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Listen to this
Have you noticed how modern gadgets come with a booklet which includes a section on "Troubleshooting"? If our DVD player resolutely refuses to start one day, we try the usual "play" button a few times, and then we poke around, often with increasing frustration, at a few of the other buttons – and then we reach for the troubleshooting book. "Did you turn the machine on?" is often the first inflammatory question ... and the rest follow with varying technical complexity and obscurity.
We rarely go to this trouble when one of our kids refuses to operate properly one morning. We do stab at the "play" button a few times, but we quickly descend into a range of raised voices, warnings, threats, insults, physical force and blackmail which certainly wouldn’t work with our DVD player! Our reactions at this point are usually accompanied by a simplistic diagnostic set: you are obstinate, lazy, disobedient, disorganised, pretending ...
We forget that we are working with young people whose lives have become unravelled to the point that they have had to be placed in care. Most of them have a lifetime of adverse and interrupted growth and learning experiences to deal with. This morning there may be a whole ganglion of physical, cognitive and emotional obstacles and demons facing them – perhaps all coming at once, overwhelmingly.
We are right to push the "play" button a few times, because it is always best if a kid can simply be helped over a hump in the road to continue on his way – but beyond that it is expected of us that we are more accurate. Is today a day of special significance for her which we don't know about or have forgotten? Has he been taught – or can he even understand – what we are expecting of him? Has she been drawing on emotional reserves this past while and today has run out of steam? Is there a crisis in his family about which we haven't heard? Has she arrived at a personal point of decision or despair out of all scale to the menial compliance we are expecting?
In our practice today we are aware that young people lives are impacted by a myriad of circumstances; their behaviour may be driven by a thousand hurts and disappointments, untold faulty beliefs and irrational fears; they are dependent on a collection of fragmentary learnings and sustained by fleeting and fragile hopes. When they don’t perform this morning when we push their "play" button, it is seldom because of a simple, single negative motivation. We may need a better troubleshooting manual.
