Children Away from Home

A Sourcebook of Residential Treatment

Albert E. Trieschman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138520400
• eBook ISBN: 9781351528870
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The editors of this volume are committed to the philosophy of treating emotionally disturbed children in the life milieu. Both have been intensely involved in training "online" therapists--child care workers. They are convinced that there is no one "right way" in milieu treatment, and propose a electric model for treatment.

Like many of the other writers included in this book, Whittaker and Trieschman conceive of treatment as a total life experience. Th ey do not see the individual versus the group, but the individual within the group situation. They also do not see permissiveness versus limitations, professional staff versus nonprofessional staff , or the institution versus an outside of the community.

The book is divided into two sections: the fi rst is a dialogue between the editors on current issues in residential treatment and problems in treating children. The second is a collection of readings. This is one of the first sourcebooks covering the therapeutic milieu for children in residential treatment centers, specifi cally emotionally disturbed children. It is also an excellent text for courses on the emotionally disturbed child, milieu treatment, and child welfare.

Readings

Introduction

What follows is a series of selected readings in the area of residential treatment organized under the several headings: What is Milieu Therapy? Individual Treatment in a Therapeutic Milieu, Group Treatment in a Therapeutic Milieu, The Nature of Cottage Life and Strategies for Therapeutic Interventions, Staffing and Personnel in a Therapeutic Milieu, The Place of Activities in a Therapeutic Milieu, and Working with Families. These areas are of key importance to the field of residential treatment but are clearly not exhaustive.

We were constantly torn between the desire to be inclusive and the realities of the space limitation imposed upon us by publication requirements. Consequently, areas of great importance to residential treatment, for example the school program, are left virtually untouched. In some cases, as with behavioral modification, we felt that other collections had already adequately covered such areas, in others we can only hope that further volumes will be compiled.

At times we included articles because of their seminal influence on the field; clearly, the works of Bettelheim and Redl on the nature of milieu therapy would fit this category. At other times, we sought articles that would have a special interest for those involved in the day-to-day work of caring for children in a therapeutic milieu; Appelberg’s article on the care of the physically ill child in a residential treatment center and Churchill’s article on prestructuring group content provide examples of this latter type. Other papers were chosen because of their utility in staff training and others because of the particular view they present of the therapeutic milieu; Garland and Kolodny’s article on scapegoating and Polsky’s paper on delinquent subcultures would be examples of the former and the latter.

After a certain point, space (or the lack thereof) became the only important variable, and we were forced to leave out many papers of considerable merit. This section of the book is meant to be read according to interest, and it is our hope that having sampled the fare, the reader will return for a more complete helping.

PART ONE WHAT IS MILIEU THERAPY?

1. Introduction to New Staff

GUSTAV JONSSON

To you who are a newcomer to the Children’s Village, welcome! This welcome comes from the adults in the village, not from the children. For most of our children you are a very suspect person. From them you will meet with open scorn and concealed suspicion. This greeting will probably meet you: “Who are you, you old bitch?” Or, “Who is that bloody bastard?”

And that is the way it is. You are an old bitch or a bloody bastard. These children have their reasons for saying so, for that is the experience they have had of adults, and you are an adult. In the Children’s Village we have only emotionally disturbed children, who have suffered in their earlier surroundings, due to the treatment they had from adults. That is why they came here. The Children’s Village is not the place for normal children but, as it is called in official language, a home for neurotic and emotionally disturbed children.

That the children have suffered does not mean that they all have had a poor, overcrowded home, that they have had drunkards as fathers and negligent mothers. There are also children in the village coming from socially acceptable homes, but in all cases their emotional life has been disturbed because they have not received the security which they need. This is not said as an accusation against parents or others who have taken care of them. It is not always so easy to have to do with children, not even when they are one’s own.

There Are No Evil Children

From the first moment in the Children’s Village you will have to understand that unhappy children are not usually romantically pale with sorrowful faces and shy, quiet manners. This is false romanticism. In the Children’s Village you are in the world of reality. Here you find unhappy children who express their longing for understanding and tenderness in a language which is natural to them: swearing and pestering and using foul language, kicking and punching and stealing, playing truant, bad table manners, sex talk, smoking and boasting.

There is a “true story,” psychologically true, about Mr. Average Swede. On his way home from a drinking party one beautiful spring night he passes a park in Stockholm where the cherry trees are in full bloom. Mr. Swede’s heart is filled with joy and emotion in the presence of the Beauty of Nature. He grasps a lovely spray of blossoms exclaiming: “Are you blooming. . .” and then becoming embarrassed by his own emotions, he continues the sentence as a true Swede: “Are you blooming, you bloody cherry tree?” Remember that story sometime when you meet a child in the village who greets you: “Hello, you old bitch!”

You will have to understand from the beginning that expressions of sympathy and desire for contact in the Children’s Village may take unusual forms both in words and actions. “I like you, will you be my friend?” might very well be expressed by curses and a blow in your stomach. The question is if this method of expression is not often a guarantee for the genuineness of the emotion.

Anyway, you will have to understand that it does not do to dismiss these children as evil or foul-mouthed. The first commandment in the Children’s Village thus reads: “There are no evil children.”

In the Children’s Village you will find not only aggressive, noisy, and destructive children, but also shy, anxious children. These I do not need to say much about. You will like them in any case. But the longer you stay here the more clearly you will see the truth in our basic principle: that the difference between an abandoned, weeping boy and an impertinent, swearing blackguard is only on the surface.

Are the children allowed to do as they like? Do we not bother about the children swearing? Do we think it is desirable that they let off steam by swearing, fighting, stealing, and breaking windows? Should children be allowed to do as they like?

No, and again no!

Let me once and for all underline this sentence: In the Children’s Village the children are not allowed to do as they like. I know that it will not help much to say this, because for the next thousand years of the existence of the Village it will be the popular opinion, anyway outside the Village, that in it there is a crazy doctor and other blue-eyed idiots who believe that children must do as they want if they are to be happy.

The thing is that the children simply do not know what they want. Typical for neurotic children is that they are dominated by conflicting impulses, both to do and not to do a single act. This rule might apply to all of us, because the real motive behind our behavior in important matters is very often determined by subconscious factors hidden from ourselves. That this deep truth is concealed from so many of us is due mainly to our well-developed ability to rationalize, to find a motive after the act has been done. What really determines our behavior is often emotion and not reason. Because the children do not know what they want, or both want and do not want a thing, it is clear that they often get into a serious dilemma if we let them continue. They will develop guilt feelings for what they have done, and try to get away from these feelings by continuing their behavior; and then the vicious circle is completed. To let off steam in a psychological sense does not mean to act in a way that was earlier forbidden. The emotion that follows the act is psychologically the main point. If that emotion is fear, the child’s condition will be worse if he “acts out.” The theory that children shall be allowed to do what they want is a simplification to the point of absurdity. As a popular notion it is crazy. It has never been postulated by any of the prophets of so-called “free education.” It has been invented by the slanderers of the Children’s Village, and we decline it with thanks!

The Chinaman’s Fatal Mistake

Once upon a time there was a boy in the Children’s Village who became annoyed at the many foreign visitors who walked around in the Village to have a look at us. He reacted by writing a satire. It dealt with a Chinaman visiting the Village who only understood Chinese, and thus he was subject to a little misunderstanding. He thought that the children were the staff and the adults were patients. In his report on his travels he described very colorfully how the staff, by all possible means, tried to arouse the patients from their apathy and get them to be active. The patients went around in their kitchens, cooking and cleaning. The staff poured syrup in their hair, threw eggs in their ears, smothered their pancakes with pepper, and emptied the garbage can into their soup. But the patients only continued in their morbid apathy.

We might learn something from this story. It illustrates a rule discovered in other institutions where an attempt has been made to treat neurotic children according to psychoanalytic principles. The rule says that passivity from the adults is wrong, because the children experience this passivity as apathy and lack of interest in them. Everybody knows that the most infernal method of making people helplessly enraged is to keep cool, calm, and collected when they swear and rave. In Sweden it is known as the “wife-tormenting method.”

No Laissez-Faire System

It is thus no use standing looking at the children when they are breaking windows and tearing down curtains. There are some dangerous people who have read a little modern psychology and got the idea that one should not intervene. This is not psychology, it is quackery.

No Saint’s Halo

The quack treatment will result in giving the child guilt feelings, and provoke his anxiety through your going around like a saint, patient and submissive. Such a saintly attitude might be ennobled to a therapeutic attitude if account were also taken of the feelings aroused in the child, perhaps to speak to him about his feelings, explain, understand, and thereby have a calming and reassuring effect on the child. But this needs good insight in analytic therapy and cannot be practiced in a small house with many children where each of them needs different treatment. To act the saint in everyday life is, in psychological terminology, to have a masochistic attitude and testifies mainly to a neurosis in oneself.

No Martyr Halo Either

In child guidance work a certain kind of mother is sometimes met with, the so-called martyr-mother. It is she who says to her child: “How can you behave like that to your mother who is so kind to you and has given up so much for your sake.” There is a male variant, too, the martyr-father, who sacrifices everything so that his son may enjoy what he desired in vain out of life. These parents are themselves neurotic and their parental love is unsound. In the Children’s Village this sort of thing does not fit in.

We do not expect thanks from the children. You win nothing demanding gratitude. Should gratitude be of any value it must come spontaneously, and not be forced. As I said before, these children as a rule have no reason to feel gratitude toward adults, considering the way we have arranged conditions in our society for them.

No Detailed Advice

Now what shall a poor inexperienced girl do with these difficult children? What is to be done when the children do not eat, do not want to go to bed, smash windows, steal, play truant, kick and scream? That is what people ask in the papers, after lectures, in letters, and so on. You too. But from us you will get no answer. We cannot answer that question. And that is of fundamental importance. One shall not be able to answer that question.

There is no patent advice for every particular situation. Children are so unlike. One child rejects food for one motive and another does it for quite another reason. It would then be wrong to treat them both according to the same prescription. It is the same with the window breaker and the child who is cruel to animals, the thief, or any of the other types we welcome to the Children’s Villlage.

You will be forced to try to understand every child and his particular problems before you can handle him correctly. That is not learned in one day, and it is not meant to be. You must, however, grasp from the beginning that it is necessary to know a great deal about a child’s earlier life to be able to understand him. Then you will see the truth in the French proverb: to understand is to forgive.

It is intended that you shall gain this knowledge about the children as individuals by attending the evening conferences and house and school meetings which are held regularly each day or every other day. There you will have a chance to discuss what you should have done when Tom did so and so or Bill behaved in some other way. Such questions can possibly be answered or at least discussed.

Learn to Know Yourself

It is not only the children who are crazy in their own way. Even we adults are different. We too all have our particular craziness. When you work with children in a place like the Children’s Village you will discover that both the sweetness and the horror of this job are that no one gets off scot free. Whether you want it or not, an upheaval occurs in the depth of your soul. We all have our inhibitions and our complexes (mikos), and when we observe children who, unpunished, can do what we ourselves once wanted to do, but were not allowed to, it will provoke a very special agitation inside us. When we see a boy openly smoking it will awaken old memories about how we wanted to smoke as children but dared not. Still worse is to experience children who spoil food, dirty themselves all over, use exhibitionist sexual language, or do something else connected with past desires and impulses within us which we, normally enough, have learned to control.

You will also find that there are certain children you cannot stand and others you will love very much. Observe that your colleagues feel sympathy or antipathy for quite other children. Even this is connected with impulses and needs within ourselves. By observing your own reactions and contemplating them you increase your self-knowledge and acquire living psychological knolwedge beyond books and gray theories.

Debutant Illness

Many small emotional waves may become a great storm. There is usually a delay, an incubation period of a few months, before the symptoms appear. Then you will get one of two variants, an extrovert or an introvert type.

Those who get the introvert form will say something like this: I will not do, I am not fit for this sort of work. Tiredness and sleeplessness and attacks of weeping are among the symptoms.

Those who get the extrovert form will say something like this : The ideas of the Children’s Village and this foolish doctor are mad, it cannot go on like this. There must be some order. No human being can stand this.

In the first case, the criticism and agitation are directed against one’s own ego, in the second case one’s feeling of insufficiency is projected onto the surroundings.

This is not of course the basis of all criticism of oneself and the ideas of the Children’s Village. There are good reasons for criticizing both yourself and the Village; but you must find your way to a realistic criticism, not a feigned criticism.

For obvious reasons the treatment of debutant sickness will not be dealt with here. It calls for individual sessions with someone either within or outside the village who understands psychotherapeutic methods.

What I want to say is that one shall not immediately condemn either oneself or the Village as inadequate. That is why I mention the illness. It is an occupational disease in the Village and similar institutions.

Be Yourself

Thus to do a good job in the Village one must learn to know the children and to know oneself. Then everything goes of itself. One cannot give general advice on how to stop a boy breaking windows or what to do with a girl who is continually stealing. In these cases everyone has to find his own melody. If you want to ask advice, you certainly may do so. But do not try to run away from the strain of feeling your way and thinking out your problems yourself. For some it is natural to show his feelings openly and directly to the children. For others a quieter manner may be more natural. We reckon that there...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Transaction Edition
• Foreword
• Preface
• Dialogue
• Readings
• Selected References
• Index