The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
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A computer picture is made up of many thousands of pixels (dots). When a computer picture does not have enough "information" it has to get by with fewer pixels – and the result is rougher and incomplete. We describe such a picture as "pixelated".
And it's not just their pictures – kids can be like this also. A good experience of home (which is not necessarily a synonym for a trouble-free experience of home) is filled with millions of interactions and communications from which children get a rich picture of what it is to be human, what it is to be feminine, what it is to be masculine ...
But probably most of the kids who come into our programs didn't get this. They have had parents who were "absent" in one way or another for much of the time – parents who have left the family or who have died, parents who have had to be at work or away from home for extended periods, parents who have been preoccupied or frustrated or embittered – and the youngsters have received very limited and fragmentary identity and sex-role modelling. And as a result, their self-image, their identity and their personal aspirations are based on much less substantial and more superficial data – "pixelated" – making their next developmental stage of risk and commitment very vulnerable.
Our most immediately useful and generous gift to the kids we work with is the richest possible interchange of images and ideas of who they are and who we are, so that the gaps in their experience are filled in, resulting in richer – less "pixelated" – pictures of themselves as they are now and as they might be in the future.
We can start this within the next few minutes, by reflecting back to them (far more often and in far more detail) who we see in them ... I remember that you don't like ... I think you may be interested in ... You have an interesting way of ... I see you often choose ... I hear that you ... Tell me more about this idea of yours that ... You're a fan of ... How come you support this or that sports team ... Such personalised observations add important layers to their dangerously thin and defended self structures. These are acknowledgements and affirmations, not value judgements, adding self-confidence and self-esteem which will be real strengths as they go out into their young lives.
Maybe it's another way of saying that we "pay attention" to them. And (dare I say this, given all the recent talk about boundaries and self-disclosure?) the more that we offer demonstrations of who we are as ordinary men and women, the more we fill out for them the denser and real images they need in order to pick their own way forward.
Unpixelate them.
