Walking on Walls

One of the joys of driving past my local Vauxhall garage is that I get the chance to watch the kids, going to and from school, walking along the low wall surrounding the showroom.

I’ve long been fascinated by this behaviour since I had an office opposite a school where the wall around the clinic started about a foot off the ground and as it rounded the curve the height went to about four feet as the sidewalk dropped away.

Observing the kids walking along this wall was a lot of fun. They would organise the parent or grandparent who was with them, not be too close or too far away. Some would get down as the height of the wall increased but eventually all who took part seemed to master the feat with a sense of triumph as they jumped off at the end. They’d organised a lesson in managing risk, without a curriculum, scheme of work or a lesson plan.

If you type “mastery” and “child development,” into Google and it brings up hundreds of thousands of links. If you then add resilience it halves to a couple of hundred thousand. I couldn’t bring myself to type in “grit” but this seems to be the current parlance for the same thing. There’s an endless debate as to whether you can teach kids to develop confidence, resilience or grit – I’m not sure. I am certain that you can help destroy all these things. (Where’s Philip Larkin when you need him?)

What re-sparked my interest in this issue was when I met a young woman who had been a precious only child who seemed to have been saddled with being careful by her very demanding mother. By a range of measures, she was successful, in that she owned her own house and car, had friends and worked in a profession she enjoyed. Yet she was on edge all the time; she’d never walked on walls.

Although she was taken to dance classes when she was quite small, as she got older she moved further and further to the rear until around eleven or twelve years old she bailed out altogether and left the field to the more confident girls. Inside her head she was somewhere between Fame and Flashdance. But now, at weddings and family bashes, she only gets up to dance when the floor is full. Being careful had become the number one rule of her life early on and she maintained that into adulthood.

My impression was that her priority was to assure her mother and meet her needs first and her own second; in this she was successful. Sadly, she’s kept this as rule number 1,” when she could have dumped it in adolescence or in her late teens or early twenties. The need to maintain this rule is powerful but not inevitable; it can be dumped. I’ve met people who’ve done this. Often such people have left town (or Ireland) but got away and stayed away. I’ve also met people who have been cursed to carry the family, “be careful" batton. Who have got away to university had a ball, dyed their hair blue and had a market stall whilst doing their degree. Only to return to their home town and take up the baton once more, though curiously holding on to a few old snaps of themselves with the blue hair.

The demand to stay with this “be careful” script can be enormously powerful (see Human Apps). The price can be enormous in the way it limits your choices. It seems to stuff your head with shoulds, can’ts and must do’s. The underlying driver seems to be fear; fear of breaking the rule.

The trick of breaking free is to first realise that the rule wasn’t there when the midwife handed you over – it was an adaptation. At the time it would have been a reasonable response to an unreasonable set of circumstances. And it worked. Once installed, people often adapt the world around them to the rule and limit the choices they make rather than adapt the rule. They assume that “that’s the way I am,” rather than “that’s the way I became.” Often the people around you will be happy with this adaptation (see Jig Saw) and there will be some resistance to altering the rules (shape) that you’ve run your life on for so long, but you’ll cope – and so will they.

As a sort of antidote to the rule, one client I saw decided to type in “frivolous,” into the screen-saver on her computer – a revolutionary act, reminding her every day that she could take time out from the serious stuff of warding off potential disaster. Another needing new glasses chose the frames without consulting anyone. Again, for her, revolutionary.

I’m working my way through the thousands of papers and presentations on enabling children to be resilient and some are splendid. My contribution to this would be to encourage parents to walk on walls when their kids are quite small and amaze them with their courage, tenacity and sheer joie de vivre.