Protecting our children – how can we break the cycle?

“Protecting our children”, a three-part BBC documentary which ended last week, followed a handful of the complex and harrowing family cases which a team of Bristol social workers were working on over a period of six months. This was documentary TV at its best, getting behind the all too often lurid headlines which fail to present the complicated lives of both parents and children. The programmes showed the trauma of parents seemingly unable to meet the most basic needs of their children.

Throughout the three programmes, I saw parents with bewildered faces who seemed unable to move away from the chaos that was all about them and at any level provide the nurturing home lives which their young children, at this, the most formative stage of their lives – both needed and deserved. The programmes made for uncomfortable viewing, life in the raw and often seemingly hidden from view from much of society.

The parents included drug-addicted Marva and Shaun who had already had to face the consequences of having had three children taken from them. They were now being closely supervised by social worker Annie as she assessed whether they would be in a position to keep the baby which Marva was now carrying.  For both parents the chaos of their lives seemed to have become the consistency with which they felt most comfortable. When instructed by Annie as to the significant changes that would have to be made if they were to keep this baby once she was born, they seemed almost destined to fail.  Time and again we heard Shaun talk of the abuse and neglect he had suffered as a child, clearly wanting more for his own child but just as evidently not knowing how to stop the destructive cycle in which he had now become a key player.

The social workers remarked that their jobs were structured by the “chaotic” choices that their clients routinely made; Annie talked about the frequent feeling of “wanting to walk away” as clients such as Marva and Shaun became seemingly ever more self-destructive, with routine drugs overdoses, binge drinking and bouts of self-harm.  Perhaps not surprisingly after Marva’s baby was taken into care, Annie had to take two weeks off on sick leave; the toll of the emotional struggle of working tirelessly in the pursuit of a different outcome for all concerned was simply too gruelling.

What came across time and again was an absence of the emotional hard-wiring needed to parent effectively. Clearly these were parents who struggled with the practical skills to support their children, but perhaps more importantly they were often devoid of the emotional resilience and strength required to deal with the legacy of the destructive and brutalised lives which they themselves had been dealt as children.

With 10,000 children taken into care in 2011 in England alone (an increase of 12% on the previous year), what we witnessed in the three hours of programming was stark evidence that children who suffer from the effects of neglect and abuse will often later in life be destined to create new trauma for the next generation. If we are to move away from the high personal, social and ultimately economic cost of the crisis intervention approach which we saw these social workers delivering, surely our only choice as a society is to intervene more effectively at an earlier stage and call time on the bleak cycle of destruction that these families are facing.

Catherine Henderson is Business Development Manager for The Place2Be in Scotland.

A Tale of Two Cities

No writer captured the character of London more movingly than Charles Dickens. His work highlights the extremes of experience and the impact of wealth and poverty on children and families in London, as a reflection of the “two nations” of rich and poor.

Reflecting on the areas in which Place2Be schools are situated in 2012, I see how these extremes of wealth and poverty blight the lives of children and families in a way that Dickens would have recognised and deplored.

Children growing up in poverty are at increased risk of a wide range of adverse experiences and negative outcomes including poor health, overcrowding, educational disadvantage and disaffection and becoming victims of crime. If this coincides with being neglected or physically abused by parents, this disadvantage can be doubled as it further undermines long-term life chances.

Talking with staff last week at a South London school, I heard about a family of three children where the mother never gets up in time to prepare breakfast and the children come to school unfed and unable to engage with their school work. They find it difficult to pay attention and concentrate on school tasks.

Only three miles away, in an area where an ordinary terraced house costs £1.5 million, I worked with a teacher who has a very troubled boy in her class. The child is unusually anxious, “clingy” and desperate for attention. Both his parents work an average twelve-hour day. The child rarely sees them; he is looked after by a nanny who speaks virtually no English and, according to the school, seems completely uninterested in him. From a therapeutic perspective, the child’s behaviour conveys his desperate aloneness, lack of security and attachment and a constant need for attention because he is not receiving it at a crucial stage of his development.

The school reports that many of the children suffer when their nanny moves on to a new family. What may be very difficult for a busy working couple can be an emotional catastrophe for a child who has just lost their attachment figure. The boy I have described could be experiencing a form of “affluent neglect” which is not so dissimilar from the children whose mother is chaotic, drug using and unable to give her children breakfast in the morning.

Although The Place2Be cannot alter the material circumstances of a child’s life, our staff share an acute awareness of the importance of reparation and of offering the child an experience of a reliable adult who can provide a safe and secure place where they can be listened to and their experience heard and understood. As a result, children who are frequently  neglected are understood better by the school staff and supported rather than blamed for their behaviour. The teacher with the needy and clinging boy is seeking to provide him with more attention and security to help him with his anxiety.

I believe Dickens would have approved of The Place2Be and our attempts to understand the drama and to meet the dilemmas of children experiencing maltreatment and emotional neglect with compassion and accessible, practical support.

Stephen Adams-Langley, Qualified Psychotherapist & Regional Manager
The Place2Be

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Counselling, therapy, improving mental health. Call it what you will, it’s time to change our thinking

A few months ago I ran into a woman whose adult daughter had had a nervous breakdown. She told me in a matter-of-fact way that she had been afraid to leave her daughter alone as she struggled through this terrible experience, for fear that she might take her own life. Happily her daughter recovered.

When I explained I worked for The Place2Be and that we work in schools providing counselling for children and parents, her disparaging response was, “These days they have counselling for everything.”

At first I was stunned.

But then I realised that she felt embarrassed. Maybe she did not feel that this type of illness merited any kind of support and that it was something that should not be talked about.

Her words echoed in my head at the Centre for Social Justice’s event “Rethinking mental health in the twenty-first century”, headlined by Alistair Campbell, who is involved in the Time to Change campaign and who speaks from his own experience contending with mental illness. Also speaking was the Rt Hon Andy Burnham MP, who made his first major policy speech as Shadow Secretary of State for Health.

Campbell called mental health the last great taboo in this country. Not long ago, he reminded us, people used the term “The Big C” because they were too afraid to even say the word cancer out loud. He looks forward to the day when we can get to the same point with mental illness.

I hail from New York, where there are no stiff upper lips in sight and many people feel comfortable telling friends and colleagues that they are seeing a therapist.

It’s not easy to communicate about the topics we heard about yesterday. The term “mental health” sounds cold and clinical. It is giving way to “happiness” and “wellbeing” which may not fully capture what we want to convey, either.

No matter what your political persuasion, I would like to believe that everyone can subscribe to the goal we work towards at The Place2Be: that every child receives the support they need to become resourceful and resilient, hopeful, happy and healthy, in every sense of the word.

Olivia Leydenfrost, Head of Communications
The Place2Be, www.theplace2be.org.uk

Children are like mirrors of the truth – if you choose to look

It is incredibly humbling to work as a Volunteer Counsellor for The Place2Be, and the experiences I have had here have been life changing.

I remember my first day.  I turned up half an hour early and watched them, tiny wee tots some of them, drifting in like leaves over the patch of waste ground in front of the car park with their 500ml bottles of Iron Bru and a packet of crisps.  I toured the school and observed the classroom banter and bravado, and then met my first child and took him to ‘the room’.

The Place2Be playroom is a very special place.  Sometimes it feels like a resting place, sometimes a platform for imagination to take flight, or sometimes it can feel quite womb-like.  Someone more eloquent than I once said ‘therapy is a dress rehearsal for life’.  I agree with this and The Place2Be room is a place where dramas and emotions can be safely played out, new types of relationship can be experienced – even new ways of being can be tried on like a new outfit!

For my first child, it was a place to grow stronger, build resilience, and have the fortitude to step back into their life.  His drama played out though decreasing need for guidance and help during play.  Over the weeks he took control of what the session would be about and grew more dynamic and confident in what he was doing.  He was happy, he was sad, he could be cheeky, or vulnerable, but all of it was him, and by the end he knew that that was more than good enough.  I once asked him why he liked coming to see me and he said ‘cos you understand me and I think I understand you a little bit too’.  If you believe, as I do, that the relationship is the therapy, that one sentence was worth its weight in gold.  It was incredibly moving.  Towards the end of our time together, he built a Lego structure with a really strong reinforced roof.  He tested it by pressing down with his hand and decided it was strong enough.  ‘I’ve put all these extra bits underneath now.  It’s not going to fall down.’  It felt like he was ready to go back to his life again and I was happy to let him go.

I always hold this quote in my mind – ‘the three main narcissistic traps a therapist can fall in to is to think that they can ‘know all, love all, heal all’.  I’m not the wizard of Oz.  I’m not here to wave a magic wand and make these children’s lives better.  But, if I’m doing my job properly, maybe a little bit of that amazing Place2Be room will get lodged in their heart, and wherever my Place2Be kids go, whatever the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune may throw at them, they’ll have their own Place2Be room inside.

Lisa works as a Volunteer Counsellor in our Edinburgh Hub.

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Fireworks and foundations

Impressive firework displays heralded the beginning of 2012. As I rang in the New Year with my children and grandchildren, big and small, I enjoyed seeing and hearing the delight shown by adults and children alike as we all stayed up well past our bedtimes.

While each of us was very fortunate, feeling safe and secure, contributing to a special family experience that is already a cherished, shared memory, I observed the fragile, curious minds of the children. Each of them needed an individual response to their particular reaction. Each had loving adults on hand to give them that attention and care.

Children need appropriate love, boundaries, structure, discipline and guidance but they also need to understand and make sense of the world around them. Adults are the ones who need to provide context and containment.

The results of the Prince’s Trust Youth Index 2012 confirm that structure and stability form the cornerstones of children’s worlds. Those with firm foundations are more likely to do better at school. Those who do worse at school are more likely to suffer from low self esteem. Lack of achievement and lack of self confidence hamper children’s prospects. Without the appropriate support, the trajectory is downwards, not up.

While we look forward to celebrating the Olympics and the Diamond Jubilee in the year that is still new, 2012 looks set to be a very challenging one at home and abroad. It’s hard enough for adults to come to terms with our reality, let alone children. It’s up to us as adults to provide the bedrock of security and consistency that children so desperately need – let us all resolve to do our utmost to do so.

One can only hope that the happy memories we help create for our children remain in their minds’ eyes, helping to provide them with the strength, courage, resilience and determination to strive through the challenging times.

So my message to us all for 2012 is try to be aware of the impact of our behaviour and the consequences on those around us.  Let’s try our hardest to be there for those children and families who need our support.

Benita Refson OBE, Chief Executive, The Place2Be

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Surviving Christmas

So, you’re standing in yet another endless queue carrying too many plastic shopping bags printed with Santa, Holly, Choirboys and Reindeers. The bags are full up with what you hope will be the heart’s desires of friends and families. You may even be filled up yourself – with warm feelings about this season of goodwill of course, but maybe also with a small sense of your own generosity and thoughtfulness. Still the queue is long, and as you wait the odd doubt creeps in about those gifts you’re buying.

You remember that last year your wife was less than enthusiastic about that CD of Led Zeppelin’s re-mastered hits. After all, she hadn’t really wanted it the year before either. And what about the way your children have been pleading for an X-Box or an iPad 2. All you’ve been thinking is that a budget of £30 is three times more generous than anything you got as a child. Giving is fraught.

But how much more fraught for those children we see at The Place2Be. Over the year a number of “looked after and accommodated” children are referred to us for 1:1 counselling. “Looked after” is sometimes a euphemism for it’s exact opposite. One eight year old boy, originally from a very chaotic and neglectful home, had already had four “placements” with different foster families. This latest was with warm loving foster parents, who already had two children a little older than him. They had thought about Christmas carefully, selecting the right presents, keeping it fair, striking what they thought were the right notes – of consideration, inclusiveness and celebration. To everyone’s dismay, including the little boy’s, it was a disaster. Unable to receive their love, he kicked out – destroying his presents and others, as well as any sense of a happy family Christmas.  How difficult it would have been for them to anticipate that their kindness might actually evoke all those experiences of unkindness he had already suffered.

The Place2Be’s role in such a situation was to work with both the foster parents and the child to help them repair this damage, and make sense of it in terms of the child’s previous experience. Giving is fraught. It nearly always stands in as a symbol for what we have not been given. And the more generous the gift, sometimes the more strongly a sense of disappointment and the need for compensation follows in its train – for both the giver and the receiver. How much more amplified will this be for a child who hasn’t even received the basics yet?

My top tip for Christmas? Remind everyone around you that this is not a festival of consumerism.  (Easier said than done, I know. I didn’t leave my carrier bags on the shop floor and walk away. If I had, it wouldn’t have only been the turkey that got roasted.) As festivals go, Christmas probably has quite a lot in common with other festivals of light, like Chanukah or Diwali. For us in the north particularly, it can be about bringing light – new life – into a period of darkness, as much as it is about giving. It is a symbolic festival, open to a range of positive interpretations. Giving is fraught because while gifts are symbolic, we are not always clear what we mean by them. If I spend more on you, does that mean that I love you more for instance? (Duh! Well, obviously!).

Worst than that, objects of desire have their own momentum. The iPad2 leads inevitably to the iPad 3 or 4. It is hardly in the interests of most businesses to do more than temporarily satisfy desires, or fill those gaps in our lives. Providing a more lasting sort of satisfaction is a much deeper and subtler business – the business of building and valuing relationships. Perhaps the “looked after” child I mentioned is telling us that as he kicks off. “This is not the right thing,” he’s saying. “We need to find another way to build relationships between us.”

As we all know, there are other ways. And perhaps this fact is a small example of light in the winter darkness. Happy Christmas – oh, and good luck with explaining all that to your kids!

Jonathan Wood, National Manager Scotland, The Place2Be

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Look out folks. It’s Holiday Time

Look out folks. It’s Holiday Time. The Big One. The Works. Happy Buy Buy Now Time. It’s Christmas.

No matter what our religion, the air fills up with Christmas trees, Father Christmases, chestnuts roasting on open fires, jingle bells and Bing (who?) singing “I’m dreaming of a White Christmas”.

So have a Happy Christmas. Time to pull up the stumps at work and wade off into the merriments of happy families.

Well, what happens? How does it work out? How happy can we be? Of course we all have a different take on it. Maybe for most of us, we more or less rise to the occasion. We pick up the spirit of the thing, enjoy our family gatherings, tuck into the turkey and Brussels sprouts, kiss under the mistletoe and exchange all our gifts with whoops of laughter and good tidings.

But, oh dear, it’s not quite like that for some of us, is it?  Many of us just simply don’t chime in so readily with all of these seasonal delights.  Some of us dread the sheer jolliness of it all. Some get ill at the mere thought of it. Some can’t bear the contortions of our families. And some can’t face the loneliness in the midst of such a parade of festive togetherness.

And some of us, of course, just can’t afford it. We just can’t – in a way that those of us who have the dosh can’t imagine. We really can’t reach those shiny things to sparkle our children’s eyes – and the more we stretch, the more we strain and the more we wait for the payback punishment later.

So what’s in a holiday? A time of rest and recreation and renewal?  Or a time of strife and stress and plain, drawn-out, knackering exhaustion?

We wish – and what’s wrong with a wish? – more of the first, for the more of us all…

Peter Wilson, Consultant Child Psychotherapist and Clinical Adviser
The Place2Be

Comfort in these cold times

by Benita Refson OBE

I look around my bedroom: it’s warm and cosy, the fire is on, it’s cold outside.  Rita our cockerpoo is jumping on the bed, her canine sister Mia, a loving labradoodle, isn’t allowed the same privileges (yes, favoritism exists in the canine world!) but what they are saying is clear: they want their treats.

Then my mind wanders sharply to the reality of the lives of the children in the schools and communities where we work. The comfort and safety of that room is so often not replicated. The noises are often those of shouting and screaming adults, not dogs barking in excitement.  The treats are far and few between and neglect and hunger are often constants. Schools offer free meals because their families don’t have the means to provide them.

Is this only part of our reality and one we can avoid looking at because it is not part of our lives? Indeed we cannot ignore what we see and hear. These children are 100% of our future and they deserve our time and support and understanding. They are failing at school because the noises in their wounded hearts and minds are louder than the teachers’ words. Their teachers try their hardest to fulfill their teaching responsibilities but they too need support in these overwhelmingly tough environments.

Their parents also deserve us being there for them, not harsh judgments about what they should be doing for or with their children. So often they are struggling with their own daily challenges: drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, all forms of self harm and anger, and increasingly, unemployment. Communities that have struggled to find their own identity for so many generations are once again being hit by factory closures like Alcan in Ashington, Northumberland where 500 jobs will be lost with no alternatives.

Let us just consider the impact on the emotional security of the children and their families. It is nothing like the comfort of my bedroom.

Can something be done to support that much bantered term “social mobility”? Can children and young adults really see the future with a sense of hope and aspiration?  Not if we don’t provide safe listening and thinking space in schools, offering time and counselling so that they can manage the things they cannot change but have the confidence to hope for greater things for their future.

For 17 years, my passion for the work we do at Place2Be has done nothing but increase as we hear the often heart-wrenching stories like the child of seven who lost her mother, the child of ten who has been diagnosed with scoliosis, the many children who witness domestic violence, the child of nine who is scratching herself because that is the only way she can manage her pain.  We hear that our living conditions in 2015 will be the same as those in 2002 but we also hear that by 2020 depression will be the second largest disability in the world. Should we lie down on a comfortable bed and just accept these facts? Or should we get out of our comfort zone and hear the reality of the children’s lives on a daily basis, knowing that we can and do make a difference? Children make academic progress when they have been with Place2Be and have some of their worries removed. They find a way of coping with what often seems too big for any lesser human being like me to understand.  Let’s not give up on them because the problem is getting too large and the economy too small. The cost of not addressing the mental health of children and their parents is far too great and we cannot afford that.

Benita Refson OBE, Chief Executive

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