Children need psychic permission to exist

You cannot spoil a child by fulfilling their need for connection and compassion. You can spoil a child by denying them empathy.

I want to focus on our children this week. They are not alright. Sometimes, we are weary of our own burdens and feel that the children are themselves the problem. In quieter moments, we look at them from a distance and wish we knew how to reach out to them with humour and light.

Just when schools had begun to open again, the Omicron variant of Covid-19 has unleashed a new torrent of uncertainty. Entire families are unwell, housing societies and offices are confused about what kind of restrictions to enforce and state governments are wary of further disruption of the economy. Election rallies continue and the pressure to keep performing and carrying on with our daily routines is relentless.

We were all hoping to move towards a restoration of normalcy with the new year. Instead we have fresh chaos. Disease, loss and grief.

We know our children’s needs are not being met. As the pandemic enters the third year, they have lived with disrupted education, awry expectations and a world outside where nobody seems to be in control. Boundaries have collapsed and as we spend more and more time in the same space as each other, we find ourselves withdrawing from each other. We are angry but not quite sure with who or why.

Last week, one of the cats we have been feeding near our home fell ill. We rushed him to a veterinarian and later brought him inside our home to protect him from the cold. Within a few hours, the cat had convulsions and died as our three teenaged daughters looked on. They rushed to call me to the room. We were all in shock for a while. Our elder daughter came and sat in my lap. I held her tight. We realised that the virus that had killed this cat was extremely contagious and other cats in and outside our home would need early medical intervention to survive.

“Okay, so now everyone will be gentle with each other,” said our middle daughter, addressing all of us. I looked up in surprise. “Yes, that’s what we can do. We will be tender towards each other. We need that. The good thing is that Papa will return tomorrow.”

Later, when I was speaking about the moment to my husband, I repeated her words to him. I hadn’t realised how much we may have become impatient and snappy with each other. In the shock of the cat’s death, a child in the family had spoken up requesting kindness. She had let us know how much her parents’ presence in their lives reassured them.

We complain so often about the new generation, referring to them as entitled, self-obsessed and gadget-oriented. We judge them for not having known struggle and, therefore, unappreciative of the cost of the privileges they demand.

“You cannot spoil a child by fulfilling their need for connection and compassion,” writes Lelia Schott, a South African author and parent of six. “You can spoil a child by denying them empathy, by replacing their need for connection and compassion with rewards and punishments, by making them work for love or safety, and by raising them to believe they are inferior or superior to others.”

Instead of blaming our children for being maladjusted despite how easy their lives are, we need to change our lens and identify what are the real bonds that will heal them. Faced with a deluge of advertising and marketing, it is no surprise that our children are hooked to what is readymade, what is quick-fix, what is pleasurable to the eyes, seductive to the palate and smooth to the skin. They are conditioned by culture and society to equate intense excitement and quick results with happiness.

We need to examine our own overly busy, preoccupied lifestyles that leave us emotionally and physically exhausted as adults. We had assumed that the pandemic and lockdowns would be a temporary blip in our lives, but we cannot be in denial of our new realities any longer. We need to zoom out and address the needs of our most intimate relationships now. Our children are crying out for our attention. We need to pause everything else and respond.

Children need psychic permission to exist, to be healthy and to belong. They need to feel that they are wanted, that our world could not go on without them. They may have the intellectual abilities of adults in some areas and can understand world problems — sometimes with more clarity than adults — yet they have no political power or agency to act. This frustration, coupled with family and education systems that invisibilise and belittle them, makes them turn away from the unpredictability of adults. They wallow in emotional numbness and often begin to self-harm.

“So much of what we call abnormality in our culture is actually normal responses to an abnormal culture. The abnormality does not reside in the pathology of individuals, but in the very culture that drives people into suffering and dysfunction,” says Dr Gabor Mate, underlining the connection between illness, addiction, trauma and society.

Solutions will arrive for each one of our families when we agree to confront the truth. When we become open to the insights and wisdom of others, irrespective of social hierarchies, we will find ourselves liberated from bitterness. Our children need us to restore life and emotional well-being. It is time to begin to heal.

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This essay was first published in The Tribune on 16 Jan, 2022