What is it about the springtime? We have increasing light and the first warm days but… It can be a time of sickness and depression. There’s a clue in the story of Snow White and Rose Red — the bear tells them that in the winter the wicked little dwarfs (not the good ones) are frozen deep within the earth, but then they get free and come up to the surface, and whatever they find that belongs to people is not so easily regained. What does the dwarf horde? Gold, pearls, jewels. In the picture-language of the soul, these are the treasures of our thinking, feeling, and willing respectively. To be the steward of our own treasures, we need the eagle’s acute perceptiveness and the bear’s steadfast vigilance, not to succumb.
Because a school is a kind of social hothouse, problems often become very apparent there. And I have noticed that when a child is not ‘meeting our expectations’, for parents it can easily become the school’s fault. Teachers of course may see it as the parent’s fault. Meanwhile, the child is blaming everyone!
Significantly, we all (the children included) feel bad about it. Now, in considering what is happening in the child between the twelfth and sixteenth years, we need to recognise that the dis-eased symptoms we can see there are part of a normal development. It is just a phase of behaviour for a basically healthy child. What is pathologically abnormal is to exhibit such behaviour throughout life.
While it is natural for the twelve-year-old to be rather self-obsessed, and to blame everyone else for any problems, continuing this into adulthood is a sad symptom of a blockage, an ‘adolescence-fixation’. A person who continues to grow will gradually move from ‘blame’ to ‘responsibility’. Blame, fault, and guilt lead inevitably to a kind of paralysis, a victim-mentality which holds everyone else to ransom for failing to meet the victim’s expectations or needs. To break this crippling cycle we must learn first to admit responsibility (which is not the same thing as being ‘to blame’), and then to encourage responsibility in others. To be responsible is to be capable of a response. This is enabling rather than crippling.
It isn’t easy to change patterns. We need to recognise that we, as parents, are quite ordinary people struggling with our own issues, often with insufficient or inadequate ‘tools’ for the job. People haven’t yet learned a lot about being parents (or teachers for that matter), nor even about being truly human. We all can learn a little more, for our own sakes, and this would help us help our children.
It’s hard being a parent. It’s hard being a teacher. It’s hard being human. Unresolved grief leads to fixed grievances, and then to a desire for punishment and revenge. Acknowledged grief, however, leads to mutual grieving, which can lead towards a transformation. Grief is a stone in the heart; grieving is a flowing river. Therefore, one thing we can all try to do is not to blame either ourselves or others for how things are, or have been, but rather begin right now to acknowledge some responsibility for change, to decide that things shall not continue in the same way. Then, in changing, we might learn how to support change in others rather than only demanding change. We could decide to support each other constructively to identify issues and find some effective solutions to the problems we observe. We can do this if we are dealing with our own issues.
