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I posted this one before the brain exercise post, but it seems to have vanished!  Here it is again!  If I find the duplicate (first one) I will delete it and keep this post.  It’s hard to read an invisible post about invisible children?

First I want to say a few things before I return to the most important mother-infant brain building article by Dr. Allan Schore that I introduced two days ago in my post.  I hope readers have found the time to at least begin reading it.  I will get back to talking about the article in depth, but it won’t happen today.

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IDEAS ON INDENTIFYING AT RISK CHILDREN:

Kids and activities – I am having some thoughts about this topic stemming from my post about myself as a young first grader as I found them in my mother’s 1958 letters.  My sister and I talked further about her experiences as an active home-schooling mother.  She told me that over the years of raising her children in New Mexico, even the most strict parents were able to allow their children to engage in ordinary and NOISY child play when groups of them were together.  Adults watched them from the sidelines, but they did not interfere, criticize, condemn, punish, or in any way separate their children out from THE GROUP.

My sister and I discussed how it would probably be possible to identify at risk and high risk children who were being raised in homes where their basic human rights as children were not being met by watching parent-child interactions at child-centered events.  Children who continually get into fights, children who seem rigid and unable to join in the play, children whose parents are ‘getting mad’ at them for doing nothing but being a child.  I guess in all the years my sister has been actively involved in all kinds of situations like this, she never noticed such negative parent-child interactions going on.

I found myself thinking last night, “Gee, maybe people like me who were severely maltreated and not allowed to be children are among a very rare group indeed!  Maybe we are in SUCH A MINORITY that we barely exist as a recognizable group at all!”

Then the thought hit me, “Maybe abused children aren’t on the at risk child watch radar outside the home in social situations because abusive and maltreating parents do not take their children to these kinds of social child centered or parent-child centered activities and events in the first place!”

Well, DUH! Linda – of course the latter is most likely true!

I think back to my own infant-childhood and know that the only time anyone was allowed exposure to ‘my mother’s children’ was when she could set up, orchestrate and control the encounter.  I also know that if I didn’t ‘behave’ perfectly, the full consequences of abuse happened when everyone was gone and nobody could see or hear them.

My mother’s letters are full of descriptions about the social conflicts she had with other people.  She starts out once we moved to Alaska defining her discomfort with her neighbors.  By the time we moved up the mountain when I was seven and the ‘homesteading’ began, there were no neighbors near us for miles!  She had herself, and especially ME right where she wanted me.

Except for the brief period of time I was allowed to join Brownies, never after that was I ever allowed to have a friend, go to a friend’s house or have one over to my house.  Never did our family – after our first few months in Alaska – participate in community life.  There were a few brief periods in between all of our moves that mother let her children attend Sunday school, but summers we were her captives, evenings and nights we were her captives, week-ends and holidays we were her captives – me of course – and most of all.

If we think we are going to identify, intervene or prevent severe maltreatment of children, somebody on the outside of the family needs to notice and pay attention.  Which children are always missing from situations that other children are a part of?  How do we know they are even missing?  (This is not even an issue for very young infants and children – how do we know what goes on to harm little ones behind their family’s closed doors?)

I am talking about children who are old enough that NORMALLY and ORDINARILY they would be ‘out there’ in the social world on some level and be seen.  We humans are social beings.  Our need to build a social-emotional brain continues on its path of development all the way through our infant-childhood as our activities within the larger world become more and more varied and complex.  We continue to build our social brain through interacting with others for our entire lives!

How well are teachers and others (especially daycare providers) who interact with young children really trained to recognize and accurately interpret child behavior so they can detect suspicious parenting practices?  No longer are parents likely to send their children to school with visible signs of maltreatment on their little body.  No longer can parents do what my mother did when she kept me out of school for days or weeks so that she could abuse me at home and nobody was ever the wiser.

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As more and more families suffer the stresses and distresses related to bringing children in to the world when they cannot stay home and take care of them, most of what used to be ‘ordinary’ opportunities for parents and children to gather together in activities is vanishing, as well.  Adults who DO remain actively involved in these social situations wont’ be likely to even KNOW other children, let alone be able to detect which children are missing – and why.

And yet as I write I also realize that the disintegration of mutual family parent-child activity times is also a sign of the growing malevolent infant-child environment our nation is increasingly experiencing.  Our inadequate 75% of fit-for-military-duty 17-24 year olds didn’t get that way over night.  The conditions within our nation are changing so fast we would be spinning if we understood the implications in terms of how they affect the well-being of children within cohesive, actively involved families.

Who can notice a child today who is really ‘missing in childhood’ even though they are living under their own parents’ roof?  Are so many of our nation’s children simply RESIDING under their parents’ roof while missing most of what children need to grow into healthy social beings?

As I write I try to focus my observations in the direction of severely abused infant-children, but I don’t seem able to do this.  The needs of children must be met all along the continuum of the years they are developing.  Deprivation of need, even far down on the other end of the spectrum for severe abuse and maltreatment changes the course of human development.  Neglect of the fundamental needs of infant-children is a growing problem within our nation, and I can’t ignore this fact.

We have such wide open holes in our childrearing net that literally 75% or more of our nation’s children are falling right through it.  It is no longer a small handful of the most terribly abused, maltreated children that don’t show up for child-centered or child-parent events so that these young ones might possibly be identified as ‘missing in action’ because they are missing the action – the very socially required activities that build children into happy, well-adjusted, safe and securely attached adults.

When the neighborhood children come over this afternoon to decorate the Holiday cut-out cookies that I better get busy baking, I know straight out that if there are any severely abused children living near me, they won’t be the ones who show up.  IF one of them showed up, I also know that I am finely tuned within myself to recognize that something is wrong in their universe.

I live in a town so small it isn’t even a town – it’s a part of the county.  We have a warm climate, and children are outside playing, parents have their doors and windows open, our houses are close enough that we can usually hear raised adult voices and children’s crying.  We still don’t know what goes on behind the closed doors, but we have a better chance of noticing when something is wrong.  (Today’s techno children, experiencing their developmental stages inside a closed house as they miss the rumble and tumble of NECESSARY group childhood play, are missing in action, also.)

We need to know that no adult who maltreats a child is a socially FIT or well-adjusted member of their species!  It is not their priority or their concern to build an emotionally regulated adequate social brain into their offspring.

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