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Listen
It usually starts off with our seeing kids as problems. Someone is experiencing them as a nuisance, as bullies, smoking up, failing at school, running with a gang, staying out, being hostile, aloof, doing drugs or alcohol, breaking and entering ... We are seduced into thinking that they simply need fixing, or worse, that we can fix them. So we strike at the presenting problem (usually along with its aura of attitude, reason, blame) and hit a blank wall. And, if we persevere enough to keep some sort of (however inadequate) dialogue going, soon enough the youth will tell us "You don’t understand."
That is a good point to go back and start again.
We realise that we have come into this situation with a simplistic agenda: get the youngster to shape up. But he or she has come with a decidedly transverse agenda: understand. Which is to say, help me to understand, to get my head right, to make sense of all this hitting out, goofing off, running away.
We make the classic error of attacking the signs
of youths’ struggle to keep up with their developmental and socialisation
timetables – instead of focussing on the struggle.
We say to the boy with an atrophied leg: "I insist that you stand up
straight and walk properly!" He looks back at us and says: "You don’t
understand."
For the child with the physical problem we do understand that we are in for a long regimen of good nutrition and exercise, of physical and occupational therapy, of mechanical and even surgical treatment – and also the probability that he will never walk entirely comfortably.
Just so with the kid who is "a problem" – the long walk of listening and understanding, of reframing and reinterpreting past experiences, of exploring family and community contexts, of providing new stimulation, support, learning, encouragement ...
It was Karen VanderVen (1) who drew our attention to
adults’ tendency to dismiss and be irritated by young people’s
"attention-seeking behaviour" – rather than simply to respond with
attention! A clear case of clashing agendas. In our practice today we
know that all the potential energy in our interactions is wasted on
divergent agendas, and that both we and the kids will be more frustrated and
further apart at the end of the day. Maybe with a different approach tonight
there will be no visible improvement in behaviour, but at least one youth
may feel that there is a possibility that he might be heard and, in
time, understood. That's a breakthrough.
1.
https://www.cyc-net.org/CYC-Online
/cycol-0202-karen.html
