“When we talk about the system around a child. I don’t like using the word system because it makes us think of the school system or the medical system or the legal system and that’s really far away from you. The system that the child is very much involved in is the family system. And I’m very interested in is the family system healthy? I’m not interested in whether the family system is a good system or a bad system. I’m not interested in whether they’re effective or ineffective. I’m interested in whether the family system is a healthy system for all everybody in the family.”
Podcast Transcript
Hi, I’m Lauren Edmunds, and this is the Lauren Edmunds podcast. I’m talking all things education and parenting for children in the primary school years, but specifically for remedial and special needs children. I hope to give you my insights that I’ve gained over the last 12 years of in-field research, owning a special needs school in Johannesburg, as well as the academic research I’ve been doing for decades. I hope you enjoy it.
I used to smoke cigarettes. I used to smoke 20 cigarettes a day. I did it for 20 years. I started when I was 17. It was all about fitting in. And I quit when I was 37. So for 13 years now, I haven’t been an ex-smoker. And I truly believe now that I’m a non-smoker. And I’m talking about that because addiction is something that is interesting and complex and requires some thought.
So addiction comes in many forms. It’s healthy addictions, unhealthy addictions, addiction to exercise, addiction to smoking, addiction to drugs, addiction to alcohol, addiction to screens, addiction to sex, addiction to pornography, addiction to being thin, addiction to food and overeating. Addiction is such a big, big word that it covers so many things that it’s so easy to get lost in the thought of it and then to dismiss it.
But I wanna ask you to not dismiss it for a moment because I want to talk about how addiction is deeper than the addiction itself. It’s more complex. And we don’t stop our addictions when we use some willpower to stop them. I mean, there’s an element of that for sure, but it’s so much deeper than that.
If you have been a smoker or had any sort of addiction you’ve wanted to give up, you probably have tried to give up at least two to three times, if not four, five, six, seven times before you were successful, if you ever were successful ever. Alcoholics, for example, tend to really struggle to give that up. Smoking is a big deal. You move over to vaping or patching, drug addiction, there’s chemical involvement as well, all of these, but a heavier drug use addiction is often, it’s a physical thing.
Not often it is a physical thing as well as a mental thing, but we’ve got to go back to the origins. And I’m talking about all of this with you as parents because the origins are in childhood. And it’s not fair. It’s not fair that you as a parent are saddled with this thought, this idea, this information. Because to be quite frank, you are just another human being.
When you decided to have kids, you didn’t actively… to be a parent. It just sort of happened. You didn’t actively decide you’re now going to be a certain type of person. You just had a kid and now you lumped with this role, this very serious role of being responsible for a child. Now if we think about the terms we use in the corporate world a lot, we talk about responsibility and accountability and we also talk about authority.
So I want you to think about your child and the levels of responsibility we ask of them, how we keep them accountable for certain things like making their bed, doing their homework, those types of things. And then I want you to think about the level of authority they have in their lives.
Now I’m gonna give you something further to think about. Your child does not have the ability to go down to McDonald’s. Now I’m thinking eight, nine, 10, 11 year olds. They cannot go down to McDonald’s and buy themselves fast food. They cannot go off to the game store and buy themselves a brand new PlayStation 5.
They cannot go off to the middle of wherever they go to buy drugs and get themselves drugs. They are too young. They don’t have a car. They don’t have income. They don’t have the capacity. They don’t have the authority. So where is all of that coming from? It’s coming from you as the parent. And that’s going to sound really, really heavy, but it’s actually quite liberating.
When we talk about the system around a child. I don’t like using the word system because it makes us think of the school system or the medical system or the legal system and that’s really far away from you. The system that the child is very much involved in is the family system. And I’m very interested in is the family system healthy? I’m not interested in whether the family system is a good system or a bad system. I’m not interested in whether they’re effective or ineffective. I’m interested in whether the family system is a healthy system for all everybody in the family.
And I think that the alarm bells that are ringing are the children. The children are the alarm bells that should be telling the rest of society that we’re not okay. But what’s actually happening is the alarm is going off and we’re taking the batteries out.
So let me take that metaphor into reality. Your child is not coping, they’re failing, they’ve got sleep disorders. They’ve got new diagnoses. They’ve got disruptive behavior at school. That’s the alarm bell going off. And what we’re doing is shutting off the alarm. We’re taking the batteries out. We’re numbing them with screens. We’re giving them medication. We are taking them to therapies that are intended to fix the symptom. And we’re not looking beyond the child into the first system that a child belongs to, which is the family unit and our family units are not okay.
Definitely COVID and those years or those months or years or however you were affected have pushed ahead the un-okayness of the family unit. Social media and the smallness of the world now when it comes to online activity has pushed forward the un-okayness of the family unit.
And that’s where the work needs to start so that we don’t have two, three, four generations of children moving into adulthood with severely unhealthy behaviors, with addictions, with destructive thoughts, because those are going to be the people that need to be employed, that will be running businesses, that’ll be running countries.
We need to help the children. The children are the alarm systems. But we, we need to help the children by helping the family unit.
When a family is giving their children processed food, fast food, unhealthy food. When the house isn’t quiet at night so children can sleep. When they’re not warm enough, they’re not fed enough. When there’s no connective time, so they’re not connected enough. When they haven’t done enough exercise, so they’re not strong enough. Haven’t had enough water, so they’re not hydrated enough. They haven’t got that connection, so they don’t feel good enough.
We have got a system that is dysfunctional. And it is being laid on the shoulders of these little children that don’t have the authority to change anything. And we can’t place responsibility and accountability on them without giving them authority. And we can’t give them authority because they’re still too young. So the authority lies with the parent. And because the authority lies with the parent, the caregiver of the child until they turn at the age that they can take it over for themselves.
The responsibility and accountability lies with the parent.
But it’s not like the parent is alone. There are systems out there that can really support the parent even though it doesn’t feel like it. Because there are also systems out there that are not supportive of the parent. And I want to talk specifically about the school system, but I think it applies to the medical system, I think it applies to all systems. That systems are run by adults, almost for adults, and we see children as sort of frustrating irritants to our system, when they are the very reason for our existence.
So the school system requires, I believe, a magnificent makeover to stop being about pushing out academic results and to start being a system of support and care and healing. Not the primary system. The primary system is the family unit. But the family unit cannot do it by itself. And we’ve got more fragmented families. We’ve got divorced families. We’ve got families who are not staying anywhere close to. They’re extended family. They’re all alone.
The system, the community can really get involved. And if we see high functioning religious groups, those groups are getting involved as a support system. Schools need to be doing the same thing. The mental health of our children is the alarm system for the mental health of the rest of society. We can no longer afford just to take the batteries out so that we don’t hear the alarm.
The alarm is a message to us. It’s a message to us to go, am I okay? And I’m not asking you to look at society as a whole. I’m asking you just to look at your family. When your child is not coping, are you going to throw more medicine at it? Something I heard this week, it said, parents medicate their children when they’re not coping. Not when the child’s not coping, but when they as a parent are not coping. So when your child is not doing okay.
Your very first protocol is to look at yourself and go, am I doing okay? What can I do to help myself? And I don’t mean taking weeks away from your family to go find yourself or going to go and get a massage. I mean, am I okay? Am I living to my values? Have I created a healthy home? Am I a healthy person in this home? How am I contributing to this health? What do I need to take away from my life, even though it might be hard? So that I can make this family unit healthy because when the family unit is healthy, the individuals are healthy.
Do I need trauma counseling? Do I need extra support? Do I need a different school? Do I need a different approach? Do I need more sleep? Do we need to take the cat out of the room at night because my daughter’s not sleeping? And can I then do that? And we can do that if we understand what we’re trying to achieve, if we understand what the outcome is of not doing that.
If my daughter is severely struggling at school and I notice that she’s not sleeping and I do nothing to stop the cat from waking my daughter, my eight-year-old daughter up every single night, then I am complicit in the decline of my daughter.
So I want you to think about what is the one thing that you can identify in your family system. Not that anybody else is doing, not that anybody else is responsible for, but what you are doing. What is the one thing that you can change? Take away, add, adjust. Can you close that window at night? How are you going to remember to do that? What is that one thing that you can do this week that will take your family system up a notch in terms of healing?
Get into this virtuous cycle of moving in a direction that is healthy. When we’re healthy emotionally, physically, spiritually, academically, relationally, when we’re healthy, a little bit healthier in all of those things, we feel better about ourselves and we can cope with more things and that the trials of the day become manageable, not unmanageable.
That step in the right direction is so vital. Your children are ringing the alarm bell for you. And when you change and you become calm and you realize maybe you’re the trigger, it’s not them. Maybe your trauma is being placed on them and you need to go solve your own trauma issues or trauma struggles. Maybe when you make those decisions, then the family unit elevates and the alarm, while still ringing, might turn off for a bit because we’re better now. And we’re not making our children the source of all of our pain.
