Camila Batmanghelidjh
SHATTERED LIVES
Children who live with courage and dignity
176pp. Jessica Kingsley Publishers. £13.99 (US $19.95).
1 84310 434 2
Jane Waldfogel
WHAT CHILDREN NEED
256pp. Harvard University Press. £22.95 (US $35).
0 674 02212 2
Stuart T. Hauser, Joseph P. Allen, Eve Golden, editors
OUT OF THE WOODS
Tales of resilient teens
310pp. Harvard University Press. £18.95 (US $27.95).
0 674 02173 8
A newborn child exudes such captivating charm that few parents shake off the illusion that the first year’s normal development is something extraordinary. But the ordinary miracle of development is often forgotten in other phases of rapid change and growth. Adolescence, in particular, invites a very different range of responses in adults, from tolerance to irritation; but the vulnerabilities of the teenage years are deep, and the fact that so many teenagers do thrive should also strike wonder in us. The adolescent years mark a period of opportunity and risk, a time when bad habits that can last a lifetime are more likely to be acquired, when the desire for self-agency peaks but skills in self-control and forward planning dip. When things go wrong, enormous resources are required for recovery. Three new books propose strategies to set damaged children and teenagers back on the track to maturity. While two of them cover familiar ground in worthy but unoriginal ways, the third blasts an exciting new route to understanding the process of human resilience.
In Shattered Lives: Children who live with courage and dignity, Camila Batmanghelidjh tells her own impressive story as the founder of Kids Company, an organization which now serves twenty-five schools across London and reaches 4,500 children through therapeutic and social work services. Her first charity began in “a discarded broom cupboard which happened to have a window”, and was funded partly through grants from several small foundations, though she also used her own funds from a re-mortgaged flat. In this account her compassion eclipses what is intended as the main focus – that is, the children themselves and their own resistance to adversity; for Batmanghelidjh’s indiscriminate empathy and sense of outrage place a screen between her story and what we really need to know. She bemoans the “socially depleted structures” which fail to protect children; she calls to account the “corruptions and injustices” that led to her charity being evicted from one of its venues, and excoriates those clinicians who “exclude” children who are not likely to provide “positive outcomes”; but diffuse compassion and generalized rage, however genuine, do not address the challenge damaged children pose.
The theoretical basis of Batmanghelidjh’s therapeutic aim is familiar: experiences in childhood are fundamental in creating emotional and behavioural repertoires in adulthood. Central to the formation of character is the child’s intense relationship with the mother or other care-giver. Infants, in order to thrive emotionally and physically, require a well-attuned maternal experience, achieved when the significant care-giver is sensitive to the child’s needs. If the attachment is robust and responsive, the child develops a sense of security. If the attachment is inconsistent and unpredictable and is not in tune with the infant’s needs, the child develops an insecure or ambivalent attachment. To clinch her argument, Batmanghelidjh uses evidence that Romanian orphans who experience severe neglect in institutional conditions are often unable to form attachments in later life, and become violent and aggressive. She sees it as her task to inject the damaged children with whom she works with sufficient heartfelt empathy to replace a carer, and to modify behaviour by providing an alternative caring relationship.
This theory of harm and healing has gone unchallenged in some therapeutic quarters for the past fifty years. While not entirely false, it takes a simplistic view of childhood experience, adult outcome and psychological remedies. In What Children Need, Jane Waldfogel guides us through more closely defined approaches to questions about the effects of parental care and attention and takes a pragmatic view of the way children adapt to variations in their environment. When Waldfogel considers the importance of early childhood experiences, she tightens up the meaning of “critical period of development” to designate, for example, a specific timeframe during which experiences either allow or suppress the expression of resilience genes. The critical period here is analogous to that in a cat’s development of vision: cover the cat’s eyes during that time, and sight will never be restored. Thus, infants who have experienced poor institutional care for more than the first six months of life exhibit more intractable problems than those subjected to neglect for a briefer period. Yet recent work with Romanian orphans poses a direct challenge to standard attachment theories by showing great variation in individual response, with some neglected children showing immense resilience.
It is resilience that Stuart T. Hauser, Joseph P. Allen and Eve Golden examine in their study of recovery among a group of adolescents so disturbed that they had to be confined to the locked wards of a residential psychiatric hospital. The rates of recovery were not good: twelve years after hospitalization, fifty-eight of the sixty-seven former patients still lived disturbed and unhappy lives; but in Out of the Woods: Tales of resilient teens, the authors change the standard question, “What experiences contributed to such breakdown?” to “Why did nine children become successful and optimistic and trusting adults?”.
Instead of focusing on the broad dimensions of risk and protection – genetic endowment, parenting, opportunity, and the social issues of money, education and status – they ask why resilient capacities develop in certain children, how they work and what we can do to nurture them. This liberating shift allows an imaginative drive into the psychological processes by which people can negotiate adversity.
The two common explanations as to why some people bounce back from experiences that knock others to the ground are nurture, usually from responsive and loving parents, or genetic good luck. Yet neither of these provides a satisfactory answer to resilience. In the adolescents Hauser and Allen study, nurture was for the most part highly problematic, and is not likely to have been the foundation of their resilience. On the other hand, to attribute resilience to genes implies an absolute endowment, and that is inconsistent with the precariousness of resilience. What we want to identify are the skills that allow any resilience genes a person may have to be activated. For a third and more satisfactory explanation of resilience is that some young people are able to reshape their own environment in ways that allow them to exercise strengths that, although potentially present before, had no room to flourish in chaotic or threatening old settings. But how can researchers “learn to see in the dark – learn to recognize signs of health even when they are obscured by troubled behaviour”? While psychologists delineate adolescent “symptoms” with elegant precision, they have hitherto found it much harder to talk exactly about positive signs of development. Such markers are particularly difficult to spot in the teenage years, when critical or defiant or feckless behaviour may disguise creative efforts towards self-determination, self-understanding and the capacity to sustain strong, mutual relationships.
The researchers embarked on their “seeing in the dark” task by listening carefully to the stories of the young people who had recovered from severe psychiatric illness. They contrast the resilient group not with those who fared the worst, but with an equal number of former patients whose outcome was assessed as average. As sceptical developmental psychologists, Hauser and Allen would not ordinarily have set much store by a talking cure; but they came to recognize personal narrative as a resource and a tool, a way of grasping how people create and maintain meaning over time. They analysed the interviews of their sixteen subjects – the nine resilient ones and the seven in the contrast group – and noted how they talked about change, about relationships, and about their developing ideas of themselves. They found that those who were able to process difficult material had richer and smoother narratives. They came to realize that the significant questions to ask were: does a speaker stick to generalizations, or can she see nuance within a situation? Is a story flexible and inclusive, or closed and static? Does the speaker welcome opportunities for change, or resist them? Are relationships tolerated, recruited, or rejected as threats? Can a speaker focus on emotionally taxing experiences or does she respond with vagueness, avoidance, confusion or by changing the subject? Does the speaker see herself as a force in the plot line, or as a bystander?
While the stories of the contrast group were structurally simple, flat and disorganized, those of the resilient teenagers were complex, vivid and clear. The teens whose stories lacked complexity faded out when asked why they did something or when asked to describe what they generally do when things don’t go well; their lack of emotional awareness was frustrating, and these teens had a tendency to foment trouble as a distraction from their failure to understand their difficulties. The resilient teens did not always begin with complex, broad or coherent narratives, but they could shift ground. Here is Rachel dealing with a formulaic account of her family, and then working to locate problems: “It’s more or less like a family – but not really – just like in a family set up – sort of”, and then she begins to identify a lacuna: “They’re upset, but you know, I don’t really know how they feel if they don’t say anything; it’s just that they get mad”. And here is Pete, who, at fourteen, stole a gun and brought it to school, gaining awareness of his reason for scaring people: “If you only feel safe when people are scared of you, they might not want to hang around. But if they aren’t scared of you then maybe you don’t want to hang around”.
There is nothing comfortable or predictable in the strategies of resilient teens. They engage in many trials, and commit many errors, and suffer many self-generated setbacks; but, unlike the contrast group, they learn from the storms of adolescence, absorbing lessons in interpersonal psychology, in handling feelings, and in shaping their environment. Stories may help to bring order to our experiences; they may introduce new themes of thought and broaden perspective. But do “good stories” – those exhibiting coherence and flexibility and complexity – account for successful adaptation or reflect an ability to manage adversity? Hauser and Allen argue that the answer is, “Both”:
We see this reciprocal function very clearly as changes in stories trigger new perspectives – constructive and not – about situations, relationships, goals, and all the other decisive elements in an individual’s life, and the new perspectives then influence later choices. The narratives illuminate a very shadowy corner of resilience studies: the question of how resilience evolves or doesn’t, and how it is informed by experience.
Out of the Woods marks several points of wide-ranging significance. First, it confirms that qualitative analysis of a small number of narratives can make a huge impact on psychological theory, as long as the right questions are asked and the material is assessed with a fresh ear. Second, it shows the personal narratives we all engage in are parts of a continuing effort to make sense of life, as well as a source of renewal and growth. Potentially exciting, too, in this study of resilient teenagers is the new angle it provides on the so-called talking cure. The curative powers come not from the expert who claims to hold the master key to interpretation, as in psychoanalytic theory, but from the patient who hones his or her skills of reflection, understanding and revision. This may explain why some psychotherapy is effective, even though the underlying theory is flawed, and why some psychotherapy is destructive, even though some of the underlying theory is correct: what matters is whether the psychotherapist’s interpretations expand or diminish personal narratives. When we compare this approach to narrative with the crude model used by Batmanghelidjh, who argues that “talking through a problem is like releasing steam from a kettle that has been boiling”, we can see how far Hauser and Allen have brought us.
Density and complexity of narrative may mark resilience in other areas, too. Five years ago, initial results of a highly speculative study on ageing were published using the diaries of nuns in the same convent. While their similar lifestyles presumably controlled the effects of many possible variables, their writing styles varied greatly, in the same way as the stories of the resilient teens and those of the contrast group. The nuns whose writing (even during their youth) was more rigid, reductive and repetitive had a high incidence of later mental impairment, particularly from Alzheimer’s disease, whereas the nuns whose youthful writing showed “high idea density” and grammatical complexity were mentally intact. Highly speculative, yes, but such differences are well worth exploring in the light of what Hauser and Allen have discovered about resilience in adolescence.
