beyond those fringes of connectedness and alienation. Their quiver of arrows is more poisoned and their use of them more unreasoned and elemental. And we are not on the familiar ground of the parent who has known the kid from Day One.
And because we have looked for the positives and cranked up our hope and made the commitment and gone the extra mile ... we can be deeply hurt. But after the cup of tea we do not naturally have that "something bigger than the dispute". We have not lived the history. We have not traded twelve or sixteen years of minutiae which are the glue of the parental relationship. In fact we rarely share to any depth the culture, language or values – and we may not even like this kid.
Yet it is as Child and Youth Care workers that we step into this confusion, however great the self-doubt and risk, and with a mix of skills, generosity and courage unknown in other professions, try to offer something better than "consequences", greater than "discipline", more noble than "impartiality" – those neutral words we easily put into self-justifying incident reports. We look for that "something bigger". Just as we may reassure our own child that no matter what has happened you are still my child, so we reach deep into ourselves to find something for this "other" child which subsumes the tears and shrapnel of today’s battle: the promise that we are still connected.
In our practice today, we know that the young person’s experience of us at critical moments is always a potential watershed: confirmation of cynicism or surprise at continuing hope. And, as we have often had to remind ourselves, today this may be our final test, the last time that our relationship may be tested and therefore accepted or rejected.
