Nurturing Safety

TRANSCRIPTION

Nurturing Safety

I want to talk about how children feel safe or not safe, and there’s a level of physical safety that children need to experience – locked gates, pool covers -, but there’s another element to it. It’s whether it’s ‘we are safe or unsafe’, it’s whether we feel safe or we don’t feel safe.

That’s a massive component for all children, but even more so for those who are struggling and sit in the remedial or special needs space. Because there’s reduced capacity at many levels, when we feel unsafe, you can imagine what the body does if you’ve done any recent reading on the nervous system and the fight-or-flight response. When we don’t feel safe, our brains stop thinking because we stop learning. If you speak to any occupational therapist, they’ll talk about children who are in an anxious state, cannot learn. End of story.

Part of that anxiety is ‘Does the child feel safe?’ Safety comes from predictability and the ability to handle things in your environment, including change. One of the significant components of safety for children is understanding where they’re coming from and understanding how you’re moving them from one environment to another.

If we talk about going to school, specifically going to school rather than going home from school, because your home environment is probably the safest place a child will be and feel, but if you move from home out of the home where they’re coming from mom and dad as their biggest safety net and the predictability of their home is the biggest safety net.

Then we can talk about whether the home is predictable, because if it isn’t, it doesn’t feel safe anymore. But let’s assume, on some level, the home is predictable and safe, that mom and dad are there, and that if they stub their toe, mom comes running. Then you move into the school environment; at the worst, it’s a big, very academic school. Teachers don’t feel that safe because they’re just driving academics, so that’s quite a significant change for a child, especially a young child, especially one who is struggling.

You want to get them up in the morning and get them to school. Maybe it’s actually not about the routine at all; it’s about I don’t want to go to this place because I don’t feel protected, I don’t feel heard, and I don’t feel like anyone’s got my back. I feel overlooked. It goes down to there’s some big things that happen at school, but little things like ‘I need the bathroom’ and if I couldn’t go at break because of whatever was happening, bell’s gone now, I’m lining up my back in class, and this teacher is not going to let me go.

There’s a sense of insecurity in that, because I’m being denied a basic human need. The child has a number of, (if say the child it sounds very disembodied but and i don’t want to say little johnny that’s like overused) but if the child they their body knows they have a need something – that it could even be thirst or hunger – at that simple level the body knows it needs something and a person in authority is telling you no absolutely not or yes and rolling their eyes sighing making you feel shameful for the thing that’s so natural that you need to go to the bathroom.

Then you have a decision to go anyway at the wrath of the teacher, to defy the teacher, or to defy yourself, and all three of them are dangerous. The one that is the most dangerous, because it’s least seen and has longer-term consequences, is when you defy yourself.

Then I decide I can’t go to the bathroom, I’m not going to defy the teacher, I will sit down and suck it up, and let’s say that’s 45 minutes to an hour and a half, how do you process that? So either you’re going to wet your pants, and that’s a whole other shame cycle, or your body’s going to hold in.

I’m talking at a basic function, imagine levels of anxiety around this as well, so you now have to dissociate yourself from a very real occurrence that’s happening in your body. Now we wonder why kids get shut off, we wonder why they’re overeating or undereating, because we’ve literally told them not to listen to their bodies, so that’s a basic safety thing.

If that’s not happening in your school, which would be wonderful if that wasn’t happening, and that’s a significant component of what we do at school, which is helping children to reconnect with their body. So, they feel safe in their own skin because if I can’t feel safe on my own, then I’m relying on an external source, and then if that lets me down even once, the anxiety and safety are compromised even more.

From a parenting point of view, if I go back to this home, mom and dad and predictability, and school, with no mom, unpredictable adults, there’s no routine. Still, there are so many moving parts and unpredictability. If I, as a child, don’t have the skills to cope with that, why would I want to go?

There are a lot of children who go anyway, and that’s when school becomes destructive. And then there’s a significant component: especially after the COVID lockdowns in 2020, we’ve been given permission to not go. Many more children are staying at home than ever before.

We should understand and honour that, at some level. Why is it? Is it purely that I don’t go? Is it lazy (that’s a destructive word)? It is children and parents who found permission not to push themselves to do the scary thing, and we’ve lost something in that.

But we have to honour it because it is scary, and schools should never be scary. It’s the second-largest environment a child is in: at home and in school. What are we doing, creating schools that are scary for children, and then of course, we need to look at balance as well, how do we push children, but also keep them safe, so parents should be considering the narrative they have at home and the kind of communication and conversations they have with children around places other than the home, and building up the skill in the child can’t make the world safe for the child. Still, we can help the child cope with the world, even when it gets harsh.