Listen to thisFamiliar words in any family, but I was struck during a recent visit to a children's home how the kids demand – and get – immediate attention from child care staff, and I was not too sure how good this really is for them ...
I had been invited to discuss a problem with a staff member and we had 45 minutes scheduled for our meeting. No fewer than seven times were we interrupted by children, and on all seven occasions the adult conversation was suspended for periods of one to four minutes. I have no doubt that the children on this occasion had business of varying degrees of urgency, and that they themselves had various capacities for waiting. But what I didn't see was any distinction being made between them, all receiving full and immediate attention.
One of the commonest problems amongst children in care is impulsiveness which is related to a combination of heightened anxiety and insecurity, a demand for immediate gratification of needs, a low frustration tolerance and an inability to wait. It also represents a deficit in self-control with which the children need help, for developmentally this is an infantile position and one which children should be growing out of or helped out of. Our sense of responsibility to the children, or because we regard it as part of our job – or maybe just an attitude of “anything for a quiet life" – prompts us to meet needs immediately they are presented, without realising that we are perhaps feeding a furnace of impulsiveness which will become more voracious as the children get older.
Ann Stricklin1 referred to “the insatiable need to be given to which is so frequently associated with the severely socio-culturally and emotionally deprived and traumatised child". She also went on to say that into this situation “there needs to be immediate and appropriate intervention to stop these pathological processes". It is here that the real work of the Child and Youth Care worker lies, far more important than being seen as the responsive “provider of all things" upon whom children can become subtly dependent “dependent not for what you give, but because you give immediately. Note that in a children's home, attention is a commodity as solid as candy, and in normal children “attention-seeking" is regarded as worrying behaviour.
It is a given of emotional development that a child is impulsive in this way. It is part of the treatment plan to build inner controls. The child care worker should therefore know the anxious or impulsive child's capacity to wait (five seconds? one minute? half an hour?) and should actively help the child to extend this to age-appropriate levels. What is awkward is that troubled kids in their teens may be presenting problems which adults normally expect in kids of three and four. We have to transpose our ways of dealing with little kids to those who are physically (though not emotionally) older.
When Tony, aged fourteen, wants some help with a project, you may be able to say “l'm busy with John right now but I'll be free at 4 o'clock “that's twenty minutes, OK?" Twenty minutes may be a lifetime for Tony, and knowing this, the child care worker may have to say “Come on in and sit down, and I'll be with you as soon as I've finished with John". We want Tony to be able to wait for twenty minutes, and hopefully he will soon be able to do so without undue anxiety, but inviting him in, where he nevertheless has to wait, is a way of reassuring him while he learns to wait. The Child and Youth Care worker will devise an appropriate way of “holding" an anxious child while he waits.
Liz, aged eight, may be far more anxious than Tony. When she wants your attention she wants it now, or else she persists or has a tantrum. Maybe for her twenty seconds is a long time. The child care worker (with one eye on the treatment plan) will also want to extend this capacity for waiting, perhaps today just to 30 seconds. The reassurance she may need is to be held or picked up for those 30 seconds while you finish dealing with John. Liz may not be able to understand the verbal message. She may totally misunderstand an impatient “Wait! “ But being held while she waits conveys a strong message: “I am here. I hear your need. I am going to listen to you. But I am still busy with John". With a smug and satisfied grin, tonight that child care worker can chalk up for Liz's emotional growth: “Got her waiting up to 30 seconds". Who knows, next year like ordinary nine-year-olds, Liz will handle twenty minutes.
Note
1. Stricklin, A. (1972) A Psychological Study of Children Legally
Removed from Parental Care. (Unpublished doctoral thesis.) Cape
Town: University of Cape Town
