Listen to thisSeparation is an experience we must all come to terms with. Birth itself, our first major experience, is a separation, a thrusting out from a warm protective all-providing haven into a cold and lonely world where needs are not met immediately. No wonder so many young children sleep in foetal positions, as if to recapture the feeling of this initial security. But the child is born when it is already, in Winnicott’s words, “a going concern–; it has the ability, even specific skills, to adjust to its new situation and gain strength by doing so. Where its own powers are lacking, the instincts of its mother (in normal circumstances) prompt her to supply what is wanted as it is wanted, “the world in small doses.” But when the birth is premature, or difficult, or when the mother is not able for some reason to give what is needed, it is not surprising that difficulties appear which may recur later in some form or other, or even be permanent. Even when things go well, as they generally do, the experience of this initial separation is not just cancelled, but may have its effect on our total view of life. It is not surprising that philosophers from Plato to Tillich have characterised loneliness as a fundamental part of the human condition.
The compensations that the mother gives her baby in the way of food, bodily care, cuddling and so forth, also have to be gradually left behind as the child is weaned and encouraged to develop. For those who have learnt to look on the mother and her child as a partnership in which both give and both receive it will seem natural that the weaning is a shared activity in which the mother does not just follow a dietitian's time-table, but learns to recognise her baby’s readiness, his frustrations, and the times when he needs for a little to be a tiny baby again. In this way she arranges for the weaning to be a natural development and not an imposed change2.
These two experiences may serve as the point of departure :n our consideration of the separation of children from their homes. This too is a natural and necessary process, a strand in the complex business of becoming adult. Yet it is also the loss of something valuable; and it is important that children should be able to master the emotional turmoil that accompanies it by the time we ask them to face it. This is impossible to prepare for, of course, when death or disaster strikes the family. In that case, as when a baby is born prematurely, all we can do is to devise as good an emergency service as possible, knowing that it can only be a “second best–3. But in spite of the general sympathy which society feels for the abandoned baby, it is fair to ask whether our nursery provision for them is always based on a full understanding of their needs. Those who have seen the film “Frustration in Early Childhood–4 will understand my doubts as to whether a regime based on principles of physical hygiene, and organised like a hospital ward with matron, sister and uniformed nurses, is adequate for children suffering from the most basic deprivation, loss of close personal contact with mother. The researches of John Bowlby5 indicate some of the consequences. Where such suffering is involved for the young child, those who look after him are tempted not to involve their own feelings too deeply, especially as they feel inadequate to help. One way of escape is to base one’s care on objective principles, such as cleanliness and good diet, which set a less challenging standard than involvement in the child's total situation. But these limits, though they may be justifiable in the adult hospital situation, are plainly not enough for children who have lost their homes. Psychologists like Gesell6 and Piaget7 have shown that mental and emotional development, just as much as physical, comes from an interaction of the child and his environment. But whereas almost any surroundings invite the child to physical action, we cannot expect normal mental or emotional growth unless the adults around the child provide stimulus and respond to his early efforts8. One sometimes hears of retarded, apparently unattractive children in a nursery who made no progress until someone was drawn to take a special interest in them; and the resulting development was a revelation to those who had known the child before. And just as care for the premature baby must begin immediately if it is to survive, so our work with children who have been prematurely torn from home must begin at once, even if there is no noticeable response; we must not wait “for them to get over the shock.”
There is growing understanding of this, just as it is realised more and more that the child in hospital who is “no trouble” may not be the one who is suffering least. But it is still not recognised widely enough that enforced premature separation from home creates a situation full of danger for the child's development, and a very special awareness is needed in those who then care for the child. It is possible for someone else to take over the mother’s role for a short time, and as the child grows older this can happen more often; but the child's peace of mind at such times and future stability depend on the security which has already been built up by consistent maternal care9.
One special kind of enforced separation is that which an outside authority brings about, in order to remove the child from surroundings thought unsuitable. The methods of doing this and their results are discussed in the next chapter. Here I only want to mention the responsibilities of such action. It is useless to move a child from “bad conditions” to the finest residential care available if the child is getting something positive from his home and refuses to take anything in from the new setting. The question of bewilderment, disorientation and resentment must be faced. Some Children's Departments used to have a policy of placing almost every child in care in a foster-home. But they found that the problems of placement were not all solved by the fact that homes and foster-homes have a good deal in common. Success still hinged on whether the child could accept a change of home at all. An important contributing factor was the honesty of the adults concerned towards the child. It may be tempting to spare the child (and oneself), a painful scene by painting a rosy picture, but one pays heavily later for doing so, and damages the child. A boy who later came to Shotton Hall was adopted by his aunt at the age of five, after his mother died. She “did her duty” but she would not talk to the boy about his mother. It was a forbidden subject and Pat did not even know whether she was alive or dead. He was not allowed to keep any memento of her. Nor was he allowed to keep in touch with his father; when in his teens, Pat heard a rumour that he had just died, but was unable to confirm it. Not surprisingly, when so much was being withheld from him, he began to pilfer. His adoptive parents became very bitter, accusing him of ingratitude for all they had done. . This boy’s story might have been very different if he had gone to live with people who could have shared his past with him. It may also give a glimpse into the situation of the child who leaves home at an age when he cannot be told what is happening and that he may not see his parents again, because he is too young to grasp it in words.
The question arises : at what age then are children ready to leave home, and what help should then be given? It may be clear from what I have said already that I do not believe in giving a precise answer to this type of question. Children's emotional development at any given age varies more widely than their physical or mental growth, and for this reason I deplore the pressure on parents who send their children to boarding school in England, to enter them at birth for such-and-such a school in a given year. This obliges them to prepare their children for this separation with all kinds of persuasion and promises, whether they feel they are ready or not. And when the boarding school does not live up to the child's expectations he remembers that it was what his parents said that made him want to go, and his disillusionment is all the greater. By contrast, Gesell, in his researches into typical reactions among American adolescents going to day schools, found at fifteen, and not before, that they began to want to break away and go to boarding school10.
It a time will come in adolescence when the boy or girl consciously frees himself from dependency on his parents, is it necessary for the parents, often at great expense, to anticipate this? I feel that it is sensible to arrange, with the child's co-operation, stays away from home, with friends or relatives, or camping. This is as natural as teaching the child in the home to become more self-sufficient. (It is no accident that the child who has never stayed away from home has often never learnt to make his own bed; the mother who is possessive is also over-protective). But the value of these visits lies in the fact that the child chooses the adventure of sleeping somewhere else, goes off to do it (perhaps a little nervously), and finds it is fun. But going to boarding school, even after such preparation, is a different matter.
How much do we really understand and take into account what such an experience means to a child? Or the experience of going to a Reception Centre? Or to an Approved School? I have written of separation as a basic human experience “but in what way does our own awareness of it influence us when we are concerned in the separation of a child from his some? One can find people even in social work, who cannot take part in it without haunting feelings of guilt, and others who insist upon it as a cure for most ills. But it is necessary to replace such personal responses with a more objective knowledge of how children react to separation and what it might be expected to achieve. This objective assessment is needed just as much in social work as in the parental decision to send a child to boarding-school, and so the booklet touches on both.
Why should people working in a special residential school for emotionally disturbed children, such as Shotton Hall, attempt to contribute to the answer of all these questions? The tact that they experience many of the normal reactions from all stages of emotional development, but in an exaggerated and distorted form, forces them to face and try to solve problems which in many other settings exist in a dormant state, breaking out into symptomatic behaviour so seldom that it is unfamiliar and unintelligible. Again, such schools have a field of experience which overlaps with that of the psychiatric hospital and clinic as well as the ordinary residential institution; and thus they have two particular contributions to make. They can evaluate everyday institutional happenings in the light of psychological insights, and express these in clear practical terms far those who have little time for study among the pressures of their work. Secondly the methods they evolve to deal with the strains and stresses to which maladjusted children react so openly, may also be helpful to those who realise that similar strains exist beneath the surface in their own setting. I might add that on our side it is helpful for us to put our approach into words and listen to the comments and criticisms of those who read it.
Shotton Hall recently organised a conference – one of a series going back for many years – called “Do We Still Need to Work in the Dark?” It asked how far the knowledge of the workings of the mind, which psychoanalytic thinking and new approaches in psychology and education have given us, was a help, and accepted as a help, among those who work with people. If one reads the published report11 one can find, for instance in the papers by Dr. M. L. Kellmer Pringle, Miss B. Stubbs and Mr, H. Williams, evidence of a combination of outlook and knowledge working in a way which would have been almost unknown in the days when I entered social work, and quite unthinkable in the last century. One also finds expressed, by Dr. R. D. Laing and Dr. W. H, Alchin, the existential darkness which is always liable to confront a man as he tries to help a fellow being in deep distress. This booklet tries to approach the question in a third way, which was only touched on in the conference in passing. It is written to encourage social workers to look more closely at a particular corner of their work, and see what had gone unnoticed in spite of their theoretical knowledge and undoubted concern far the children in their care. Its central chapters describe one particular approach, evolved during many years of experience in one setting. I hope this will be helpful not necessarily as a text-book example, but as a point of comparison – even contrast – with the work of others, and to show how a particular philosophy can find practical expression.
Viewing the quantity of research published in books, articles conferences, broadcast talks and even films (4), on human reactions in normal and stressful situations, one must agree that the increase in knowledge has been spectacular. But there are many ways of using new knowledge. The most valuable and most difficult is to use it in developing insight into oneself, the people one works with and the work one does as Clare Winnicott so well describes it12. It must also help in developing new techniques and new categories of thought. But there is always the danger that the latter, which should be used in the service of insightful human relationships (whether in education, child care, or psychotherapy) somehow come to take their place. These techniques lead to complex organisations and a hierarchy of roles for social workers. In the complexity of our new administrative arrangements we forget to ask what it means to face them as a child – we ignore how a child feels.
The question of admission and settling in forms an obvious topic for a study of this kind. Far most children, as Bettelheim says, no day in a child's stay in a setting is more important than the first one. Apart from Bettelheim13 few writers have dealt with this at any length; indeed from most of the books describing even the most progressive work, one would not guess that there are any problems surrounding admission.
References
1. For instance Symposium. Plato. Aristophanes” speech. The
Courage to Be. Tillich (Fontana). p. 56.
2. The Child and the Family. D. Winnicott (Tavistock). ch. 12.
3. Childhood and After. Isaacs (Routledge). ch. XIII.
4. Frustration in Early Childhood. Directed by Dr. M.
Meierhofe.
5. Maternal Care and Mental Health. Bowlby (W.H.O.).
6. Infant Development. Gesell (Hamilton).
7. For instance The Child's Conception of the World. Piaget
(Routledge).
8. Deprivation and Education. Kellmer Pringle (Longmans). See
for instance pp. 190-1.
9. Public Health Papers 14: Deprivation of Maternal Care.
Ainsworth (W.H.O.). also Brief Separation. Robertson
(Tavistock).
10. Youth. Gesell and others (Hamilton), p.235.
11. Do We Still Need to Work in the Dark? (Shotton Hall 1965).
12. Challenges, Frustrations and Rewards (Shotton Hall 1964).
The Development of Self-awareness. C. Winnicott.
13. Love is not Enough. Bettelheim (Free Press, Illinois). ch.
2.
This feature: Lennhoff, F.G. (1967). The experience of separation. Being Sent Away: The Admission of Children to Residential Settings. Shrewsbury. Shotton Hall Publication.
