Adults Without Halos
Children’s culture rests on a convenient fiction: an adult knows better for the simple reason that he is an adult. Age does increase experience, but it issues no guarantee of good sense, fairness or self-control.
Parents, teachers and other adults can be wrong, can manipulate, can lose their temper, can defend their authority and can mistake their own mood for a teaching method. Sometimes they are trying to help and doing it badly. Sometimes they are mainly defending an arrangement that suits them.
At the same time, a child’s feeling is not automatic proof of adult failure. Both sides see the situation partially. The adult has more experience and more power. The child has direct knowledge of how he in particular is being treated.
It helps to look not only at the argument but at the repeating pattern:
- whether questions are allowed;
- whether the adult admits a factual mistake;
- whether the rule is explained;
- whether the rules are the same today and tomorrow;
- whether punishment depends on mood;
- whether fear of losing love is used;
- whether humiliation, threats or force are applied;
- whether another adult can be brought in.
Not every conflict has to be won head-on. Where dependency is great, open confrontation can make things worse. Sometimes it is wiser to end a fruitless argument, write down the facts, wait for a calm moment, or go to someone who has influence over the situation.
If home or school is unsafe on a permanent basis, you need an adult outside the system: a relative, a teacher, a doctor, a psychologist, a coach, a friend’s parent. Not a “replacement parent”, but someone able to check reality and help you act.
Having several adult reference points is especially useful. Then one person’s failings do not become the design of adult life as a whole.
The main lesson of someone else’s mistake is not a promise never to do the same. Almost every parent once saw bad parenting and drew conclusions. It is more useful to understand the mechanism: exhaustion, fear, power, the absence of any skill at talking. Otherwise, twenty years later, the same response can come out of your own mouth in a thoroughly convincing tone.
A one-off outburst and a system can be told apart by the check the next day. A teacher who shouted at the class at the end of term may say in the morning that he was wrong, and the rule stays as it was. Another admits nothing, but on Monday demands the exercise books, on Tuesday laughs at the same exercise books, and on Wednesday marks according to mood. In the first case the child is upset. In the second he has to guess the rules afresh every day — and that is a separate job, which takes more energy than the subject itself.
From outside, such a pattern is visible faster than from inside. So an adult beyond the system is needed not for comfort but for cross-checking: to find out whether what is happening is abnormal, or whether it is like this everywhere and this is simply life.