Here come the children!

Brian Gannon

The first children were due home in an hour. A weary feeling went through Amy Nash as she wondered how best to use the hour. A short nap? No, she always felt particularly waspish after a day-time sleep. She could read a little in the blessed silence of the empty cottage.

How she longed for this period of silence and time to herself at the start of the afternoon.

Mornings were always busy with domestic matters, staff meetings, supervision, and so on. But now she sighed with satisfaction at the peace. The short-lived peace. Before long there would be the first shouts (why did they always have to be so loud?) as sounds of conversation and argument and teasing came thorough the hedge, across the lawn and into the cottage.

Suddenly the tidy rooms and ordered passages would get messed up. Off would come the school clothes (and bits of grass and inexplicable mess with them) and things would get dumped here and there. The children would come out of their rooms and into the common areas, the kitchen, the lounge. The fridge would be opened by the impatient and hungry ones who were unwilling to wait for lunch ...

Lunch! Always noisy. Always messy, with bread-crumbs, spilt tea, smears of jam and the surly unwillingness of the kids to clean up after them. Amy knew that she would get tetchy with them. She even had the feeling that they increasingly provoked this response in her “as if they knew exactly which buttons to press to irritate her.

It was getting even worse lately: she felt that the group as a whole was unco-operative and even a little hostile towards her. Someone would squabble, spill something or lose a jersey, and the whole group seemed to turn to Amy with a look which challenged: 'Lets see what you are going to do about that!” It felt as though none of the children were 'on her side' to support her in such frustrations.

There was a yell from the front lawn. Then another. Amy felt a knot of foreboding tighten inside her. She had wasted her precious hour. The children were coming home.

Evaluation
1. Many child care workers will recognise something uncomfortably familiar in Amy’s feelings. Groups of children living and growing up together do tend to be rowdy, excited and competitive. They do mess up the place and spill things. Troubled kids test their boundaries more than others, and do have that further edge of provocation or destructiveness which jars all the more; needy kids whine and squabble more. But for most of us, these things “go with the territory', and we learn how to live with them “and even learn how to use them productively in our work. What could be behind Amy’s difficulty?

2. There is amongst all who work with children (child care workers, nurses, teachers, youth leaders and certainly parents) the very common malady which has been called “child weariness”. Growing children are constantly making demands on the adults around them: physical, mental and emotional demands. We are able to say to a colleague or to a spouse: “Just give me an hour to myself; I need a bit of a breather, and then I can carry on.” But children can’t be bought off so easily, still less groups of difficult children.

Child care workers learn that the intense interactions during the time they spend with groups of children are very tiring, and that they need to pace themselves carefully. They do this by varying the duration, the nature and the composition of the groups they work with. For example, after a half-an-hour alone with a hurting child, a child care worker will welcome a more robust session of team games with a larger group, and could then handle a smaller group doing creative work. In the absence of such daily planning, staff can get into a tedious and meaningless cycle, and supervisors need to help build good rhythm into care workers' days.

3. More seriously, Amy could be burned out. Sustained experiences of hard, tiring, abusive, overloaded and unrewarded work with children, often tip the scales to the point where a child care worker loses heart. Then, with depleted energies, resourcefulness and hope, the child care worker becomes defensive and self-protective, fuelling a spiral of unmet needs (both of worker and children), of disappointments and hurt. So Amy may be burned out, and this is something for which she and her employer must take joint responsibility.

4. But burn-out is not terminal. A rest, another look at aims, expectations and working styles, and we can be as good as our new resolutions. Could it be that Amy’s real problem is that she actually doesn’t like children or like working with children? This sounds odd for someone in her position, but it can happen. A common danger is that new child care workers come into the field with simplistic but firmly held beliefs on the lines of “What today's children need is ..." or “The best way of dealing with children is ...'" – and when the recipe doesn’t work (as none of these recipes do) it is easy to blame the kids or to find something wrong with the job or the organisation. Such folk are not going to be happy in child care work. They came into the work for the wrong reasons: perhaps because of a social principle, or because of some moral ideal or an educational belief or method “but they are certainly not here because of the children.

5. Certainly parents go through times when they, too, have “had enough” of their own children, when they long for some “time out”. But these are just changes in the weather; while the climate is one in which the children are loved – and they know it.

6. Amy is not looking forward to being with children today – and today is therefore not going to be profitable for her or the children. Child care only “works” when the grown-ups like being with kids, and when they in turn are open to whatever the kids will bring into the relationship. Of course, it could be simply that Amy is not well today, or that she is tired today, and that tomorrow will be better. But if it is more than this, Amy really does have to examine her motives and her expectations in child care work – certainly for her own sake – but mostly for the sake of the children.