Reflecting on... being old enough

Six-year-old Jessica talked about her hamster. ‘He looks funny and doesn’t want to play anymore.’ Jessica’s hamster had died but ‘because she’s too young to understand’ her parents substituted the much-loved pet with a replacement hamster and said nothing. Two adolescent brothers have diagnoses of schizophrenia. Their ten-year-old brother Miles has a worrying presentation which requires assessment. An offer of family therapy has been accepted but the boy’s parents don’t want Miles to attend ‘because he’s too young to understand about mental illness’. Eight-year-old Leon’s grandfather died. They’d had a close relationship before Leon went into care and became estranged from his family. Professionals decided that Leon was ‘too young to attend the funeral’.  Twelve-year-old Elsie believed she was becoming a monster. Evidence for this was hair on her ‘privates’ and blood in her knickers. Elsie’s father withheld consent for her to attend sex education classes throughout junior school ‘because she’s too young to know about that sort of thing’. 

Anecdotes like these make me incredulous at adults who deny children knowledge about their experienced realities. Not-knowing is an unbearable position so inevitably, ‘unknowns’ are filled with worry or fantasy; ‘my hamster is sick’; ‘my grandfather didn’t love me’; ‘I’m going mad like my brothers’; ‘I’m a monster; I’m bad’. Consequently, these negative beliefs manifest as ‘acting-out’ angry behaviours or ‘acting-in’ withdrawal and despair. Adults seek to medicalise children when all they are trying to do is make sense of their experiences. This is buck-passing and abusive.

Questions come to my mind about what is unknowable or unthinkable about and by whom. It isn’t usually the child, equipped with innate curiosity. I have engaged in many ‘facts of life’ conversations in children’s therapy sessions. Initially, I wondered if this was beyond my remit but I would argue not. Therapy is a safe space where children bring their worries, fears and fantasies to be thought about and made sense of. So I have explored ideas about death with a six-year-old, explained the characteristics of mental illness to a ten-year-old, described what might happen at a funeral to an eight-year-old, and discussed pubescent development with a twelve-year-old. And I have done so confidently and candidly. Children are never too young [whatever their age] to be treated with respect and protected from ignorance. They can manage information about life, sex, illness and death if an example of being able to manage is modelled for them. They are always old enough for that.    

 

First published in BACP Counselling Children & Young People, December 2013