Consider –

Each morning on your way to work you enter gridlock. Your heart races in anticipation. The cab cut you off. The light turns red, then green, then red again and you haven’t moved. You look at your clock. You slam your hand against the steering wheel. You glare your distaste. You tail gate and consider bumping the guy in front to get him out of your way. You sweat and feel trapped and a little desperate. You’re solitary goal is to get past the target car, the blue Prius in front of you. Your life depends on it. But then he cuts in front of someone else and moves ahead. You are forlorn. It’s a battle. Every inch is a battle. You choose another target car.

You see a man to your right. His hands are circling the air in front of him. As you sidle up beside him, you see his eyes are closed at the dead stops, but still his arms dance above the wheel. He is conducting, you realize. You honk and gesture to him to move forward but he doesn’t notice you. Curious, you inch closer to see if you can hear what he is listening to. You take a deep breath and audibly exhale. Your own breath gets your attention. And as if he heard that breath also, he glances over to you and for a moment your eyes meet. He smiles every so slightly. You nod at him to let him know you see him as well. You breathe again because you realize it feels good. You turn your own music on. Very quickly, there is an opening and gracefully you move your car into it.  

We know from the start that we are special. We know there are catacombs of possibility and promise within us. We also know stuckness – when the door to possibility is closed to us because we have not been seen, heard or validated.

This is about wonderment of human potential and creativity. Our children need to hear these words – You are unique. Keep going. Trust yourself. There’s no one like you. The world needs you being you.

Exploring the “who am I?” question is an important part of your child’s development. This is a challenge considering that education today is decidedly cognitive, and does not instructively take on the social and emotional demands of adolescent development. As a result, parents are ultimately responsible for their child’s social and emotional education, the “heart” work of development. And all that at a time when adolescents are trying to create their own identity separate from their parents.

Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the conscious building of interpersonal (awareness of other’s feelings) and intrapersonal (self-awareness) intelligences necessary for living an effective, engaged life. How can parents support their child’s social and emotional growth? Here are eight tips that support adolescent SEL at home and strengthen the changing parent/child relationship:

1. Active Listening – How a parent listens to an adolescent child can positively aid in the work of identity formation. Parents help their children explore the “who am I?” question of adolescence by listening without judgment or fear. Listening with an open heart helps adolescents make sense of their world and their changing selves as they begin the process of taking responsibility for who they are at that moment and who they want to be.

2. Self-Reflection – Where does self-reflection, the foundation of self-knowledge, fit into an adolescent’s busy schedule? Parents can promote this critical developmental need at home in creative ways – conversation around the dinner table or even watching a movie together. Self-reflection needs time to develop and practice to come naturally.

3. Model Authenticity – Adolescents are keen observers of human behavior, especially of their parent’s behavior. They constantly question truth and reality as they experiment with new ways of being. Parents support their child’s search for emotional courage and honesty by living it themselves – or at least by putting ones best effort forward. A good starting place for parents is to not pretend to have all the answers.

4. Promote Creativity – The adolescent work of creating an identity means stepping into the unknown. Like artists, adolescents enter an empty canvas and experiment with colors and materials as a way to accept or reject new ways of being. Creativity gives adolescents freedom to experiment and create themselves in safe and constructive ways. This can be achieved through art, writing, dance, sports, clothing, theatre and music. Parents validate their child’s creative endeavors when expressing their own curiosity with real questions and interest.

5. Celebrate Mistakes – Mistakes mean your child is taking risks and ultimately learning from their experiences. Mistakes are an essential part of growing. Physicist David Bohm writes: “From early childhood, one is taught to maintain the image of “self” or “ego” as essentially perfect. Each mistake seems to reveal that one is an inferior sort of being, who will therefore, in some way, not be fully accepted by others.” This is unfortunate because “all learning is trying something and seeing what happens.”

6. Parallel Process – Parallel process is learning and growing alongside your child. With each moment of your child’s growth, parents are reminded of their own experiences at that age. Simultaneously, perspective is necessary for parents even when they feel there is none. Adolescence joins parent and child in the human journey of self-discovery.

7. The Struggle is Important – Parents often want to pick their child up after they fall down. It is important to recognize that resilience is linked to learned self-reliance. Adolescents need to learn and accept difficulty as part of life and living. They learn what they are made of when they go through something on their own. Parents need to support the important work of struggle as a developmental imperative.

8. Integrating The Dark Side – It can be frightening to witness a once sunny, “problem-free” child transform overnight into a gloomy, irritable adolescent. Some parents find the emerging darker side (self-doubt, anger, fear, self-consciousness) difficult to accept and send the message that the harder stuff of growing up is not accepted. Parents need to integrate the highs and lows, the good and the bad, to support balance and self-acceptance.

Ultimately, adolescents who are exposed to authentic SEL experiences and practices at home and in school are better equipped to live lives of self-acceptance, discovery and personal responsibility.

It takes two to know one.

Gregory Bateson

Filed under: Poems & Quotes ]]> http://adolescentwork.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/1683/feed/ 4 Kimberly Hackett http://adolescentwork.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/change-is-inevi/ http://adolescentwork.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/change-is-inevi/#comments Thu, 17 Nov 2011 16:49:10 +0000 Kimberly Hackett http://adolescentwork.wordpress.com/2011/11/17/change-is-inevi/ ]]>

Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.

It was 28-year-old Mike McQueary walking away after witnessing the 58-year-old former coach raping a 10-year-old boy in the Penn State football shower room.

Imagine what lesson was emblazoned on the boy that day.

This story first focused on Joe Paterno, the 84-year-old coach ousted after a storied career. But the story and crime truly begins when former graduate assistant McQueary did nothing to stop the rape of a child in progress.

The criminal indictment of Sandusky says a shaken McQueary first asked his father for advice and then slept on it. It wasn’t until the next day that McQueary told Paterno what he saw. Paterno then told his bosses. Yet no one ever called the police.

And it was 10 days before Penn State officials talked to McQueary and then longer before officials finally banned Sandusky from bringing children onto campus. That ban sent the message that Sandusky’s crimes could continue off campus – as long as they were out of sight and out of mind of Penn State football.

While all the skirting, ducking and pushing under the carpet was going on, a 3rd or 4th grade boy, who had been knowingly raped, was left unprotected. It is sadly obvious that Penn State was acting much the same way the Catholic Church responded when charges of child sexual abuse by priests surfaced.

Penn State continues to care more about the enterprise of football than the atrocities of child rape that allegedly occurred on their campus. Should they have canceled last weekend’s Nebraska game as a statement of solidarity to get this right once and for all, to send the message to fanatical students that child protection is far more important than worshipping football?

But they did not cancel the game. One child, eight children, a hundred children, it doesn’t matter, the game goes on. Is this the same ethical mistake they made in 2002 when State officials chose to lamely ban Sandusky from bringing children onto campus instead of calling police. Once again, they focused on the game, the machinery of making money and pushed the “problem away,” out of sight, out of mind, a clear statement of their priorities.

The boy, now 19, lesson, then and now is the same, that his suffering doesn’t matter, that powerful men get away with crimes, that nothing is more important than money and football, in this case.

When McQueary walked away, he made it clear to the boy who saw him that he was unworthy of the former quarterback’s protection, that he was invisible and forgettable. When Penn State students rioted and pushed over a TV van because they were upset their beloved hero was ousted, the message was clear: “We don’t care about the suffering of children when stacked up against our scared football habit.’’

In the end, the boy is left alone. He has no option but to get up each morning, go to school and probably continue to deal with Sandusky preying on him. And maybe, the boy thought, it was all his fault. Maybe he should have called out, cried “help!” Maybe then the big man with red hair would have done something.

The problem was probably his intelligence combined with enormous feeling. It would have been easier if he didn’t think so much about why his parents were unhappy or why kids were mean at school or why adults were careless with him and how no one did anything when it was obvious something needed doing.

At first he tried to help his parents see that fighting made them unhappy, and his teachers see that that children were being excluded at recess and not just him. But they nodded dismissively and said, “don’t worry, we’ll handle it,” and they never did.

Instead of getting lost in video games, he worried about why adults weren’t better at being adults. And if adults couldn’t do something, who could, because there was no one else besides kids and adults, he thought. I suppose he might say, if he could articulate his feelings without adult prompting, he felt unsafe, which made him weary, which made him not trust, but no one asked him how he felt and he certainly didn’t think to tell anyone anyway.

At school, he knew he was on his own. Homework was easy and always would be. The real problem was he didn’t have friends. There was no one to play with during recess. The other boys controlled the football and threw to the kids they liked. Every time the ball didn’t come his way, he felt a pain in his head, like they were hitting him even though they weren’t. He looked at the adults looking like everything was fine and instead of asking for help, he told them he felt sick and they sent him to the nurses office.

His strong thinking and feeling moved unobserved through the grades and by 6th grade, a hard crust replaced his once soft malleability; his hard understanding of how the world worked made permanent grooves in his pliant brain.

By 10, his thinking made so much sense; he started to grow a turtle’s shell, a shell strong enough to last his lifetime.

I want this blog to embody the creativity and freedom of growing and learning in a world that can feel constrictive, over-defined and destination bound. We never stop creating ourselves through experience, thought and feeling and our relationship with our world and the people in our lives. I want to write about that.

So I’m reactivating this blog and like me, you will see changes, a new morphing look, a movable title, writing that will include all sorts of themes and subjects. But mostly, it will be honest, curious, and creative. The ingredients, I think, to living a good life.

Thank you for being loyal readers and supporters as I continue to explore what I believe are important themes in this life we live together.