Robbing our kids of their childhood
The 15 year-old boy’s teachers were convinced he could score better grades. His aggressive behaviour, they felt, was a mask for some deep emotional wounds that had badly scarred him. So they referred him to the Mico Counselling Centre. It turned out they were right.
“He told us that his brother, cousin and best friend had already been killed and he was just waiting for his turn,” said Hermena Davidson, director of the centre, who asked us not to identify the teen by name.
According to Davidson, the boy lives in a community that has been plagued by violence. His mother, a factory worker, has been trying her best to give him a better chance in life.
“At the first counselling session, we met with the boy and his mother separately,” Davidson told the Sunday Observer. The purpose, she explained, was to learn more about the child’s background.
The counsellor’s initial role is basically that of a “listener” who tries to help the child and parent to discover for themselves the reasons for the child’s inappropriate behaviour and to facilitate their efforts at formulating and implementing a corrective programme.
The teenager’s circumstances were, to say the least, unfortunate.
“His mother would be at work when he came home from school, and he would be unsupervised until she came home from work, which could be late at night if she was working overtime at the factory,” explained Davidson.
Therefore, like so many other youngsters his age, the 15 year-old came under the influence of older boys in the community who had dropped out of school and were either involved in crime or associating with criminals.
His mother, as well as teachers, noted a steady decline in his deportment. His disobedience and aggressive behaviour became intolerable, and when his mother was called in by the school’s principal, she asked, with tears in her eyes, “what ah can do so dat ah don’t hear seh him get shot or gone to jail?”
This teenage boy’s story, though, is not unique. In fact, counsellors like Davidson and other care-givers encounter children in similar circumstances almost every day – children who are either victims of, or witnesses to recurrent violence, sexual assault and emotional abuse.
The experiences, the care-givers say, effectively rob these children of their childhood.
“Violence affects every aspect of children’s lives,” said Davidson. “The child who is either subjected to, or a witness to violence will oftentimes show physical, emotional, behavioural and academic symptoms as a result of the experience.”
She said that physically, the child will sometimes show signs of fatigue, suffer loss of appetite, headaches and/or backaches, and may even have bowel irregularity.
Davidson offered as an example, an eight-year-old girl who, because of her poor academic performance and constant fatigue, was referred to the counselling centre.
They found that she lived in an inner-city community where gang violence not only resulted in gunfire at nights, but also constant stress and tension in her home.
“In such an environment, the child is not only unable to concentrate properly on her schoolwork, but doesn’t even get sufficient rest or sleep,” said Davidson.
“Emotionally, there is often a heightened sense of fear along with feelings of depression and anxiety,” added Davidson, who said that children affected in that way often display a tendency to stop trusting adults “because the child sees adults as people who cause pain”.
The experience, said Davidson, can lead to aggression, withdrawal, procrastination, and the child may even start experimenting with drugs in a misguided effort at “coping” with the situation.
Clyde Edwards, founder of FLOCK (Facilitating Little Ones to Christ’s Kingdom), a Christian care-giving group for youngsters, agreed. “Our children are absolutely traumatised,” he told the Sunday Observer, adding that a common response to the psychological trauma of violence is withdrawal.
“This affects the entire family,” he said. “Parents might stop looking at the news, but among children it is worse, they just turn off to the world.”
Mico’s Davidson, in an attempt to demonstrate the psychological effect that violence and callousness in the society have on children, cited the case of one boy who told Mico counsellors “mi see when man flatter before dem dead an’ it look funny”.
According to Davidson, a key strategy to correct this kind of trauma is for parents to actively involve themselves in their children’s rehabilitation.
In the case of the 15 year-old boy, his mother accompanied him to most of his counselling sessions.
“Most of the work is between the parent and the child,” Davidson said, “with the counsellor being there to reassure them that they can do it.”
The teenage boy and his mother developed a “contract” between themselves which bound them to specific modes of conduct, responsibilities and rewards.
This contract, she said, is not only about the child adopting “more appropriate behaviour” but includes “behaviour modification” by the parent. She said that parents who complain that their children are using curse words may be contracted by the children to themselves refrain from doing so. “Also,” Davidson added, “the child may want included in the contract an agreement that the parent not be quick to accuse the child of wrongdoing before getting all the facts”.
According to Davidson, rewards, such as a favourite snack, a movie treat or just praise for good behaviour can be placed in the contract.
“We call this positive reinforcement,” Davidson said. However, she added that “negative reinforcements” of withholding rewards for inappropriate behaviour were also essential, “as the child needs to know he is living in a structured environment in which he must accept responsibility for his actions”.
In the case of the 15 year-old boy, his behaviour improved and his grades got better after weeks of counselling. “He progressed remarkably well,” said Davidson, “and he was an outstanding participant in our Easter camp last year.”
She said it was during that camp that they visited the Camp Road Remand Centre which had a powerful effect on the boy, as when they returned to the centre he said to her: “Miss, you know that one of the men said he was there for 17 years – that is longer than I have been alive!”
These days, according to Davidson, the teenager will, more often than not, go to the centre immediately after school to do his homework before going home.
Although Davidson is proud of the success stories from the counselling centre, she admitted that it was tough work, particularly for the parents.
“Parents aren’t taught to be parents,” she said. “There are no courses in parenthood that prepare us for coping with the challenges of raising children.”
She said that this inability to cope often led to a feeling of resignation. In such a situation, said Davidson, parents may just give up by saying “the child is just bad, there’s nothing more I can do”. But she warned that this attitude was like a death sentence to the child.
She said that while she had seen many heartening cases similar to that of the 15 year-old boy, too often the parent and child do not complete all of the sessions, technically termed the “behaviour modification intervention system”.
According to Davidson, it is not unusual that after four of the six sessions, the parent and child stop attending. She remembered more than one instance of calling on parents to ask why their children were missing the counselling sessions, only to be told that the children were “doing much better now so we really don’t need to come back”.
But, warned Davidson, “too often the child that does not complete the counselling schedule reverts to his or her former inappropriate behaviour because they have not grasped and internalised the tools they need to have to make the change”.
The children, she insisted, must have these moral and psychological tools because they are surrounded by hostile conditions, persons and messages that can thwart their potential.
“Our intervention is not complete until all the counselling sessions have been done and the child not only begins to show improved behaviour and grades but also develops what we call an ‘insight’ into their own need to adjust their mind and their attitude toward positive goals for themselves,” she said.
Valena Marsh, guidance counsellor at the Cockburn Gardens Junior High School, told the Sunday Observer that “the tragedy of the whole situation is that our children are imitating what they are seeing happening in their homes and communities”. She said that she had been noticing a worsening of the aggressive behaviour among students and attributed this to the example being set by the adults around them.
“Oftentimes our efforts at conflict resolution don’t get very far,” said Marsh. “They don’t want to talk about things, so there can be no reconciliation. This is what they learn in their communities where people don’t work things out through dialogue but resort instead to physical attacks.”
However, there have been recent signs of Jamaican children rejecting this poor example being set by adults.
Last year, a year when at least 17 children were killed by gunmen, at least two peaceful street demonstrations were mounted by schoolchildren in separate parts of Kingston and St Andrew appealing for an end to violence.
And children themselves are providing their own solutions, among themselves, to the problem. For example, at Haile Selassie High School, located in the often volatile Tavares Gardens community, a system of “peer counselling” seems to be going a far way in helping students to cope.
According to the school’s guidance counsellor, Rev Leroy Walters, the “peer counselling system is proving to be very effective, because the peer counsellors are also students in the same age group who are living in the same or similar communities”.
The young counsellors, he said, were able to get through to their fellow students the way no adult could.
The counsellors apparently use “peer pressure” as a positive influence among their colleagues.
Mico’s Davidson concurred with Walters. She said that it was not uncommon for young people who have benefited from the centre’s work to bring their friends who also needed help.
“It is very heartening,” she said, “to see our youth actively engaged in changing the course of their lives and the lives of others around them for their own benefit.”
Davidson insisted that adults could also be helpful. “Behaviour modification strategies begin with us, the grown-ups,” she said, adding that “our example is their best guide to what is appropriate behaviour.”
Paulette Lewis, a counsellor at the Mico Centre, emphasised that the quality of parenting was the major determinant in how a child responds to, and copes with, the violence surrounding him or her.
“Sometimes the parent is only there in body, but not functioning as a parent – and I say parent (singular) because the cases of parents being present are so few and far between,” Lewis said.
She said that there were too many cases of parents taking the attitude that they “can’t bother” and cited the instance of a mother saying that she stopped trying to guide and discipline her child because, “the company and example of the other children in the yard” made it a waste of time.
Lewis told the Sunday Observer that it was most disturbing that this attitude now seemed to be a part of our culture. She said that parents who gave scant attention to their children were not confined to the poorest classes, noting that most of the cases coming to the counselling centre concerned children from the middle and lower classes.
She said that in many of these cases, it was the parent-child relationship that was at the root of the behavioural and academic problems that caused the child to be referred to the centre.
Lewis and Davidson would like to see adults giving children more affection and emotional support, because “if they are only receiving disapproval from us, they will give up on themselves”.