Life is full of beginnings and endings and one of the social skills that school teaches our children is how to manage these. Every school and family have their own rituals around the start of a new terms, the end of a term and the holidays. Achievements are celebrated, practical preparations are made like buying new school uniform, sending home children’s work and so on.
For fostered and adopted children change can be fraught with difficulty because insecurity leads to hyper vigilance and stress. School can be an enormously stressful environment where a child has long periods away from their attachment figure, has to manage relationships and conflict with their peers and is expected to cope with demands to become more independent all the time and regulate their own feelings. Amidst all this they are also supposed to be progressing with the basic tasks of reading, writing and understanding the world.
So you would have thought that reaching the school holidays and being with their attachment figure would be a time to relax and feel less stress. However the likelihood is the child might be full of anxieties about the changes that are coming or they’ve been adapting to like teacher, class, topic or just daily routine. These children and young people don’t take for granted that an ending will be followed by a positive new beginning. The reality though when you are looking forward to seeing them after a day at school and are greeted by a meltdown is very stressful for any parent or carer. More than likely you too will start to dread beginnings and endings.
Remembering that beginning and endings triggers feelings of separation and loss that are at times overwhelming for these children and young people is a fantastic start for working out how to cope and support them. NICE have recently introduced guidelines about managing children’s behaviour in primary school and are recommending a whole school approach to children’s social and emotional wellbeing that enables teachers to identify and provide specific help for children already showing signs of anxiety, emotional distress or behavioural problems. So don’t go it alone talk with the relevant staff at your child’s school about the extra help they may need with transitions. If they need you to go with them to their teacher at the beginning of the day and the teacher to hold their hand and walk them to you at the end to settle back into school explain to school this will help them to self-regulate their feelings.
The need to build in rituals that help children cope by building predictability around beginnings and endings is an important parenting task that helps the child become a more secure person. For many children who have experienced trauma any kind of stress causes them to become aroused and they will then act in whatever way they feel helps them survive. The ability to be alert and focus is important but it’s important they are not becoming over anxious. Rituals can really help manage this.
A foster carer once shared with me how during the school run at the end of each day she had to pick up three youngsters. She had an agreed meeting point with the second young person she picked up and he was always late event enough the same pattern had to be followed each day. When we explored what was happening we realised that because he was second to be picked up he sometimes had to wait a few minutes for her. By being late he was avoiding the feelings of anxiety about where she was. By swapping to picking him up first his timekeeping was drastically improved.
Another foster carer I supported cared for a young persons whose food hoarding always became worse at holiday times. The young person had a packed lunch during school time so was able to manage their own food during the day. During holidays mealtimes were unpredictable because it depended on what was happening each day. By planning each day including meals and making sure there was always easy access to healthy snacks, even when not at home, this really helped the young person anxiety and reduced their hoarding.
These are examples of the day to day issues but for children and young people their relationships within school are going to involve separations and losses. Teachers change year by year, have periods of sickness, maternity leave, new jobs and this has to be accepted. It can be challenging and your child may need extra support to manage the transition but the golden thread in terms of attachment is you as the parent and carer. It is through you supporting them to make sense of the separation from a much loved teacher, marking the ending with a card and gift, and acknowledging the anxiety of a new beginning but also the possibilities that the ability to cope grows. By being alongside them through beginnings and endings their capacity to make sense of them without overwhelming anxiety will increase.