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Listen to this
I am offering a tin of biscuits around at tea. My grand-daughter, all two-and-a-half years of her, upbraids me: "Grandpa, you must hold your cup with both hands."
"Why should I do that?" I ask.
"Because if you walk around with your tea in one hand you’ll spill it and it will make a mess."
She has been taught well. God knows she has another fifteen years of socialisation ahead of her (if indeed that ever stops) but the expectations of our world are often so unhelpfully expressed that it’s a delight to find it well done.
We adults do tend to take short cuts to convey our expectations. "Don’t touch that." "Put that down." Even with older kids we try to get away with these clipped robotic instructions. "Turn that down." "You're not going out in that." "Pick that up."
It’s more complex than that.
The process of socialisation has less to do with submission to the rules of society than with learning to manage as a member of our society. In our role as adults we can never succeed in programming every possible action and response into our children and youth, simply because we can never foresee the countless eventualities which may arise in their lives. Rather, we try to build within them their own processes for understanding society and for making personal choices and decisions in relation to it.
Consider some of the reasons we offer when children ask why they should obey us. "Because I say so." "You'll go to your room." "Because I’m your mother." "Don’t you dare ask me why!" Any self-respecting kid will try to decode such baffling riddles – and will either recognise the threat for what it is or be left uncomprehending and subdued.
Children and youth who come into care have often experienced limited communication, therefore limited language, and thus limited explanation about themselves and the world. The whole phenomenon of "irrational beliefs" arises from young people’s attempts to draw conclusions from insufficient or erroneous data, and so they come to believe that adults cannot be trusted, that the only way to safety and happiness is to comply with others’ demands, or that "I am a bad person" ... (See Webber)
With such young people, most of all, more is expected of us when we communicate. Mere commands to comply do nothing for them – except worsen the misconceptions upon which they are tragically trying to construct themselves and their worlds.
Consider again my lesson from my grand-daughter. Do this (hold your cup with both hands), for this reason (otherwise you’ll spill your tea), to avoid this natural consequence (there’ll be a mess). I may question her reading of my neuromuscular co-ordination, but the sequence which she sketches is irrefutable.
In our practice today we know ourselves to be more than controllers. We are teachers and explainers, and purveyors of information and experiences which enhance the capacity of kids to make choices and decisions in their lives, alone, with their families or with society at large.
