Unlearning our 'bad' behaviour
When I was seven years old (a pretty tender age I think we can all admit), a boy in my primary school class would often be sent to the principal’s office. Usually, he would be in trouble for swearing when he was frustrated at making a mistake. Maybe he was stressed from being abused at home? Perhaps he had a learning difficulty or was neurodiverse? I don’t think any of the adults responsible for him asked such questions; sending him off for the strap was easier.
Afterwards, he’d walk back into class, wincing with each step and his chin jutting out – just a little defiantly – but of course, he couldn’t hide the tears in his red eyes.
I appreciate that some people reading this will think, ‘I got the cane and the strap and it never did me any harm!’ and to that, I would ask, ‘Did it do you any good?’
Even at seven years old, I could see this boy needed to be helped, not hurt. I found it profoundly upsetting that he was beaten and humiliated. So, whenever he was sent off to ‘get the strap’, I would excuse myself to the toilet and slip a note under his desk lid on the way out with little messages like, ‘I’m sorry that happened to you’ and ‘You didn’t deserve that.’ He’d come back to class, open the lid of his desk and look around to see who’d left him the note. I never told him it was me. I just wanted him to feel that someone cared.
Thankfully, corporal punishment was abolished in 1987, but goodness knows how many lashings he had endured by then. Years later, I heard he ended up in prison, so all the beatings clearly didn’t set him on a ‘straight and narrow’ path. Maybe they just taught him how to be violent.
There is a different path we can take
Fast forward to today, in Baltimore city, U.S.A., where a quarter of residents live below the poverty line, there’s a school doing things differently. More than 80% of its students qualify for free or reduced lunches, and some of the children are homeless. Naturally, a child’s stress shows up in their behaviour. And so the teachers are trying to help instead of hurt: detention has been replaced with meditation. Kids who act out are sent to a Mindful Moment Room to learn calming breathwork and yoga and to talk things through with a staff member. This school has realised that teaching children to self-regulate will improve their wellbeing and focus and build relationships with their teachers and peers.
Now, imagine if we did this the world over?
Imagine the impact we could make on young people and the future generations that follow?
There’s still a tendency to believe that adults can feel and express anger, but children must not. It wasn’t long ago that parents used phrases like ‘Children should be seen and not heard’ and ‘If you don’t stop crying, I’ll give you something to cry about’. Both approaches invalidate a child’s feelings and do nothing to teach them emotional literacy. It can even result in generational trauma.
I’m a far-from-perfect twin mum. I KNOW how challenging it is to manage a child that is in a heightened emotional state, while trying to regulate our own heightened state in response. Our energetic bond with our children can mean that when they ‘freak out’, we are too. I think every parent, including myself, has yelled ‘calm down!’ when they sound far from calm and only later realised the irony of that.
That’s why I wrote my book for adults AND children. My goal with The Little Tiger with the Big Temper was to give time-poor parents, teachers and caregivers a conscious communication tool or conversation structure proven by neuroscience to validate a child’s feelings. Once they feel safe and seen, they can be soothed.
Preparing adults for the world starts when they are children
In the Western world, we’re seeing a global epidemic of anxiety, depression and behavioural disorders in young people. Our kids are going to face extreme challenges in the not-too-distant future: global warming, the 6th extinction, water scarcity, housing affordability, a meth epidemic, along with the pressures of social media, online bullying and all their peers wanting to be Tik Tok famous – we know these issues will have an impact on our children. We can’t prevent their exposure to these things, but we can prepare them for it by teaching them emotional literacy, self-regulation and resiliency.
This is an urgent call to action. The time to start preparing children is now.
Or we will fail them.
To date, the approach to mental health has been ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. New Zealand’s teenage suicide rate is the highest in 41 OECD and EU countries, twice as high as the US and almost five times that of Britain.
So, we could say that governments haven’t been putting enough funding into counselling and support, which would be true.
But what if we look at children’s wellbeing from a more long-term, preventative angle?
⭐What if we give our children a safe space to express their emotions?
⭐What if we empathise and validate their experiences instead of shushing, distracting, humiliating, shaming, punishing, or shutting them down?
⭐What if we teach them how to self-regulate their powerful emotions using a simple breathing technique they can do anytime and anywhere to help them navigate more difficult emotions of stress, anxiety, anger and nervousness?
⭐What if we teach children when they are young and eager to learn, so they have 10 years of practice behind them before they hit those sensitive teenage years? How much more resilient would they be?
⭐What if we learn along with kids? As I see it, the challenge for our generation is that we are in what I call an ‘unlearning’. Since it is our duty as adults to model the kind of behaviour we want to see in our children, can we learn to partner with them in the calm and the storm? Wouldn’t this make a big difference to the future?
I can’t bear to see a future of doom and gloom for my children. I need to see hope and possibility. I need to hold onto a ‘what if’. This is the vision I have for my children and why I hope to make a difference with my book, The Little Tiger with the Big Temper.