Listen to thisHarry walked in with his head down, his feet pounding the floor as he walked. If this was an older house it would be shaking from his stomp across the living room to the table where I sat reading the morning paper. He looked at the two boys sitting at the table with me, glowered and said “Both of you! Piss off! Right now! I need to talk to Shane”. Quickly the two of them started to rise ...
I turned to them. “Jody, Alan, would you very much mind “pissing off” for a while? I can see that Harry really wants to talk. We can catch up with each other later ...” They transposed quickly from the flight provoked by Harry into a more dignified departure.
I remained seated, folded the paper and pushed it away from me and turned to Harry: “Well, Harry. Sit yourself down. Talk to me.”
He threw himself down at the table into what I can only describe as an elbow sprawl, head in his right hand, his lips quivering, and picked up a spoon which he clenched in his other hand. “It’s that bitch Miller. I swear, one day I’d like to roast her in her own sodding oven!”
I sat forward, put my elbows on the table and rested my chin in my hands, and looked at him expectantly as if to say “Tell me everything.”
For twenty minutes I listened as he played back the row which had erupted in the kitchen just after breakfast with Maud Miller, our no-nonsense but heart-of-gold housekeeper, the story richly punctuated with expletives and fruity adjectives. In short, he had snuck into one of the store-rooms during the busy clean-up which a group of the kids was doing, using this throng of his peers as cover, and emerged with two packets of biscuits. Eagle-eyed, Maud had seen him slip into the room and so was ready for him as he came out. She had relieved him of the biscuits and told him that he was banned from the kitchen for a further day – she had passed a similar sentence the previous day when he had conned another kid out of his share of the “posh cakes” sent up as past sell-by date by the local store. Further, this morning she had done her “trial and sentence” in front of the other boys and so had “libellized” him and she would pay for it.
I nodded as if understanding his anger.
In its brief form, Harry’s history was one written in the toughest part of town where the vision of Social Services tended to be blurred by the complex urban geography and by such questions as who belonged to who and who cared for who. Now nine, he had lived for some years with an embittered and alcoholic aunt. Both of his parents were in prison. His experience of abandonment was compounded by his aunt’s reluctant “parenting” coupled with seriously inadequate physical provision. He had been a “survivor” on the streets, and his irregular attendance at schools was rewarded by disapproval, exclusion and failure. He was, when he finally came to us four months ago, a tightly-packed and volatile bomb, which is why I now spoke to him in the way I did.
"Harry,” I said, looking approvingly directly at him, “it’s good that you came to talk to me like this. And you explained to me what made you so angry – but you didn’t hit out at anybody. You talked.”
He sat there for some minutes. The signs of trembling anger slowly gave way to a somewhat manufactured frown as though he were not quite letting go of his crossness, but this was now a social cue rather than a raw inner emotion, and thus real progress. His self-control was clicking in.
We had worked hard with Harry. In any program it is always hard to individualise an ITP, especially when we know that we have to go further back in the developmental clock and redo some of the work that got missed out. Others in the program might feel that we are making allowances unfairly, and in such circumstances one has to be scrupulous about meeting everyone else’s needs. (For example, the possible collateral damage to Jody and Alan had to be managed just as carefully as the reception offered to Harry.) Most people reading the first paragraph of this account would have themselves reacted with anger towards Harry. At best, some behavioural contingency would have been forthcoming: “If you speak politely, I will listen to you.” But Harry wasn’t at this point yet. An angry reaction would have cranked up his rage and confirmed his expectation of rejection and punishment.
It is a sign of raw, unmediated aggression when a kid hits out unthinkingly at what frustrates him, whether it’s a person or an item of furniture. It’s known as “barrier behaviour”: when something or someone gets in the way, instead of seeing the wider picture and working out alternative routes to satisfaction, the person just kicks at the barrier. For the deprived and unsocialised, it’s a long journey from this point to polite interpersonal verbal negotiation – and we were on this journey with Harry.
Much of his verbal threats and expressions of anger, offensive as they might have been to some, were probably little more than the patois of his neighbourhood – and far preferable to physical attack which would have been Harry’s former style. That he was able to exercise this level of personal control to satisfy the three adults who were his “key workers” in the program, was cause for celebration. Kate and Nic, my colleagues on this “assignment”, would be pleased to hear the news when we met briefly at hand-over later on.
“Well, Harry,” I said after a while. “You can’t have those biscuits, but in ten minutes it will be tea time and we can at least enjoy one of Miller’s peanut butter sandwiches ...” He grunted approval.
“What are you doing after tea?” I asked.
“Some kids are going to kick a ball around on the lawn.”
"I'll come down and watch you for a while.”
He left the room more quietly than he had entered it. I went off to reconnect with Jody and Alan before tea.
Kate and Nic were agreeably surprised by the morning's scenario when we talked about it that evening. Harry’s shoot-from-the-hip aggressive scenes usually ended up with far more trauma and gore.
Kate said it for us all: “There have been many times these past weeks when I would gladly have strangled Harry. It’s good to know that what we've been doing seems to have been worthwhile – but it’s been tough.”
"I feel like buying him a bicycle,” said Nic. “Or a ten-roomed mansion!”
We laughed.
"In the mean time, buy him an ice cream,” I said. “It’s important that the reward we give at this stage is our time and our friendship. The fact that he’s beginning to respond to those is our real hope.”
Who knows? We child and youth workers hypothesise and diagnose and assess ... and come up with plans which may or may not work out. But it's the trying which is often where the success lies. In six months' time we think Harry will have moved a lot nearer to his nine years in terms of reasonable nine-year-old behaviour. If we had chosen to punish or reject him whenever he acted destructively, we may never have moved forward from our starting point. By responding to the gist of his messages rather than to his crude way of delivering them, we were at least in a conversation with him. Sure, there were some tough times to come, but we three went home that night with lighter steps.
