Talking 1: Talking about what is going to happen

Brian Gannon

Brian Gannon introduces a new series on 'take-away' skills for those who work with troubled children and youth with a two-part discussion on the way we use Talking as a tool in child care work.

Children in care are short of many things. Perhaps most important, they are short of the words and ideas which help them to understand things, to make good choices and to learn from their experience.

Normal children
Let us look briefly at children who do well. They have good vocabularies and understanding because their parents talked with them often. Their mothers repeated words and ideas to them over long periods, so they learned concepts like numbers, colours, size and weight, and values like happy, helpful, sad and scared. They were prepared for new tasks and challenges, and they received helpful feedback. Their experience at home was generally reliable and predictable, so they learned to make connections and to understand their world.

Making up for losses
Troubled children have not lived with such good care and teaching. Often they come from large families, often with single and/or working parents, and often with one or more additional problems like alcoholism or unemployment. So their parents usually have not had enough time or energy to talk with them so often, to advise and to explain. Worse, experiences of deprivation, violence and desertion have added anxiety to their lives, and they have not learned to trust their world. Much of the work of Child and Youth Care workers, therefore, is in making good this lack of experience by going back for a time and talking with children the way good parents talked with their children.

Talking about what is going to happen
This is such an easy thing to do that we forget how important it is for troubled children. In their private thoughts they often worry 'What is going to happen to me today, tomorrow, this weekend?' We know that deprived children are pessimistic about their lives, and their experience has led them to expect the worst to happen. They have little confidence in their own ability to handle situations when they arise. We can help them by talking “in these three ways.

1. To reduce anxiety we remove the unexpected from youngster's lives by showing them the future.
The chief ingredients of anxiety are not knowing exactly what challenges and scary things are going to happen and not wanting even to think about them. We help by allowing children to view the coming period in advance. Here are some examples of what we tell them:

'This morning I will be out shopping until eleven o'clock'

'Today you have to see Mrs Smith about that lost library book'

'This weekend we are going to see if your Mom comes to visit'

'Today is the day we're going to see that movie'

'Tomorrow afternoon is your first try for the netball team'

Everyone (including you and me) is anxious about walking down a dark passageway. If someone turns the lights on for us, we feel more confident. More, when we turn the lights on for them, the children can see to the end of the passageway “they can see where they are going. For many children, making their futures visible in this way is enough for them. They can begin to manage their lives and feelings better when they see things in some perspective.

Helping with anxiety
Some children are much more anxious than this. They easily give up, they become upset when they see difficulties ahead, they delay, 'forget', throw a tantrum ... These children must be helped through shorter periods at a time; we show them smaller stretches of the road ahead, just to keep them moving:

'What we're going to do now is have some breakfast'

'We have a few minutes to sit on the grass before we go in'

'The first thing is to get this hair of yours looking nice'

To help children through the day, we may have to help them through the next few minutes. When they can manage the shorter periods, we can move on to the longer ones “an hour, a morning, a whole day or a week. A child care worker learns how to 'pace' a child's healing and growth.

2. To help them understand themselves, we reflect young people's feelings about the future.
It's not enough for children to know that they feel bad. They will only get control of themselves when they can put words to what they are feeling “and when the realise that everyone else in the world shares these feelings. So in our talking we give them this information. To use the examples above:

'This morning I will be out shopping until eleven o'clock. If you are worried that you can't find me, you know I will be back then.'

'Today you have to see Mrs Smith about that lost library book. You probably feel embarrassed about that.'

'This weekend we are going to see if your Mom comes to visit. I know you felt hurt and disappointed last Sunday.'

'Today is the day we're going to see that movie. I feel quite excited about that, don't you?'

'Tomorrow afternoon is your first try for the netball team. You're probably anxious about whether you'll make it?'

Better solutions
An important part of sound mental health is having a sense of self-control and self-direction. What we are doing here is helping kids to recognise their feelings for themselves without us having to tell them. Anxiety is a big black cloud which scares children; but words are more easily handled.

If children just 'feel bad' they don't know what to do about it. If they can recognise for themselves how they feel, they can understand themselves better and develop more mature solutions.
'I feel bad' can lead to a superficial solution in order to 'feel good' so they might use escape into sleeping, eating sweets, smoking up, or hitting out at someone to reduce a feeling of tension. But if they feel 'disappointed', 'frustrated', 'afraid', 'hurt', 'excited', 'impatient' or 'lonely' their feelings make more sense, and they may even get some clues as to what to do about them. We get them to this point by talking.

3. To help youth manage future tasks and challenges we prepare them with information and skills.
We not only have to show children the future and help them to recognise their feelings about the future “we must also help them to manage things successfully so that they become less anxious next time round. Mother tells the little child 'The iron will burn you', 'Turn the tap this way', 'Pat the dog like this' and 'Say thank you to John'. There might be literally thousands of these brief social skills lessons every week “and each one leaves the child more competent and more successful.

The troubled child did not have the advantage of this close guidance and education. Many children in care “even much older children “are inexperienced and clumsy at managing minute-by-minute life skills.

Looking at our earlier examples, we can see how to show children the future, to help them recognise their feelings about the future “and then to give them some skills to deal with the future:

'This morning I will be out shopping until eleven o'clock. If you look for me and can't find me, you know I will be back then. If you find it hard to wait for me, then feel free to read or listen to music in here until I come.'

'Today you have to see Mrs Smith about that lost library book. You probably feel embarrassed about that. Let's work out what would be best to say and how we can offer to pay for the book.'

'This weekend we are going to see if your Mom comes to visit. I know you were hurt and disappointed last Sunday. Shall we make a Plan A for if she comes, and a Plan B for if she doesn't?'

'Today is the day we're going to see that movie. I feel quite excited about that, don't you? Should we look in the newspaper to see what the critics thought of it?'

'Tomorrow afternoon is your first try for the netball team. You're probably anxious about whether you'll make it? How about us asking Patricia to give you some tips and some practice?'

Child and youth care workers are good at operating on two levels: one, they may ask a child to do a task; two, they ensure that the child has the skills to do the task. Otherwise the child will fail or do the task unsatisfactorily “and then feel worse about himself. From the literature on social skills training we find two useful techniques:

Demonstrating a skill. This is how we hold the screw driver. This is how we shake hands.
Rehearsing a skill. You try that now. Let's see if you can do it. Maybe we should practise that before you go in.

It is important that we don't threaten, sermonise or moralise. Children don't want to hear “There, now see what you've done!" or “I knew that I couldn't trust you with that." Our only aim is that they will experience success and mastery, and so replace pessimism with hope. Children can easily recognise when we are 'on their side'.

One youngster, coming from a lifetime of failures and unhappiness, said to me once: 'What has been great for me is to discover that the world works. It never used to work for me before!"

Next month: Talking about what has happened.