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Social competence: Learning formality and informalityMany, many years ago, R.A. Harris, who was Headmaster of Moorland House, a school for troubled children in Yorkshire, wrote distressingly of a boy who had been encouraged to write home.
The boy started his letter: "Dear Sir or Madam." When asked about this, the boy explained that he didn’t really know who would be at the house when his letter arrived, or even whether they were directly related to him. The boy had been moved from placement to placement so often that he really didn’t understand who his real parents or where his real home might be.
In our work we often quote the old platitude that troubled kids have to unlearn much of their behaviour before we can teach them better. We forget how many youngsters come to us with great gaps in their lives of things they didn’t ever learn. The touching formality of the boy in our story, writing home to "Dear Sir or Madam," illustrates a child who didn’t learn 'home' and didn’t learn 'Mom' or 'Dad' – neither the myriad and complex nuances of home and family which comprise the building blocks of a nine-year-old’s most rudimentary social competency: When it’s OK to laugh or cry or remain silent; how to have fun and how to apply oneself to a task; how to discriminate between busy, less accessible parents (for example when there are visitors or family business being done) and parents as friends when we’re all lying around and playing on the sitting room floor; when to "let go" and when to practise politeness; and so on.
While we may be aiming for "good behaviour", we realise that there is no such thing. Any behaviour may be good behaviour, depending on the circs. And kids growing up in reasonable homes with Moms and Dads learn to comfortably interpret the circs.
In our practice today, we don’t think of unlearning behaviour (some of it may be culturally and familially deeply significant) but of things the youngsters didn’t learn. We enrich their environment by exposing them to a diversity of situations and behaviours so that they lose their hesitancy and awkwardness and relax into a social milieu which they come to understand and where they can make their own reasonable decisions about how to behave. And in all this we are never judges or critics; only teachers and companions.
