BLOG PODS #15 - Punishment Doesn't Work (for troubled kids)
INTRODUCTION
This is one of the most important things I’ve learned in 30+ years of working with troubled children and young people:
💡 Behaviour is NOT the problem, it’s a SYMPTOM of the problem
Running on broken legs?
Imagine a runner has entered a race, a 100 metres sprint . Normally they can do that distance in about 15 seconds, so they’re hopeful of a good result.
But the day before the race, they break their leg in an accident. Because they’re a keen runner and they have friends in the race, they turn up on crutches to watch. Obviously they can’t run-they have broken leg after all-but they can watch.
How ridiculous would it be for their coach to come along and expect them to run on their broken leg? No-one in their right mind expects a person in that condition to run at all, never mind a sprint. No amount of protest or persuasion from the coach is going to help.
The runner can’t run. End of.
Causes and symptoms
Behaviour in troubled kids is difficult. It’s causes them no end of problems but it also presents huge challenges for those of us who work with them.
We find ourselves having to deal with children who are aggressive, or who throw things and damage property, or who hurt themselves and assault others. These kids don’t comply with the usual social rules that the rest of us-and society in general-take for granted.
When these kids become teenagers, things escalate. Their behaviour is more tricky to manage because they’re bigger, stronger, louder, cleverer, etc. but the same behaviour now ‘offends’ other people and can turn into ‘offences’ when the police get involved and prosecutions follow.
Whether as childcare workers or police officers, we are often called upon not only to try and restore some sort of order, but to mete out punishment.
My issue here is that the behaviour isn’t the problem. The behaviour is a symptom of the problem.
The issue with our runner was not that s/he refused to run but that the broken leg made it impossible. A berating by the coach achieves nothing.
Punishment, exclusion, prosecution, removal of privileges-whatever-misses the point when it’s targeted at behaviour and no thought or focus is given to why the behaviour occurred in the first place.
Caveat
Now, I’m talking here about children whose start in life has been really difficult. They’ve been exposed to abuse, trauma and/or neglect and their development has suffered as a result.
It’s these kids that need a different approach.
The majority of kids, whose families function pretty well, who are looked after and received some semblance of parental care and kindness - they may well respond well to ‘punishment’ when they step out of line. I prefer to think of it more as ‘consequences’ that aim to help them learn from what happened and avoid the same mistake in future - but you get the point.
Where children have the basic sense of stability in their lives, some attachment to the adults who raised them and whose self-identity is one of being wanted, loved and supported, they can handle consequences designed to help them. They won’t perceive them as rejection, hatred or revenge.
But troubled kids will. And it will make not the slightest positive difference to their behaviour.
An eye to the causes
If your childhood has been fraught with a lack of care, disconnection from those around you and serial traumatic experiences, your brain and body become accustomed to dealing with this. You develop:
* a heightened stress response
* a body that feels tense
* an elevated heart rate
* sleep that is disturbed and erratic
* emotions that rarely calm and run out of control, etc.
Punishing a child like this merely imposes more negative experiences that induce exactly these physical and mental states - they dial up the problems, rather than solve them. In this scenario, children may even ‘learn’ that those caring for them (foster carers, social workers, teachers, youth workers, etc.) make them feel like their abusers did!
Such approaches merely repeat the kinds of pain, fear and isolation they’ve experienced over and over growing up. In that sense, it may well induce a ‘water off a duck’s back’ response. Same old… Same old…
In other words, punishment will not work - it won’t be effective in changing behaviour in the long term. It may even do the opposite and further entrench already difficult feelings and behaviours.
These kids need something different.
Do this instead
None of this is rocket science. If children have experienced abuse, trauma and neglect, they basically need the opposite - nurture, consistent care and kindness. Things like:
* Safety - trauma-induced states like hyper-vigilance, emotional lability, tension in the body and mistrust of others, can begin to calm and learn new ways of being in the context of feeling safe. Consistent approaches, familiar people and repeated experiences of being safe, can help a child’s system stand down from alert and return to more normal levels of activation. One of the best measures of an environment that can be healing for a child, is when nothing is happening. People are just being. Life is ticking along and there’s not much to report - it’s safe, we’re here together and we’re OK. Passive, normal, uneventful safety is a lovely thing. It’s also a healing thing.
* Patience - it takes time to really mess up a child’s development. Bearing this in mind can help us and them not to expect too much change too quickly. Bodies and brains take time to adapt and, even after significant progress, can easily and quickly return to previous negative responses. Old habits die hard, especially when they’re wired into the child’s physiological and neurological systems. But time really is a great healer and patience, both in the moment and by hanging in there with them for the long haul, is key.
* Calming - one of the most common features of households and parenting that induce negative states in children, is stress. Too little money, too much sickness, too many changes, too much aggression, too much blaming, too many disappointments and too little affection… all this is stressful. For a growing child it means they spend far too much time NOT being and feeling calm. To recover, they need LOADS of it. Responding thoughtfully and empathically to behavioural outbursts is a great way to help kids to calm. Working hard to attune to how they feel, while not feeling or expressing such emotions ourselves, helps them to feel ‘heard’ and ‘seen’ and ‘held,’ while also being accepted and helped. Modelling calm responses to tricky situations - including a child’s own behaviour - is a great way to induce a return to calm in them.
* Encouragement - it would be an understatement to say that most of these kids experience very little encouragement. In fact, the opposite is true: they experience rejection, criticism, discouragement, cruelty and abuse - all incredibly negative and damaging messages. What they need instead - funnily enough! - is boat loads of encouragement. Now we don’t want to go over the top. Kids unused to it, may think we’re being patronising if we lay it on too thick. But taking opportunities to offer gentle encouragements, small positives and quiet praise will help to challenge a negative internal working model in the child and turn it around. It’ll take time, but we’re in this for the long haul, so we can afford to be subtle, but deliberate and consistent in taking opportunities to build kids up.
As I said, none of this is rocket science - and yet it has the potential to change a kid’s life!
Just asking ourselves: ‘what have they been used to and what do they need to correct that?’ can lead to some profoundly simple yet transformative ways to aid recovery.
Ways we get it wrong
Most of the approaches I’m trying to challenge here make one of three mistakes related to ‘why’ punishment seems right:
* It makes someone else feel better - most punishment finds at least some of its justification in providing payback. You did this to me/them/us/society so you deserve… There’s no thought for the impact on the child themselves, beyond how bad it might be for them and how good that’ll make others feel - the idea that this fulfils some kind of justice, imbues it with respectability. To me, this is the right-wing, tabloid, revengeful ‘othering’ of the child in question. There’s no thought for whether it’ll help, never mind how. It’s all about making someone else feel better at the kid’s expense, because they ‘deserve’ it.
* You did this, therefore you get this - this is the kind of menu-based punishment model you’d see in the criminal law, if you just applied it without judicial discretion. Courts have lots of discretion, of course, but you get the point: certain behaviours attract certain punishments. That punishments should ‘fit the crimes’ is a central tenet of a just society, isn’t it? Yes, to a point. But troubled kids need a lot of carefully tailored discretion and tons of patience when it comes to thinking about consequences - if indeed they’re appropriate at all. Merely meting them out parrot-fashion is nonsense. Once again, it fails to ask why the behaviour happened in the first place and does nothing to lessen recurrence because it doesn’t tailor the consequences to help the child.
* I have to do something or you win - one of the common tropes of professional (even personal) child care is that we - the adults - have to be seen to do something. We have to win. We must push back at this behaviour at all costs. More specifically, we can’t let you (the kid) win. This is akin to punishing a kid NOT to make them feel bad or to help them recover, but to make us look good - or at least avoid looking weak. A disappointed coach screaming at a runner with a broken leg never looks good, though. Neither, in the end, does it achieve anything at all. It’s not a competition whereby we must come out on top (whatever that is); it’s an opportunity to turn the tide in a kid’s life - we’re in this together.
If only we can resist the temptation to be punitive, to rush in with threats of punishments or consequences that are ill-thought-through, we could really move the dial for these children.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Bodies and brains that have become wired to cope with awfulness, sometimes over years of repeated abusive experiences, take time to heal.
We can take the child out of the danger pretty quickly but it takes time, safety, patience and kindness to take the danger out of the child.
Being a worker supporting kids like this is tough. Some of their behaviour is offensive, whether or not the intention is to offend. But if we allow ourselves to be distracted by it, we miss a golden opportunity to look beyond it, to dig deeper and answer the most important question - ‘what happened to you?’
Then we can start responding in ways that propagate healing.
See you in the next one.
More information:
Some of these are ‘affiliate links’ - this means I get a small reward if you buy something, but it won’t cost you anything extra!
* BOOK: What Happened to You? Conversations on Trauma, Resilience and Healing by Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey (link)
* BOOK: Working with Troubled Children and Teenagers by Jonny Matthew (link)
* WEB ARTICLE: The case of Valdo Calocane starkly illustrates the need for treatment rather than punishment (link)
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©️ Jonny Matthew 2024
