Listen to this
Fritz Redl was the clinical director of Pioneer House, the first residential treatment program for troubled children in the United States in 1946. In his classic text, When We Deal with Children (1966), Redl identified toleration as one of five strategies for handling challenging behavior. Redl posited that to have any success at all, child and youth care providers who work with troubled youngsters must develop tolerance of a wide array of frightening, disgusting, offensive, and painful behaviors.
Redl stated that to tolerate a challenging behavior is to accept it temporarily. This is an appropriate strategy when youth cannot control all their behavior all the time, when it will take time for child and youth care workers to eliminate the cause of the behavior, or when management techniques cannot handle the behavior. When adults tolerate youngsters’ challenging behavior, they allow them to misbehave, to give up, to be verbally aggressive, to refuse to take part in group activities, to tantrum, and so on, because the adult knows the youth cannot help themselves for that moment. Adults tolerate the behavior temporarily until the behavior can be managed or changed.
Among the most common reasons cited by Redl for tolerating behavior are the following.
Redl cautioned, however, against tolerating behavior that is self-defeating, unfair, disruptive, contagious, harmful, or dangerous.
Redl differentiated between tolerance and permissiveness. They are not the same thing. Tolerance is understanding and accepting that a youth is doing the best they can in a given situation at a given moment even though they may fall short of where they should be. Tolerance is understanding and accepting that things may look different from the youth’s point of view. Tolerance is understanding and accepting that one’s own perspective on things is necessarily limited by one’s own self-oriented subjective perspective, and the full objective picture may be much different. Thus, it is possible to be tolerant of a youth who misbehaves without condoning their behavior while still upholding the need for change.
So how does one become tolerant and accepting of young people and their behavior? Influenced by Redl’s teachings, Torey Hayden and I constructed a relationship-driven classroom model (Marlowe & Hayden, 2013) incorporating our experiences as teachers of at-risk and troubled youth, our teaching and treatment environment was designed on the following concepts crucial in developing tolerance. While the setting in this instance was the school, the concepts apply to any milieu setting.
Self-awareness is the ability to recognize and understand our own thoughts and emotions, and to know how they influence our actions. It involves stepping back to reflect on what we are thinking and feeling, and to understand why we behave the way we do. Those skilled in self-awareness can pause before reacting and then choose how they will respond.
Redl stated that self-awareness was key for succeeding with troubled children and youth. It involves understanding what we feel and think amid conflict and how our traits, temperament, and experiences condition us to respond to select behaviors in specific ways. What happens to us emotionally in the process of interacting with troubled youngsters is the critical factor in determining our effectiveness (cited in Long, 1991, p.44).
Self-awareness is important to learning to be tolerant because it enables us to maintain our behavior as a conscious action rather than a reaction to what the youth is doing. It allows us to monitor our own behavior and make the almost continuous small adjustments necessary to discourage inappropriate behaviors and encourage appropriate ones.
Developing tolerance is predicated upon not feeling personally threatened by directed inappropriate behavior (e.g., get the fuck away from me, you asshole. Do you hear me?) Self-awareness allows us to step back and not take misbehavior personally (as most of life is not personal). Chances are the reacting young person doesn’t feel personally about us at all; we just happened to be in the way. Thus, we shouldn’t feel the need to retaliate, to intimidate, to show who is boss. We don’t need to prove it, and if we are proving it, all we are really playing is one-upmanship.
Choose Objectivity
In a relationship-driven approach, objectivity is used in conjunction with its opposite, subjectivity. Objectivity refers to the ability to let go of the self-oriented point of view and to see things from either the perspective of the child or from a general perspective external to ourselves. In cultivating objectivity, we recognize three things: that our own perspective is limited; that the child also has a limited perspective, which will be unique to them and different from ours, due to their different life experiences and circumstances; and that there is always a bigger picture that is both outside these individual perspectives and inclusive of them.
One reason objectivity is important to learning to be tolerant is because it helps us recognize that our own perspective on a situation is always limited. It reminds us to consider how the young person sees things and how their own experiences influence what they are doing.
A second reason objectivity is important to learning to be tolerant is because it helps us remember that there is a bigger picture. We are hard-wired to look at the world in a way that puts our thoughts and our motivations on center stage. Objectivity helps us realize that what can feel very important or very major is only part of a bigger world.
Separate the Person from their Actions
To relate in a warm and tolerant manner, we must accept that each child is ultimately separate from their actions. It is crucial to understand this distinction between who we are and what we do. We cannot change who we are. We can change what we do.
We cannot change our birth date, the circumstances in which we were born, who our parents are, our ethnicity, the genes we were given, the disabilities we have to cope with, and what our society or neighborhood is like. Those factors, among others, make us who we are from birth to death. Actions and thoughts, however, are different; they can change. So, the focus of change is always on what we do and what we think.
Understanding this concept is important to tolerance because it helps us understand that we should unambiguously like the child most of the time. This doesn’t mean accepting everything the child does but making it clear that the child is acceptable. We do this by focusing on the child, showing an interest in the child, paying attention, being fully present, and genuinely listening to them.
Embrace Commonality
Commonality simply means what we all have in common. While we are aware of our individual subjective realities, experiences, and differences, we must also acknowledge that we share the same basic humanity, no matter how different we may appear from the outside. We all experience fear, joy, pleasure, anger, and discouragement. We all experience pain, tiredness, arousal, hunger, illness. At our core, we all are much more alike than different.
I recall being asked by a group of fellow teachers how different it must be to teach children in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Kentucky having previously taught children in an industrial chemical neighborhood inner city Indianapolis. “It’s not very different, not really,” I replied, “Kids are kids are kids. They all share the same human traits and human needs despite their differences whether it be skin color, the way they speak, or cultural background. Their differences are superficial.”
A lack of understanding of commonality can cause us to be intolerant and judgmental. It is one of the major underpinnings of prejudice and contributes directly to racism, bigotry, gender, transgender, and sexual orientation discrimination, religious fanaticism, hate crimes, and similar problems. Embracing commonality lets us realize that the youngster, however different, bad, or repugnant, is just like us under the skin. Commonality helps us understand the youth is not a beast or inhuman or unreachable but simply doesn’t know how to be different at this time and place. And if we connect with this common ground, we have a chance of bringing about change.
No One Chooses to Be Unhappy
No kid wakes up in the morning and says, “Hey, I think I will be depressed and angry today.” No kid says, “Wow, what a fun place to have a panic attack. I think I will have one in this overcrowded group home at bedtime.” No one chooses unhappiness. So, if a youth continues to do something that makes them or everyone else unhappy, it is safe to assume the youth doesn’t know how to do differently. If they did, they would because unhappiness is a bummer.
Everything we do, no matter how odd or misguided, is done because we think consciously or unconsciously that it will lead to our feeling happier. Youth engaging in difficult or destructive behavior do so in the erroneous belief that this will relieve their unhappiness. They are not trying to be unhappy. They are trying to be happy but going about it in unproductive ways, because – for whatever reason – they are simply not able to do differently at this point in time. A misbehaving youth simply hasn’t come up with a more effective way to be happy.
Understanding this is important to tolerance because it helps us realize that however annoying or incomprehensible a youth’s behavior seems to us, they simply haven’t learned how to do differently. The appropriate response from those who do is to teach them how.
Personal Change is Very Difficult
Changing ingrained personal behavior is extremely hard to do in large part because we are creatures of habit. We are hardwired to do things as we’ve always done them. Changing our behavior is hard for everyone and it seldom happens overnight. It takes a lot of focused work and patience.
Redl coined the term learner’s leeway to denote a child’s need to be allowed to make mistakes while learning new behaviors. While not all efforts will be successful, unsuccessful efforts are not invalid, wrong, or useless. Quite often we learn more from our failures than our successes, but this only happens in a climate where failure is not a source of humiliation, distress, or punishment.
A tolerant adult is open to approximation. It usually takes several efforts or approximations before a new behavior is mastered. Understanding this is important to tolerance because it helps us realize that a child may genuinely want to change their behavior, but because they are not yet adept, they initially fall short of the desired behavior. It is important to recognize and encourage these approximations for what they are, rather than as failures to complete the behavior perfectly.
We should not ignore backslides, however. This encourages the youth to believe they got away with it, so it really doesn’t matter how they respond, or else we simply don’t care how they are doing. Instead, point out slip ups matter-of-factly; then encourage the young person to get back on track immediately.
Approximations, slip ups, backslides, and failures are part of the process, not the outcome. Understanding this is important to tolerance because in an age of instant gratification, many of us want things quickly, whereas in the real world it is normal for people to slip up or fail many times before achieving their goal. A tolerant adult understands that this does not mean change is impossible. It simply means the young person hasn’t gotten there yet.
A Closing Note
Tolerance is a crucial aspect of relationship forming with troubled children and youth. We all tend to only form relationships with people who are tolerant and accepting of us just as we are. Thus, we want to communicate to young people that who they are right now is sufficient for us to form a relationship with them. They are okay just as they are. This is necessary for the youngster to find it worth taking a risk to change. Redl and David Wineman (1957) provided a prologue to this viewpoint when summarizing their residential treatment program message to their children: “We like you; we take you the way you are, but of course in the long range we would like you to change” (p. 301).
References
Long, N.J. (1991). What Fritz Redl taught me about aggression: Understanding the dynamics of aggression and counter aggression in students and staff. In W.C. Morse (Ed.), Crisis intervention in residential treatment: The clinical innovations of Fritz Redl (pp. 43-55). The Haworth Press.
Marlowe, M.J., & Hayden, T. (2013). Teaching children who are hard to reach: Relationship-driven classroom practice. Corwin. DOI:10.4135/9781483387857.
Redl. F. (1966). When we deal with children. The Free Press.
Redl, F. & Wineman, D. (1957). The aggressive child. The Free Press.
