What is happening?  I sat at the park the other day and watched a child around eight years old cry and hit his mother, and her reaction was to rub his back.  I understand that I do not know their story, but I see this more and more.  Children are acting out, crying and assaulting people without consequences. I know it is not that simple.  I work in mental health.

I remember once asking a colleague about a student we were working with.  He started destroying the classroom because he was asked to put his hand up rather than yell out. Everyone evacuated the class to the hall, teachers and all.  They abandoned this child in the class, leaving him to flounder. I entered the class, sat on the floor with him in silence and waited. I figured he would eventually either share his feelings verbally or act out.  He looked up, surprised I was there and said, “They hate me.” I explained that is not the case, but when he breaks things, it makes them feel sad, just like he feels now. Did I change his behaviour? Probably not.  Did he do it again? Probably. Did everyone evacuate the class and abandon him when it happened again? Almost definitely.  Did anyone go in and sit with him? Highly unlikely.  This makes me sad, not just for the child but for the future of our education system.

I say that it is doubtful that anything changed for that and many other students because I was reprimanded for going into the class. I questioned this reaction to what I did with “How do we teach a child to come out of crisis from the hall?”. The response I got was that this was not a therapeutic environment, and we needed to be happy he was letting us on the bus.  In other words, he is allowing us on the bus although he is steering it. So, we should let him destroy the class when he dislikes something or does not go his way.  They believed that he would eventually stop, but why would he stop this behaviour was effectively serving a purpose. I was dumbfounded; I explained that they were setting a precedent and that his reasons for these outbursts would become more trivial because it got him what he wanted. They disagreed; their one-day PD Day workshop told them otherwise.  I had twenty years working in mental health at this point. What did I know?   Frustrated and unable to just shelf my knowledge and defer to the one-day workshops, I quickly left that job to focus on places I could make a difference.

I understand children do generally not act out in a bubble.  There is almost always a reason for it, and it is not for me to judge.  What concerns me is that the world seems to be afraid of setting limits, hurting feelings, or correcting behaviour.  I hear people say their child or student does not want to talk about what is causing them to behave the way they are, or they are just expressing their frustration. How do we address the issues if we are unaware of the problems? How do we teach children to cope, process feelings and communicate? What happens when they encounter true adversity later in life?  As an adult, I can tell you that the adversity I face daily is significantly more difficult to cope with than my childhood adversity, and those challenges continue to affect me as an adult.  I was also raised in the 1970s when the approach to parenting was sink or swim, survival of the fittest compared to parenting now.

This rant-like post expresses my frustration at the lack of accountability and coping skills we teach kids. We must let kids fail, teach them to deal with adversity and toughen up. That is how they learn.  What happens when we are gone if we hold their hand, fight their battles, and remove their voices?  They then become overwhelmed and afraid. The person others step on to get ahead.  Nobody wants that for their child, but that I fear is what will happen.  The scary part is that we have a whole generation of kids with helicopter parents who have failed to prepare them for the real world.

I am far from a perfect parent, and much to the chagrin of many of my friends, I have exposed my children to real life from an early age. Take care of your siblings, even when they annoy you, and I do not care if it’s inconvenient.  They came to funerals regardless of their age.  When our dog was put down, they were there.  If they wanted to try out for rep sports, they did, and if they made it great, if not, better luck next time.  They learnt life lessons.  They knew that death was a part of life. They learnt family first always. They discovered that the coach’s kid, although not better, sometimes gets to be the catcher.  They know that hard work is essential and that if you gave 100%, be proud because there is nothing else you could have done.