Child & Youth Care Practitioner
A lot of the work I do with children and youth involves
working in partnership with schools. It is not uncommon due to the number of
hours our kids spend in the school environment; typically 5-7 hours each day
five days a week. That is almost the equivalent of a full time job! Needless to
say school is a large bio-ecosystem in a child's life and adults in the life of a child must be actively involved in the child's academic career.
According to Bronfenbrenner's (1994) Bioecological Theory of Human Development it describes the classroom as being is within the Microsystem of a child's life (the school
board is within the Exosystem). You may click on the link to get a good visual
of what I am talking about here. Basically when one views a child's life in
this perspective we are able to gain a better understanding, a glimpse of the
potential impacts on children; we can see how the child develops outside the
nucleus of their immediate family. Together in this perspective plus the fact
children attend school as adults would attend a full-time job we can begin to
understand school and the enormous impact it has on any child or youth's day to
day life. It is huge!
It is my hope through this blog story that I can create a
snapshot of the importance of being involved in your child's academic career
from junior kindergarten right through to high school and beyond. Please
realize your child's academic career is at minimum 12-15 years long! Why should
you be involved? So you can guide your child through their vulnerable years and
ensure emotional health at the end of it. Something else to consider is the possibility that
your child could develop a mental illness throughout these years, we can still ensure emotional health
by being there for them. Our children are developing beings and are emotionally
vulnerable. They grow at their own ideal pace. We
have to guard this maturation process.
Parents/guardians/significant positive adult role models are
imperative in the life of a developing child. We need to be there to interject
wisdom, create safe and quiet spaces for them to talk and just 'be'; we need to listen and not respond with our biased opinions and life
experiences (this is a hard one for most to do!).
A school system is not designed to focus on your child's
emotional needs. In fact emotional needs of a child is not a number one
priority for the education system. Have you ever considered this before? That
schools are not designed to focus on the emotional needs of a child? Have you
ever made a statement like - Why can't the school just… or How come they never
noticed… or Why are they not doing anything about…Schools are not therapeutic
environments. This reality is not a bad thing necessarily (although I
do wish it were different but that is a whole other blog topic) because there are professionals who can better treat kids therapeutically than one who is trained as an educator. This includes parents/guardians and significant others.
A school is a system that is designed to teach curriculum, it is designed to educate children on
practical global skills to ensure their success in the adult world. It is
designed with an economic foundation ensuring that our little ones can grow up
and make a lot of money, not just for themselves but for the economy.
This is the reality of our global world.
The reality of what the school system is has been an evolving process for me. I have been actively involved in my kids academic lives since their first year of school. A number of years ago I was asked to attend a parent symposium in Toronto, ON at the Ontario Minister of Education's office. When the former Minister of Education Leona Dombrowsky
spoke to us in the audience (parents from all over Ontario, Canada) she
referenced [the now former] Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty who had piggybacked a
statement made by U.S. President Barack Obama just prior to her speech with us. The statement was something about
schools and the importance of the younger generation being innovators, leaders
and better than every other country; that being strong economically is the
country that remains on top (Google Obama's views on education and you will
know what I am talking about) in the world. After Ms. Dombrowsky's statement I recall
thinking - Wow, that is tremendous
pressure for our young people.
This story creates a picture of our political system (the Exosystem and yet another
system…are we seeing a pattern here?) is setting kids up for failure. The
standards are very high, so much so the schools will often brag about their progress on standardized testing but I will leave
that for a future blog post too (I am realizing I have a lot to say on this
topic!).
Back to the emotional piece and schools and why parents/guardians/significant positive adult role models must stay closely involved.
I have established
and stated my views on schools not putting students' emotional needs at the top
of their priority list and why that is, let me state another reason. It is
important for schools to have policies and procedures. The policies and
procedures are not just for academics or teaching or volunteering or
fundraising or employment issues or….(it goes on and on the amount of policies and procedures). Schools are large institutions.
There must be policies and procedures, there has to be some kind of organized
structure in order to accommodate large numbers of people in a learning environment.
Beyond the simple day-today policies and procedures in schools there are similar documents that dictate student
conduct and behaviour. This is where the mental health piece
comes into it for me and an area that I believe can use some major improvements. I reside in Ontario and one of the policies and procedures that govern schools is the Safe Schools Act, this Act became law in 2001. This Act introduced zero-tolerance practice and detailed how conduct and behaviour were to be addressed in schools. Listen closely.
Zero tolerance on any level and in any environment where there is a mass population of developing children and youth is the epitome of failure. Why? Because a developing child particularly youth/adolescents likely do not have the brain maturity to respond to situations that arise within the school environment. Conduct and behaviour aside their brains have not matured. What a concept. Stay with me here, sometimes those who are so behaviour focused will bypass this perspective because this is when it gets complicated and this is when we as adult's in the life of a child need to step in. Yeap, there is work to do not just a a finger to wave but work to do.
The school 'system' is a weak link in a child life; because of hard and fast rules related to behaviour and conduct this weak link is leaving some children/youth emotionally vulnerable. How can it not? They spend almost the equivalent of a full-time job every week! This is the power and interconnectedness of Bronfenbrenner's (1994) Bioecological Theory of Human Development.
Separating child development and emotional needs in favour of behaviour and conduct in a zero tolerance program is setting kids up for failure. This is why parents/guardians/significant positive adult role models must be actively involved in their child's academic career. There is no combating or overcoming the system for what it is. Get involved and be a part of the solution, advocate for your kids helping to guide them along towards their optimal potential in life.
You may wonder, did I not just state how important it was to have policies and procedure in the school environment and now I am talking about these same policies and procedures as a weak link. Yes I did. Look again at the Bioecological Theory of Human Development diagram and take another look at the interconnections of the various systems. There is no understanding one part without the other. The systems can not be separated but we can be aware of their existence and how the interrelate with our views and perceptions in life. Do you know someone who has never attended a school function/meeting/fundraiser/banquet/book sale etc.? There are lots of people out there who figure leave school at school. This perception is dangerous to the kid's in their lives. We can make a difference in the life of a young person who without us walk around with their head's down, hoodies up and hair in their faces. They are being lead down potentially dangerous paths of feeling unheard and misunderstood but mostly unsupported. We must ensure these kids are not labelled because of a lapse in judgement or a poor choice that they simply were not able to comprehend. These paths and labels perpetuate the emotional vulnerability, a sort of 'grey area' that is sometimes referred to as saying someone 'fell through the cracks'. The policies and procedures are ineffective because they are literally black text on a white page with little to no deviation, human emotions in the developing child especially are far more complex than this.
With the onset of terms like bullying and cyber-bullying and the concepts surrounding this new phenomenon we must be mindful of our interactions with our young people and remember their emotional vulnerability. Policies and procedures and the Safe Schools Act play an important role in the hierarchy of our society but they do not have to play a role that overlooks important primal needs of young people growing into adulthood. We have to be advocates for our young people. @BoysNeedtoFeel
Credits
First Photo: http://i.livescience.com/images/i/19509/iFF/sad-girl.jpg?1314712592
Second Photo: http://thecolourworks.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/emotion-at-work/
Bronfrenbrenner, U. (1994). Ecological models of human development. In International Encyclopedia of Education, Vol. 3, 2nd. Ed. Oxford: Elsevier. Reprinted in: Gauvin, M. & Cole, M. (Eds.), Readings on the development of children, 2nd Ed. (1993, pp 37-43). NY: Freeman
