Resilience: the State of Play
Resilience: the state of play
Life has never been easy. No matter how lucky we are, every single one of ushas to deal with fear, shame, disappointment, injustice,failure and all the other ills that flesh is heir to. Unless we’re resilient, we’ll crack under the strain.
This is why loving parents – and anyone else concerned with the care of children – naturally wantthe next generation to develop resilience. This means doing everything possible to nurture various skills and capacities in their charges, including
-the ability to build positive relationships, on which to rely forsupport in time of trouble
-the self-confidence and self-belief to bounce back from difficulties
-the ability to control strongly-felt emotions and use them positively
-the communication, problem-solving and planning skills needed todeal with obstacles and setbacks
-initiative and adaptability to adjust plans and strategies in response to changing circumstances.
These qualities depend on a complex combination of physical, emotional, social and cognitive development, which in turn depends on how children are nurtured from birth and throughout their childhood. Psychology and neuroscience have now shed a great deal of light on the ways nurture affect children’s well-being and mental health, but it seems to me that – when you strip away all the scientific terminology – there are two key ingredientsunderpinning every aspect of development: love and play.
If children have plenty of these from the moment they come into the world, they should be able tocope with stress and adversity throughout their lives,rising to challenges and learning from failures rather than lapsing into a state of ‘learned helplessness’.
Love, play ... and adult attunement
Love is the basis of attachment, and it’s now well established that secure attachment exerts a positive influence onalmost every aspect of a growing child’s personality, includingself confidence, self-regulation, communication skills and the ability to forge positive relationships – all of which provide a sound foundation for life-long resilience. A baby’s primary and secondary attachment figures are therefore of enormous importance.
But it’s also well-established that play (a catch-all term for what children do when left to their own devices) ishow children learn – each on their own unique terms – about the world and their place in it. I’m a great fan of the playworkers’ definition of play: freely chosen, personally-directed, intrinsically-motivated behaviour that actively engages the child. If children are eventually to be able to take responsibility for their own actions and think for themselves –planning, problem-solving, exercising initiative and adaptability – they need plenty of opportunities for this sort of play.
The trouble is that parental love and infant play can sometimes be at odds with each other, since the former is associated with dependence and security, while the latter is all about independence and freedom. In recent years, therefore, there’s been growing interest among psychologists in the phenomenon of parental attunement – the extent to which adults are able to tune into infants’ feelings and intentions, knowing when and how to join in with support ... and when to back off.
Research has now established that the most securely attached children are those with well-attuned parents who, through careful observation of their baby’s movements, facial expressions and vocalisations,are able to engage in a sort of ‘infant mind-reading’. For instance, highly-attuned attachment figures are happy to engage for long periods in thesocial play known as ‘the dance of communication’, where the baby imitates its mother’s facial expressions and vocalisations and she imitates his*.
Through these playful interactions (which originate at least as often from the baby as the mother), babies are introduced to the myriad ways that human beings communicate their thoughts and feelings. Social play with mum, other caring adults and – as time goes on – other children, is how every infant gradually learns what it is to be human. He also acquires the language skills through which to communicate and organise understanding for the rest of his life.
But every newborn human being must also learn how to deal with the material world on his own terms. The capacity to controllarge- and small-scale bodily movement is rooted in freely-chosen, personally-directed, intrinsically-motivatedattempts to explore the immediate environment. And so is a child’s deep, personally-embodied understanding of the relationships between objects, space, time and other aspects of material reality.
The role of a well-attuned mum in this respect is to act as a sort of personal assistant, facilitating her child’s exploratory endeavours and intervening only if his activities are antisocial or dangerous.She has to know when to stand back and leave the child to focus on his explorations and experiments, solving problems for himself and developing increasing control and confidence. Indeed, throughout childhood, parents and other adults who oversee their charges’ play environments need to know – above all – when to back off.
Love – or, at the very least, personally-directed care – therefore is always a vital ingredient in the developmental mix. If ‘personal assistants’ are primarily motivated by love or care, and thus concerned aboutchildren’s healthy long-term development, they’ll try to ensure as many opportunities as possible for self-directed play. As a result, the children’s chances of becoming confident, resilient lifelong learners will be considerably enhanced.
*Since the first carer is usually the baby’s mother, I’ve referred here to the primary attachment figure as ‘she’ and the baby as ‘he’. The gender of participants in the dance of communication is, of course, irrelevant so every use of ‘she’ could be ‘he’ and vice versa.
Nature, nurture ... and 21st century culture
Unfortunately, the relationshipsbetween adults and children don’t exist in a vacuum: they’re always significantly affected by the prevailing culture. Andtoday, in the 21st century wealthy west, this is a competitive consumer culture, beamed into every family home via a huge array of information technology. Everyone’s perceptions about love and play are inevitably influenced bytherepresentations of ‘adult love’ and ‘children’s play’that we seeevery day on our TVs, DVDs, laptops and iPads.
So today’s mums and dads are well aware that their children are growing up in a highly competitive global economy, in which human happiness is measured largely in terms of material success. In this world, parents are led to believe that ‘love’ means spending money to give their offspring the best possible start in life, while ‘play’ involves the purchase of endless commercially-produced playthings.
Parents– and other caring adults – are also influenced by the constant emphasis on danger in screen-based entertainment and news programmes, which affects our perception of risk. When the caring adults in children’s lives become over-protective, they tend to restrict opportunities for children to roam freely outdoors in natural surroundings, which is where our species is designed by nature to play and learn. The sorts of large-scale exploratory activity and messy experimentation in which children are driven by nature to engage aren’t well-suited to an indoor environment, particularly a carefully-furnished 21st century home, awash with expensive technological equipment.
Add to this the sad fact that it’s not onlyloving parents and other adult carers who supervise the nurture of 21st century children. There arenow a great many invisible adults involved in the process. These adults work in the marketing departments of multinational corporations and they know all about the attunement researchunderpinning my conclusions in the previous section -- indeed, every year they spend millions ‘tuning in’ to children’s feelings and intentions via market research. They also know all about our shared human vulnerabilities, such as fear of shame, disappointment and failure.... and how to exploit these to sell more stuff.
Sadly, theprimary motivation of these invisible child-rearers is not concern for the next generation’s healthy long-term development. It’s the need to keep their jobs by making as much profit as possible.
It’s not in the market’s interest to point out thatlove andplay are essentially free. Consequently, an entire generation of young adults now has been reared to believe that shopping is the answer to all human problems. They’ve been taught that shop-bought products– particularly the high-tech, screen-based products in which modern lifestyles abound – are far more personally fulfilling than the dance of communication orfreely-chosen, personally-directed, intrinsically-motivated behaviour that actively engages a child. Indeed, for many children over the last quarter century, this sort of ‘real play’ has been almost entirely eclipsed by screen-based entertainment of various sorts.
One of the most depressing conversations I’ve had recently was with a midwife. She told me that many new mums are busy texting their friends while she and her colleagues deliver their babies: ‘They’re not even properly present at their babies’ birth – and then they can’t understand why Baby doesn’t appreciate the beautiful nursery they’ve spent a fortune preparing.’
The market-driven solution to these young mums’ disappointment is, of course, the purchase of more and more stuff, meaning that ‘hard-working parents’ are so busy earning the wherewithal to keep their infants supplied with toys, technology, fashion items and so on that there’s little time left for tuning into their feelings and intentions. So it’snot at all surprising that, according to UNICEF, the USA and UK – two countries particularly in thrall to consumerist values – have shamefully low levels of ‘childhood well-being’ and a rapidly escalating number of mental health problems among children and young people. The resilience children need to deal with stress and adversity is not beingnurtured.
Bouncing back from 21st century problems
I’ve spent the last fifteen years researching these issues, so sometimes find myself despairing at the extent to which screen saturation and hyper-consumerism have invaded 21st century family life and values. But then I remember that raising children has never been easy: previous generations of parents had to deal with wars, disease, pestilence and other catastrophic events from which – thank God – human progresshas protected our lucky nation in recent years.
And fortunately, thanks to the combined forces of love and play throughout the millennia, we are still a highly resilient species. The problems confronting modern families are not insuperable and modern technology can just as easily be used to promote healthy lifestyles as to undermine them. It’s simply a question of rallying the age-old ingredients of resilience (check back to the list above!) to spread the word that selfish materialismisn’t good for children.
My years on the research trail have introduced me to many wonderful people – academics, professionals in a wide variety of disciplines, concerned parents and campaigners – who’ve been building positive relationships for many years to tackle this problem. I’d recommend anyone who’d like to join us to visit the websites of the UK-based Save Childhood Movement and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, based in the USA.
Positive supportive relationshipswith other concerned adults have certainly bolstered my own self-confidence and my belief in humanity’s essential goodness, helping me write a number of books on the subject (the first of which, Toxic Childhood: how the modern world is damaging our children...and what we can do about it, I’ve recently revised and updated). Save Childhood is currently running a ‘Too Much Too Soon’ campaign, against another 21st century cultural attack on children’s play – the increasingly early start on formal education. So I’m now working on another book to support their cause –Upstart: the case for raising the school starting age– which is helping me controlstrongly-felt emotions by turning them into arguments about the developmental significance of play.
The more people who join these childhood campaigns, the more communication and problem-solving skills, initiative and adaptability we can rally to improve life for today’s children. And even if you don’t have time to involve yourself fully, you can still help the cause by spreading the word about the significance of love,play and adult attunement for child development, not least for building resilience.
We can’t know what the future holds, but there’s no doubt there will be many challenges for today’s children to confront as they grow into adulthood. So they need as much reallove and realplay as they can possibly get. That way, they too will be equipped to survive, thrive and pass on human strengths to the next generation.
The Save Childhood Movement:
Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood:
Sue Palmer is a literacy specialist and childhood campaigner. The updated version of Toxic Childhood is available from Orion Books, as are 21st Century Boys and 21st Century Girls.
Upstart: the case for raising the school starting age is due for publication by Floris Books in early 2016.