“Twigg” - Folding Socks

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2011/05/01/971611/-Folding-Socks

Sun May 01, 2011

by twigg

Difficult as this may be to believe, I did actually have a life before becoming an immigrant, woodworker and part-time Blogger.

I trained, for a while, at a small engineering company, as a production engineer. That was in the early eighties, and I was young, and quite unsure of the direction I wanted to follow.

I sort of "fell" into Social Work, specifically Residential Social Work with abused and neglected children, starting in 1982 and continuing, off and on, until about 2002.

It's tough, that world. Tough for the adults who give much of themselves in a desperate effort to repair at least some of the damage that adults do to children.

Tougher still for the children who live lives that we, as functioning adults, can barely recognise, let alone comprehend.

Providing appropriate and effective care and treatment for emotionally disturbed children is a time-consuming, expensive and very challenging task. Few have the skills although many try and to demonstrate this I want to tell you a little story that goes some way to describing the level of detail involved.

There are no great parents. As a concept it is, in any event, meaningless. Judging the quality of parenting is, at best, a tricky business and Social Workers generally do not try to quantify the quality of parenting.

What they do instead is look at the outcomes. If a child is coming to the attention of the "authorities", be that school, church, youth group, youth justice, then Social Services (in the UK), will get involved.

The starting, ending and middle points of this involvement is always about the child's welfare. Parental Rights are a legal concept, and have little, if anything, to do with the interests of the child. Instead there is the recognition that a child's best interests are usually served by a child remaining with it's natural parents, providing that the parenting is "good enough". Good Enough parenting is a very low bar, but it is sufficient for Social Workers to resist removing a child from the family home, preferring, wherever possible, to provide support to the family, not simply just a single, or multiple children from a family.

Good enough parenting does not mean a fancy home, or even, in some circumstances, any home at all. It means that an assessment of the child, and that child's circumstances must show that the child is provided with adequate primary needs, is loved and feels loved, and that their basic emotional needs are being met.

Evidence of neglect, emotional or physical would be unacceptable, but neglect does not mean absence. That is, little food in the home is not neglect if the parents simply can't afford to shop. It would be neglect if it became clear that there was money, but it had been spent in the Casino. While good social workers would explore with parents, their management of a family budget, there are limits, and spending food money on drugs, gambling, alcohol etc. not only describes a situation where the adults are simply not coping; it also raises serious concerns about the very real dangers that children might be exposed to.

The children I worked with were well beyond the point where Social Services had first become involved. Indeed, many of them had spent most of their young lives in the care of the State, and because we had them, that care had also failed.

Most "looked after" children are fostered, and in most cases that is all the intervention they need. For a small minority the damage, neglect and/or abuse is such that fostering or adoption is not a sensible or helpful option. These children prove that when you read their files and realise that each and every one of them have failed in multiple foster homes. The damage to some children is so profound that not only can they not succeed in a family, or quasi-family situation, they are actually capable of destroying the family.

So the lucky (if a child with such a background can be called "lucky") ones end up in highly specialist therapeutic homes for emotionally disturbed children. There are very few of those in the UK. I worked in two that have impressive national reputations, and one of them even deserved it's accolades. It is that one from which this anectode emerged.

There is a great deal of theory regarding the emotional development of children from the youngest infants forward. Indeed, some of the most important developmental steps a child takes happen in the first few weeks and months of life. Good enough parenting during this period can mitigate much of the potential damage that poverty and the associated problems can cause later in childhood. More, good parenting in infancy can make it very much easier to help damaged children recover.

Anyone wishing to gain a greater understanding of these areas of child development could do much worse that to read some of the works by Melanie Klein and Donald Winnicot. Those two will lead you to many others who have pioneered research and understanding in this field.

I mentioned earlier that emotionally damaged children are capable of causing serious harm to any family they are placed with. I know, it's hard to believe that the angelic looking eight-year-old that the social worker just dropped off can wreck your marriage, but she can. Children who fall into this category have no concept of personal or family relationships and dynamics, Why would they, they have no experience of healthy ones. They have developed survival mechanisms which don't allow for healthy relationships to happen. What remains of their fragile egos only know how to defend from harm, and they do this by projecting that harm onto others, and splitting any relationships they encounter as a way of preventing the emotional involvement that they desperately need, but cannot accept.

One area that professionals working with children need to understand and deal with is that the children they will care for are guaranteed to test the unity of the adults up to and, if allowed, beyond breaking point. It is crucial that the children not be allowed to drive a wedge between the adults in such a staff team. If they are permitted to do this then there will be hurt but, more importantly, you will have let them down just as badly as all the previous adults have let them down.

This is how it happens ..... Amy is nine. She attends school off site for four hours a day. She leaves at eight am. As part of the morning routines, once Amy has gone to school, the Care Staff tidy her room and make her bed. They arrange her teddy as she likes it and they do this the same way every morning. Amy has a favourite member of staff. That adult always makes sure that teddy is put in the bed and appears to be sleeping when she returns from school. The others simply lay teddy on the pillow. Amy's inner self has managed, through this simple object in her mind, to split one good member of staff who, to her, represents everything she wants out of life (which amounts only to a Mom who doesn't hurt her), from the rest. The rest, those good people who care about Amy and make her bed every morning, now represent the blackness she feels inside as she goes through her day.

That was a fictitious example designed simply to demonstrate the mechanism at work here. Now for the way, well, one of the ways, a professional team tries to address this. The example is small, and it isn't really the point. The point is that what is going on here is an attempt to help adults understand that the children do this, and the way of thinking about even the smallest details helps the adults actually win this battle, and really help the kids.

I walked into the dining room of the Unit where I was, at the time, a senior member of staff. The Head of Home was having a group discussion on this area of the work with a bunch of potential recruits. Two of them later turned out to be valuable additions to our team.

As I walked in the Head of Home threw a pair of socks to me with a request that I fold them. There were a few smiles around the table at this. However, I am made of stern stuff and have been asked to do much more difficult things than fold a pair of socks. Sensing a trap I folded the socks and threw them back.

It appears that I neatly evaded said trap because, according to the recruits, I had passed the test. The socks were folded in exactly the way they should have been.

What was going on here was simply this. The recruits were being lead through this Diary (Not "this Dairy", ya understand, I haven't quite finished it yet), and morning routines were being discussed. Any one of those young adults might be the who on any given day, tidied Amy's room, made her bed, put away her clothes. The crucial bit was that when Amy came home she could feel good about her room, and know the staff had done that for her, and have no idea who had done it. In that way, in that one tiny incidence, Amy has no choice but to feel good about the adults caring for her .... all of them; and that leaves her available for bigger fish to be fried, down the road.