I worked at a pop-up Vaccination Clinic a few weeks ago. You know the drill by now. Line up, register, jab, wait and leave with a sticker. Anyway, the clientele changes like the tides. King tides were experienced during late summer last year when appointments for first and second jabbers seemed to coincide. Now we are entertaining the very young and the over 65s. An interesting dynamic. Conditions are choppy.
Most notably, we have millennial Mamas and Papas bringing in the younger set – those between five and 11 years of age. Anecdotally, about 50 percent of the children coming in for their shot demonstrate some form of anxiety. They line up in front of my registration desk, holding tight onto a parental glove with one hand while hugging their favourite stuffed toy in the other. This clinic has found its temporary home in a relatively wealthy area in the downtown core. We are utilizing one of the large classrooms in a community centre. The acoustics are horrid, and no partitions separate the immunization stations – so the chants of wailing children ring out loud and clear. This results in a very nervous time for those waiting in line. As well as the sound of the "No, Daddy, no DADDY, don't make me have it" ringing out in high decibels, we also have the phenomena of the runaway child. They run around the room avoiding the vaccination tables. The poor parent is just overwhelmed and everyone finds it so difficult to know what to do. When you have wailers and runners ‘performing’ simultaneously, the whole space goes into high alert. We have a cot behind a screen at the back in Aftercare, but it is anything but private.
So we have the screamers, and we have the runners. We have the poor vaccinators who sit back and take little action except doing their best to reason with the child. They are careful not to intervene in any way contrary to the new codes of practice.
And then we have the parent. And this is where the "in my day" line comes into play.
Yes, I have succumbed to using the "in my day" idiom. I have arrived at that time in my life. In this instance, my speech goes like this.
In my day, I would have taken my child and swung them onto my lap. I would have placed enough pressure on both arms, probably resulting in light bruising. The health worker would have been complicit with me in this action and, as my accomplice, quickly and forcibly got that needle into the arm. Sticking to the script, we would have used words like, look now it's done, what a silly girl you are, it's nothing, now sit down, I won't tell you again. …. Need I go on. It was the 'no nonsense' approach.
On one of my clinic days, a doctor came over to our desk in a moment of relative calm. She is a pediatrician. So she has seen it all before. She told us that she had just witnessed a wonderfully calm mother at her station. The seven-year-old daughter was distraught, she said. The mother had quietly agreed with the child that this was a difficult decision to make and said she felt anxious too. Her tone was loving and understanding. Just what you would need. She oozed confidence and serenity, said the doctor. Slowly and surely but with dogged conviction, she convinced the child to give it a go. 'I don't know quite how she did it, but she was fabulous,' said the doctor. No bruised arm, No bribery. No trickery.
So there is a middle ground. A place between heavy coercion and the new precious parenting. It begins with confidence and in teaching our children to make difficult decisions. Growing resilience. My brute force methodology suddenly seemed a less than exemplary method.
We have so many teaching moments in life, for our children and ourselves. We are gifted opportunities to stretch and to exercise resilience. These strange times during the pandemic have provided a perfect place for improv and new emotional pathways.
I previewed a book on order from my local library, The Coddling of the American Mind.' co-authored by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. The title alone had me wondering if they sold merch - a t-shirt or coffee mug perhaps?
The authors examine the new parenting culture and conclude we have bought ourselves "into a myth that students and children are inherently fragile." They go on to surmise that "for the most part, this represents an understandable desire to protect children from emotional trauma. But overwhelming evidence suggests that this approach makes kids less psychologically stable. By over-sheltering kids, we end up exposing them to more serious harm."
They offer a third option, like the example provided by the mother, so admired by our pediatrician that day. That is to provide a pathway for the child to grow emotionally and to help them to expand their resilience threshold.
My brutal method punished my child for non-compliance. The opposite route displayed during my clinic shift was to consider the child as overly precious and fragile — offering all the possible safety bells and whistles. Some kids took 45 minutes to have their jab with all the talking and the pandering to this need to feel safe.
The Coddling of the American Mind authors have coined the phrase, Safetyism —defined as "a culture or belief system in which safety has become a sacred value, which means that people are unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns." I recognize that we all have different levels on our safety gauges, so we are talking in a generalized realm here.
If the authors are correct and this rise of safetyism is dangerous. We might also ask how it affects the ways we nurture children.
What is that old biblical verse from the Book of Proverbs? 'Teach a child in the way they should go, and then when they are old, they will not stray from it.' Not much actual guidance there. But it speaks of an emphasis on parental teaching – and these days are full of teaching opportunities – anything difficult is a chance to teach something that will stay with children when they are older.
My hope is that this year has built a level of resilience in us all. That puts a slightly different slant on our desire to see the back of 2021. Perhaps we are moving into 2022 with greater strength than when we started the year.