Pretender
I am the great pretender.
I can sway like the trees,
I can move like a cat,
And I can speak like a person who is acting in a play.
I can roll like a ball,
And be wide like a hole.
I am the great pretender,
And sometimes I can act like you.
But me,
I do not know who or what I am.
What I seem to be, is someone else.
But inside I do not know who I am.
Pretender is my name.
This poem, written by a child who is negotiating significant trauma on a daily basis, illustrates piercingly the fundamental importance of a parent in a child’s life. A child’s sense of identity and integration is acquired through the mindful reflections provided by a loving parent. In the reverie of the mother, as she gazes lovingly at her child and responds to the child’s needs, is the genesis of personal identity. Children will only know that they exist if the parent sees them.
Some parental figures, whilst negotiating their own childhood traumas, experience their children as toxic. The child’s needs and attachment-seeking behaviours might feel draining or repellent. At times, the parent may infuse the child with shame by transmitting discontentment, wishing the child had greater qualities. Despite physical, sexual and emotional assaults, the parent-child bond seeks cohesion, leaving children time and time again hoping for better days and repeatedly forgiving their parents.
Across the world, it is recognized that 87% of children who are being abused experience maltreatment at the hands of their immediate carers. This is in the context of Britain annually sustaining childhood maltreatment involving 1.5million children, of whom only approximately 40,000 receive a child protection plan providing social work input. Clearly, child abuse is an epidemic, the victims of which are too silent and powerless to hold the state accountable for their safety.
There is a price to pay for child abuse: the rage either turns in on the self or, in revenge, is hurled at others.
There is remarkable consistency between child abuse, criminality and long-term dysfunction. Whilst we stare into the eye of a catastrophe, our politicians cling to a kind of quaint tea party, providing paper-doily solutions rearranged in the same old useless, mindless way. The subject of their intention is ‘parenting’. They believe they can solve social care issues by marching dysfunctional parents into parenting classes, where the use of the ‘Naughty Chair’ seems to be the panacea. Everyone is preoccupied with morality. If only high moral values could be hammered into the heads of the amoral, we would have a perfect society.
In the service of parent training solutions, a plethora of institutes has emerged, each with its own manual of parent modification. The truth is, those parents who would benefit from parenting classes are not the real source of the challenges we face. Of course, having one’s skills enhanced is confidence-boosting and stress-reducing, but it is arguable whether the intervention is being delivered at the real problem.
The dark truth hides somewhere more sinister and uncomfortable. The shiny faces of the politicians have rarely been there or lived it, so it is hardly surprising that they lack the vision to describe the real object of our despair.
Imagine being a nine-year-old, your house too horrific to live in. Sometimes you hear your mother scream, and you’re frozen in terror despite wanting to go to her rescue. Post-assault, your mother looks at you as if the pity in your glance devastates her. This is the child who wrote the poem. Childhood has not been about good or bad parenting. It’s been about survival; surviving the blows but also attempting to survive the emptiness, the crushed identity.
This child is one of the lucky ones, having found Kids Company. Our staff function as an additional parent, allowing enough safety to flourish and metamorphosise pain into poetry. However, those children who haven’t been reached with help will eventually sink into despair, which vacillates between passive suicidality and vengeful hatred.
The real challenge for our politicians is to understand that, once the biological carer has failed in caring for the child, the state needs to step in as a substitute parent. The devil is in the details: it’s not just about the provision of underwear, socks and bed-sheets. It’s about restoring the loving reverie that would otherwise have been provided by an adoring parent. We have been blinded by the fear of interfering with the parent-child bond, and consequently we have failed to conceptualise systems which can provide loving care for children who have been denied it. Our social care agencies are preoccupied with procedures and fear of being sued, when they should be thinking about how to provide consistent attachment and love for a child who needs to be nurtured.
I hear your shame bellowed back at me in protest. You don’t want to talk of love in the public space. But neuroscience is now unequivocally confirming that human relationships are the primary drivers of neuronal structuring. Brain scans reflect it back at us: where there is lack of love, there is a gaping hole. It’s that catastrophic emptiness that deprived children want filled with care.
Who dares look into the chasm wins.
