To say that I am concerned about children and young adults’ ability to cope in this world would be a gross understatement. More and more I find myself working with 18 to 23-year-olds, and the complexity of their relationships with others and themselves is intense. Given this, I wasn’t surprised when I learned that self-harming, anxiety and suicide levels were at an all-time high among our youth. It is a fact that some poor souls choose to leave this world, believing that to be a less painful choice than trying to live in it. I’ve have come to the conclusion that our only hope is to give them the resilience and insights that they need to weather the storms, rather than watch them as they struggle taking life on one demon at a time.
In 1970 I was nine years old. I arrived at school one morning to see my friends huddled together in the playground looking distressed and tearful. I rushed over to see what was wrong because the last time I had witnessed such a scene, Malcolm Mossop’s mum had been hit by a bus and died. I asked them what was wrong and they all sort of cried some stuff at me. Seeing my confusion, and In the most sombre way possible for an eight year to effect, a girl with a ginger afro said, “today at 3 o’clock the world is going to end”. I stared at them in disbelief then sneered “says who”. She held my gaze and said, “It is in the testimony of Nostro Damn-it and Jaque’s mum, and dad told her about it last night at dinner, so it’s in the bible”. Now, this piece of information rocked me, and suddenly the whole thing was credible and my sole reality. Jacque’s mum was the coolest mum on the planet. While most of our mums wore aprons and got a ‘shampoo and set’ once a week, Jacques mum was a flowing-haired gypsy looking hippy. She was funny, cool, and so warm with us all. She turned our skipping ropes for us, held our elastics as we jumped, and we always wanted to go there to play. She and her husband would pay to watch our ‘wee shows’, and we would dance and sing in the garden shed for sweetie money. It would be fair to say I had a ‘mum’ crush on her, and I would have been sure to have concocted a ‘switched at birth fantasy’ if it had not been for the fact that I had been born at home in the back bedroom. If Jacque’s mum had told her about this, then it had to be true. I began to weep and wail with the rest of them.
Before the bell rang for assembly, it had gone round the whole school, spreading from the girls’ playground through to the boys’ then back again. Kids everywhere were crying and being sick. The alarmed teachers took us to the assembly hall and calmed us all down then explained who Nostradamus was and what the prophecies were. They straight up taught a bunch of 5 to 12-year-olds about speculative information and that prophecy was not a reliable source of fact. Then we were all flung out for an extra half hour playtime to help us get over it.
Can you imagine the scare stories our youth face today around Donald Trump and North Korea? What internet nightmares and conspiracies are there are out there to stir them up to a point where the threat is as completely real for them as it was for me that day?
The peer pressure of my day has nothing on the peer/social media pressures of today. The constant searching for ‘Likes’ and content approval has hit every generation but for the teens, this is directly linked to, and driving, their self-esteem issues. The young teen bracket can be the cruellest age for bullying, and in my youth, the playground was where you learned to stick up for yourself if you didn’t want to be seen as someone that could be pushed around. It no longer ends in the playground and the home is no longer a sanctuary with space where hurt could heal. Through social media, bullying can be experienced wherever they are and whatever they are doing. One girl with zero self-esteem told me that if she posted a photograph of herself or her family, she would be horribly trolled. These 19 year-olds would subtly twist the knife in what we Scots call ‘A joke with a jag’. I guess the memory of the spoken will fade if not ruminated upon or revisited; the written word, however, is etched into the mind. It creeps toxically into the consciousness and alters so many levels of esteem and wider connectedness. It’s a stone cold miracle that out young are not all screaming, running for the hills. It’s too easy to say ‘don’t look’, their social and support networks are online too, and for some friendship circles, there are more interactions taking place online than are happening face to face. Not to join in this would be to condemn themselves to social suicide.
We need to teach children to understand the true nature of the human condition. Role modelling, and not telling, is the only way to go because It starts with us opening our mouth wide to show the baby how to eat its food and from there it never stops. Maintain our own innate well-being and authentically living this way, by default gives children a resilience template to access so that they too can live and thrive in the world.
Respond to children with no judgement whatsoever, and accept for them that the way they are looking at things is currently their reality. Empathise with them and then, when they believe they have been understood, point them in the direction of their own innate wisdom. Role model how to influence what you can when you can, but more importantly how to find peace to let go, when the ability to influence the has passed. The ability to not dwell on disappointment is the single most useful thing we can do to build resilience.
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