Why We Might Be Curious

Perhaps our work with vulnerable young people is not so much a job as a belief; a belief that the young people we work with can and will make progress and have decent, fulfilling and satisfying lives. It seems to me that one of the most useful ways we can contribute to this belief being true is though our own curiosity about our young people. When we observe a young person behave a certain way we often explain their behaviour based on a kind of certainty about their motives or intentions. Hit hard by an angry child, we might think to ourselves “they want to hurt me,” or even “they didn’t want to hurt me”. Same action, perceived in different ways, and our response to this action is likely to be highly influenced by our thoughts about their intentions. Unfortunately, even if we know the person well (and often in our work we do not) we may well be wrong. And if we are wrong about their mental state, we may not respond effectively. Additionally, we might happily say why (in our opinion) a young person acted as they have, even though they may not really know why themselves. I’d like to suggest that such certainty is not likely to be helpful. What we believe about ourselves and others can become a self-fulfilling prophecy because we tend to act in accordance to what we believe. Further, our inborn potential to give more weight to information that confirms what we already think than we do to information that contradicts it (called confirmation bias) means we often experiences our beliefs as being supported by the evidence before our eyes. It may be more useful to be curious about their mental and emotional state than to be certain, and that to be curious about why a child does certain things and cannot do others is one of the most helpful things we can do. There is something special about curiosity, to really sense, hear, feel what life is like for the child, and showing genuine interest in their thoughts, values, beliefs and intentions. Previously, drawing on John Bolwby’s suggestion about how therapists may best help their patients, I suggested that in our work we may help our young people not so much by interpreting things for them, but by being a “companion for…exploration”. A key tool to this companionship is curiosity. The American psychotherapist Dan Hughes highlights how the first shared state between an infant and their primary caregiver is one of acceptance and curiosity, love and playfulness. Murphey & Joffe said that “creating a caring relationship requires genuine curiosity.” It is through shared curiosity that the child first experiences being in the mind of their attachment figure, who is curious enough about the emotional tone of the child’s communication to respond in an attuned way. Being curious frees us from the need to always having to “solve” difficulties. This can take enormous pressure of us, and can be hugely validating for the child. This does not imply we do nothing, but that what we can do is to be curious about the meanings of events and behaviours and curious about possible causes of action. For me, to genuinely be curious is one of the great skills of our work; it is our genuine interest in our young person’s thoughts and feelings and respect for their perspectives. Curiosity sits in the long tradition of therapeutic working. The approach applied in therapeutic communities, which employ the planned use of social interactions and processes, is founded on a “culture of enquiry”. Without curiosity, the child’s behaviour means only what they act out. Curiosity allows us to not lose sight of the efforts the child is making to build a relationship with us. Also, curiosity is the anti-dote to avoidance (a common response to trauma). Our curiosity about the child in the here-and-now builds a bond of trust, respect and reliability and provides the foundations for new, healthy attachments; when someone is genuinely curious about us, it causes us to be reflective, to wonder about ourselves, and we have a sense of being special, and our genuine curiosity in the here-and-now expresses our attempt to think into the inner world of our young person. Rather than being certain about why a child has acted a certain way, we might be curious about many things: • Why things are the way they are? • How it is that this person came to be in this situation? • How one might we help? • What will happen if you do something (or do nothing)? • To wonder about who this person is • What their experience of themselves is? • What it is like to be them? • What are their intentions, motives, goals and thoughts? • What are they feeling? • What am I thinking and feeling, and why am I? It is also useful to be curious about outcomes. How can we be confident enough that our young people are making progress? Change is often messy, and a young person’s recovery from the difficult circumstances of their life is unlikely to be a smooth, constantly improving path. It is much more likely to me a rollercoaster, sometimes moving forward, sometime going back; sometimes progress might unlock previously unseen difficulties. An example of this might be a young person who for years has turned anger about their experiences inwards and only expressed it by hurting themselves beginning to express their anger more outwardly (but still not appropriately) by acting it out more directly on the world around them. This uncertainty about progress and outcomes is one important reason why we need to try and measure change through some objective means.

Resilience in Residential Childcare and Fostering

If our work is somehow walking alongside the child as they explore their inner world (Bowlby’s “companion for exploration”) then we need to be as well-equipped as we can be. However, at this point we need to acknowledge a difficulty. Training and personal development programmes should provide the skills and knowledge to do the task (the explorers’ tools), but the hard emotional labour of looking after our young people also requires some personal qualities. This is the “stuff” of explorers that is beyond any training programme. This “stuff” includes a deep emotional pool on which to draw; ability to step outside the immediate feelings brought up by the child’s difficulties; insight to see their behaviour for what it is...communication; and capacity to come back in the face of repeated rejections (“stickability” and “bouncebackability”). These qualities (there are undoubtedly others) might be referred to as resilience. Resilience is usually thought of as having three layers. First there is an inner layer of personal qualities and inner strengths, including a secure sense of our own identity, healthy self-esteem, belief in our ability to influence the world, and beliefs and experiences of success. As adults, this is largely our own “stuff”; our own individual responsibility, and we cannot reasonably look outside ourselves to be given these things. We have acquired them, to a greater or lesser degree, as part of the trajectory of our own lives. Those of you interested in attachment theory will no doubt reflect on the role that a secure childhood attachment can play in providing the foundation for this. Resilience is not just these personal qualities, it is also produced and supported by the connections we have to other people. In other words, an individual’s capacity to “stick with it” and to “bounce back” depends in part on their character and in part on their network of close and supportive others (families and friends). It is a sad fact that the anti-social hours of the work can take its toll on our families and friends, but knowing this can encourage us to work hard enough to maintain these much needed connections. The third layer of resilience is usually called community. This is the degree to which we are connected to something wider than our immediate supportive circle, the way we feel we have a place in the world and feel that we belong, that we have a purpose and are fulfilled by our daily lives. It is important that we connect with our own work community and with communities beyond our own work place. This is in part the stuff of the therapeutic community, but it is also the stuff of teams, of working together, of integrating and sharing with colleagues from different disciplines, and the stuff of looking outside our own organisation to the wider community of childcare (a helpful social worker, a conference, journals and magazines, web-discussion forums, and so on, all connect us to the wider community, even, perhaps, helpful blogs). It is also management structures, supervision, mentoring, buddying systems and formal and informal networks of colleagues. It’s worth mentioning here that, as well as receiving support and developing our resilience in these community contacts, we are also there to provide support and sustain the resilience of others in these communities (that’s what a community is) and to be as ready to give support as we are to need it. Perhaps these are rare things, although I see them daily in the people around me in my own organisation. If you know people with this “stuff”, and they like children and want an interesting and varied career, perhaps you should think about recruiting them to a fascinating and rewarding career. If you see gaps in this stuff in yourself or in your colleagues (and gaps will appear for none of us is unbreakable) then perhaps you could think about how to help.

Social Control Theory

There is a widely held, informal theory of child development that unwanted behaviours will somehow be “switched off” if they attract sufficiently disadvantageous responses, a kind of informal, social learning approach. However, there is little empirical support for this idea. One of the ideas put forward by the Chicago School in the 1920s & 30s is that violating social norms is potentially so pleasurable that we should perhaps be more interested in finding out what constrains people from doing so more often than they do. Social Control Theory (Hirschi) suggests that individuals are constrained from anti-social behaviours by four types of control: 1. Inner controls that result from internalizing pro-social beliefs and values. I would add to this the idea that pro-social values take root more readily when the individual has an internal representation of themselves and others as worthwhile. 2. Outer controls, which are typically social and economic sanctions. I would add to this the point that many traumatized children will not experience typical social sanctions as unwanted. One example would be that negative attention from a telling-off might be preferred to no attention at all 3. Indirect controls that arise through identification with, for example, a victims discomfort or a parent’s disapproval. I would add to this the idea that such identification requires a degree of empathy that may be inhibited in traumatized children 4. Satisfaction of needs. Anti-social behaviour may arise as a way of satisfying needs, from material needs for possessions though to internal needs such as power, revenge and control. If the individual can satisfy these needs in legitimate ways then the need for anti-social behaviour is reduced. The imposition of outer controls (sanctions) may well increase a need for revenge, power and control, and therefore increase rather than decrease unwanted behaviour. Outer controls and indirect controls can only be effective at “switching off” unwanted behaviour if an individual has a degree of self-control; they clearly cannot be effective if there are significant impulse control difficulties. This also applies to earning rewards and privileges, or gaining levels. We also know (e.g. from the Cambridge Study of Delinquency Development, Farrington, 1990) that delinquent behaviour is more likely when an individual’s social bonds are weakened or diminished. The combination of low levels of affection and the failure to adequately protect a child is both traumatising and associated with weak bonding, and so children who are traumatized in their families are at high risk of exhibiting a wide range of unwanted behaviours. The problem with social learning approaches for this group of children is that both the earning of rewards and the loosing of privileges weaken, rather than strengthen, bonds. Another reason sometimes put forward for reward-punishment approaches to unwanted behaviour is that all children need opportunities to learn about the consequences of their actions. This is undoubtedly true, but we have to be careful what the child is learning. From the exertion of adult power they may learn that they are small and powerless and what they really want is revenge. But there cannot be a problem with exerting some level of discipline; the question is more of how it is done, and why. Getting a child to help clear up a mess they’ve made, or making them wait a little for something they want to do, can help them make amends, teach as sense of consequence, promote experience of delayed gratification, and distinguish wanted behaviours from unwanted. However, it is essential that the use of consequences is accompanied by good quality explanation and genuine, authentic warmth. Explanation promotes the child’s ability to generalize to other situations, and authentic warmth allows the child to experience discipline as a supportive intervention for their benefit, rather than the exercise of adult power.