Naomi Fisher
@naomicfisher
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Clinical Psychologist. Author. Speaker. Website: https://t.co/lNP61HBdr2. Substack: https://t.co/jZKGYJJB3I. https://t.co/63niN1wCwO.
Devon, England
Joined November 2013
The use of fear to control children is so ubiquitous that most adults don’t even realise they are doing it. They’d never describe what they are doing that way. But in so many different ways, the children feel it. Here’s what it looks like. 1/.
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Today I heard from a parent that their son was terribly upset when he got covid, because it would ruin his 100% attendance record. At the end of the year, those with 100% get book tokens & certificates in assembly. Here’s why policies like that should stop. 1/.
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Imagine a world where we said, what’s going on with the children? So many of them are angry and distressed after school. So many of them are shut in their bedrooms. So many of them are anxious and unhappy. So many of them disillusioned at 15. 1;.
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Who are these kids? Well, it’s the children with serious illness - one girl in his class has leukaemia, for example. Or the disabled child. Or the child with overwhelming anxiety. Or the child who became homeless with their mum due to domestic violence. 3/.
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It’s piling on the homework and then telling them they shouldn’t be struggling and if they think this is hard, wait until next year when it will be twice as tough. To a child who is already not managing, it seems like there’s no hope at all. 4/.
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It’s telling children that if they don’t work hard at school, they’ll be failures - sometimes not just at school, but for their whole lives. One boy told me his teacher said he’d end up under a bridge if he didn’t try harder. 2/.
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What’s the problem, you might think, with rewarding those who turn up day after day? Surely it’s just a nice little treat to recognise their commitment? As with all reward systems, however, we don’t think enough about those who don’t get the reward and the effect on them. 2/.
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It’s the kids who find school most difficult and who have the most challenges who struggle to attend. Whar happens to them when everyone else goes up to get their book tokens? They are punished. They are punished because the absence of a reward acts as a punishment for them. 4/.
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So what’s the problem? The problem is that 100% attendance isn’t about trying harder. It’s largely about luck, particularly at primary school. Luck not to get ill, luck to have a stable family, luck to be the kind of person who doesn’t find school overwhelmingly stressful. 7/.
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It’s telling them that their parents will be sent to prison if they don’t attend school more often - surely one of the most terrifying things a child can hear. Not only fear of losing their parents, but guilt - it would be their fault. 3/.
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It’s punishment systems which escalate quickly, and which involve shaming consequences like lunch in isolation, or having your name written on the board for all to see. It’s having no space for errors like forgetting your pen or having the wrong colour .socks. 6/.
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When parents talk to me about gaming and screens, it’s always about fear. ‘Will they get addicted?’ they ask me. ‘I can’t control my own use, how can a child do it?’. There’s so much fear that we have no time to talk about the benefits. So here are some of the things I see. 1/.
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Whenever there are rewards, the flip side is punishment. When we reward one person, the others are punished by the absence. When we reward someone one year, and then not the next, that again the absence acts as a punishment. It makes them feel bad. 5/.
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It’s telling those who struggle to attend school dire stories of those who stopped going to school and became addicted to drugs or involved in county lines - with the clear implication that this is what happens to those who aren’t at school every day. 5/.
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Rewards for 100% attendance reward the lucky, and by doing so punish the unlucky. The lucky feel good and the unlucky feel bad. And that has other consequences. Because making those who find school attendance hard feel bad is very unlikely to make them more able to attend. 8/.
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It’s behavioural systems where children are moved from the Sun to the clouds, or from green zone to red zone - in public. And some children are always in the clouds, or never make it to green zone. Everyone knows who they are. 7/.
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Others are more sensitive, and also more exposed to the threats because they are the ones who find things harder. They worry all night. They chew their sleeves to shreds. They obsessively check their bags for the right equipment. They can never relax. 9/.
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Of course, we know this. We know that children feel bad when they don’t get something and others do. This is in fact pretty well how rewards are meant to work. They are meant to motivate. The idea is that children will try harder to get the reward. 6/.
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This morning my child forgot their swimming kit. I didn’t have a meeting first thing and so I went into school with it. That’s because that is what I would like someone else to do that for me in the same situation. I want them to learn that when things go wrong, other people.
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Here’s the thing. You can’t tell by looking at a group of children who is going to worry or not. You can’t tell from their faces who is so worried about their lost pen that they are shaking in their shoes. They will hide it. You can’t predict the impact on each child. 10/.
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Today I heard from a parent that their son was terribly upset when he got covid, because it would ruin his 100% attendance record. At the end of the year, those with 100% get book tokens & certificates in assembly. She mentioned it in passing, she obviously didn’t think it was a.
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But fear is hard to titrate. Something that causes one person mild anxiety can cause another person intense stress. We can use fear to control, but we can’t control the fear we create. And if we are creating fear, why are we surprised when children are anxious? 13/.
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Some children won’t notice the implied threat or feel the fear because for them it’s easy to comply. They fit in well with school requirements and so they never get near the darker side of these approches. They stay in the Sun. 8/.
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Put yourself in the black school shoes of the very unhappy child who’s been told unless they get back to school & work harder their life is over. They believe it. They think they will be lifelong failures & lose hope. Children trust us. Let’s stop using that to create fear.15/.
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It contributes to anxiety, because children are aware of the consequences of not getting 100%, and some of them will become really anxious about it. For others, it will contribute to their anger and their feeling that they aren’t valued as much as others. 9/.
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These reward systems come up often when I talk to young people who are disillusioned and burnt out by school. The significance of book tokens goes beyond the money. They signify approval, status, validation - and to those who don’t get them, they signify the opposite. 12/.
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What would happen if we saw school related distress as feedback on the system? As a psychologist, I meet many children who are distressed by school. Usually I’m being asked to change that. Can I make them less anxious? Can I make them attend without protest? 1/.
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This happens again and again in our education system, and that’s why I keep on banging this drum. Every intervention should be evaluated for its impact on losers as well as winners. It’s not enough to pretend they could all be winners if they just tried hard enough, 11/.
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So yes, the proud children up the front of assembly can’t see a problem, and their parents think it’s ‘just a nice gesture’, but it’s so easy to ignore the effect on the least advantaged. We celebrate the winners and the losers are invisible, shamed into silence. 10/.
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But if you don’t even know that you are using fear, you won’t think to look. You won’t ask yourself, what emotions am I trying to generate here & what happens if some children are rather too responsive to my efforts? What happens to those who can’t comply as I want them to? 11/.
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This morning I made a mistake. As a result I was 20 minutes late for a meeting. No one gave me a behaviour point. I apologised and we moved on. I’m not in detention now. That’s because I’m an adult and I live in the real world. Why should our teenagers be treated so differently?.
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One of the most significant things we could do to change education for the better would be to really acknowledge difference. We could simply accept that not all five year olds are ready to read, and not all 16 year olds are ready to do high stakes exams. 1/.
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Imagine you start a new job and they send a strict dress code, down to the colour of your socks and style of your shoe. They also send you a list of equipment which they say you must have every day. Some of it seems a bit strange - two green pens?- but off you go dutifully to.
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What else is there? Catch yourself using fear & ask if it’s really necessary. Ask what the effect will be on the most anxious child in the class. Imagine what it’s like for the children on the flip side of these scenarios - the one who can’t attend, or who isn’t achieving. 14/.
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We all think we are trying to motivate children to work hard, try hard and behave themselves. To this end, some fear seems justified. Children want to feel less afraid, and so they comply in order to get away from the feelings. They believe us. 12/.
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As a clinical psychologist, I'm often asked what to do about school refusal. By which adults usually mean, how can we get the children to go to school and stop protesting? Here's why our kids need us to think differently. 1/.
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One of the mysteries of life for me is why we have designed school in such a way that it requires children to do so many things which are very hard for them - and which become much easier in adulthood. 1/.
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When I tell people that I work with children and families who have problems at school, they often nod and look sympathetic. 'Bullying is terrible', they say. Yes. It is, but it's not bullying I hear about most. Here's what families tell me. (with @_MissingTheMark) 1/
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Last year I was sitting in a local library whilst my son sat a GCSE maths exam. The librarian, who was in her late 30s or early 40s, asked why I was there. When I told her, she said ‘I am so glad I wasn’t born nowadays. I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing today.’. She told me.
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Imagine if we didn’t think the problem was them. If we weren’t giving diagnoses like ‘after school restraint collapse’ or ‘anxiety based school avoidance’ & putting them on behaviour programmes, but instead we saw their distress as a klaxon call saying ‘Something is wrong’? 2/.
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Recently I talked to a young person who told me about starting secondary school. We were lined up, she said, and our uniform was inspected. I had never been in trouble at primary school but they said my shoes were wrong. There was a coloured stitch around the heel. She got a.
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Maybe we’d look at their lives and ask ourselves what it’s like to be young in 2022. We’d see the pressure they are under and we’d ask if that’s necessary in their one and only childhood. We’d ask if they really need to spend their childhood taking tests and being ranked. 3/.
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I didn’t realise, when I started working as a psychologist with children and families, how many stories I would hear about distress relating to school. School-related distress wasn’t really something that came up in my clinical training. 1/.
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We’d build adventure playgrounds & make schools places full of opportunities and choices. We’d surround them with adults who valued their voices & helped them to learn about things they love, We’d build workshops and studios where they could learn skills and find meaning. 4/.
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Why is it, when we’re told that we have to prepare children for the ‘real world’ it always means making them do unpleasant things? It means making them get up early every morning, or wear clothes they hate. 1/.
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What would happen, if we saw the distress of children as a warning call? Not a problem in them, to be dealt with by professionals, but a sign that something isn’t right in the world. What If we listened to the tears of children & we asked, how could we do better? What then? 10/.
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I’m hearing more and more examples of school micro-control of teenagers. Behaviour points for the wrong earrings or socks, for not being immediately ‘on-task’ or for losing your pen. Schools say that if they control the small stuff, the big stuff will follow. They are wrong. 1/.
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We need to put flourishing at the centre of children's lives. We need to stop asking 'how do we make this child go to school' and start asking 'how do we help this child learn?'.Only then do we have a hope of an education system which works for all. We surely owe them that.15/.
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Let's imagine that we have 100% attendance. Every child is in school. The sick ones, the unhappy ones, the ones who have just lost their parent or grandparent. The ones who are only just four and can't quite manage a whole day yet without a nap. They're all in. 1/.
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@GradeScience Learn that others won't help when they are in need? I guess that depends on how you see the world.
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We’d value their differences and nurture their individuality. We’d make spaces for play. We’d start with relationships, always, and we’d offer them chances to challenge themselves. We’d surround them in unconditional acceptance and we’d help them recover when they messed up. 5/.
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We’d tell them there are second chances, and third, and fourth and that there is never only one way in life. We’d give them hope for the future, and we’d show them we believed in them, even when they fail. We’d show them that success happens in many ways. 6/.
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I see children who don’t feel competent anywhere else in their lives, feeling good about themselves when they play video games. I ask them about it and they come alive. They often can’t believe an adult is interested. 2/.
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School attendance is such a simple drum to beat. Get them to school and all will be well, goes to rhetoric. They can't succeed otherwise, we're told. Behind that drum there are a million stories. Here are some of them 1/.
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I do also see young people whose lives are really difficult, and they use gaming to avoid their thoughts and feelings. Their parents worry & start to put in bans. The thing is, the gaming is the solution they’ve found, not the cause. It’s the difficult life we need to change.5/.
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The problem is the inflexibility of our system, which prizes attendance and test results over emotional wellbeing and flexibility. Which doesn't start with what each child needs to learn, but with a set of hoops they need to jump through. 14/.
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We might say, we’re sorry the world is in such a mess. We didn’t mean your childhood to be about pandemics, and climate disaster, and economic meltdown and mounting costs. We want you to feel safe, because you are our children. We owe you that. 8/.
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I'm a trauma therapist and I work with families of children who are not fine at school. The more stories I hear, the more I am concerned that the strategies which are being used to apparently 'help' can make things worse rather than better. (with @_MissingTheMark) 1/
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If we saw these children’s distress as feedback, maybe instead of sending them to see a psychologist, we’d be asking how we could change the school system so it prioritised flourishing over curriculum, so it put emotional well being on a par with test scores. 5/.
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When we demonise screens, we risk demonising the things our children love. We denigrate their choices. We give them the message that the things they value aren’t worth the time, that they can’t be trusted to make decisions. 8/.
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When a child is struggling at school, often they are seen by professionals (like me!) who assess, write reports and make recommendations. As this process goes on, something strange happens. Here's what it is (with @_MissingTheMark) 1/
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They are the canaries in the mine, letting us know that all is not well. Their distress is a product of the system, just as much as exam results. As long as we continue to ignore it, it will continue to multiple. It’s the system which needs fixing, not the kids. 7/.
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There are things we can’t control - but other things we can. Our priority for childhood could be emotional well-being, relationships & opportunity. We’d choose joy. We’d make happiness an key educational outcome. We’d judge schools by how pleased children were to be there. 9/.
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We’d listen to what they said & take them seriously. We’d stop assuming we always know best & we’d let them make some choices themselves. We’d tell them they can’t be ‘behind’ because there is no race. We’d let them make mistakes & we’d be there to catch them when they fell. 7/.
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We can learn to play Roblox, or Brawl Stars, or Minecraft, and appreciate the connection that that gives us with our young people. We can ask about their progress and about their new game. We show that we are interested in them. And from that seed, other things will grow. 10/.
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'Be More Resilient'. As a psychologist, it was a surprise to me when parents started telling me how much they hated the word 'resilience'. To me it sounded like a good word, an empowering one. Not to them. Here's what they tell me. (with @_MissingTheMark) 1/
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I see young people who are really isolated, starting to make connections through online gaming. They can start by in-game typing and then move into voice chat. The shared game takes the pressure off, and they can relate. 3/.
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This is a banner which was hung in at least three schools in York by the South Bank Trust, a MAT. It is harmful to young people and their families, and it is dishonest. This is why. 1/
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Imagine you're in a job you really don't like. You're bored, you have few choices about what you do, and you don't feel you fit in. Each Friday an 'Employee of the Week' prize is awarded & the pressure is intense. Every night you go home with hours of extra work to complete.1/.
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I meet young people who can regulate their emotions with their tablet, taking some time out in their day to put on headphones and sink into their safe zone, meaning that they can carry on afterwards. It’s such a useful and portable way to take some time out. 4/.
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I work with children who are unhappy at school. One family told me what a therapist told them to do with their school-refusing 5-year-old. 'Put on his uniform', he said, 'and don't let him do things he likes until 3pm. Don't interact'. Here's why that is a misguided idea. 1/.
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Here's one easy hack which could improve teenage mental health. Stop telling teenagers that their GCSEs are the most important thing they'll ever do and that if they don't do well, their future life will be blighted. People say this to motivate teenagers but for many it has.
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But none of that will change the core of the problem - which is the way that this child experiences school and how it makes them feel. Not because there’s anything wrong with the child, but because there are things about school which they find deeply stressful. 3/.
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When I suggest to parents that they spend time with their children on screens, they return surprised. ‘We had no idea that they were doing so many things’ Or ‘they are building games or learning how to code’. It’s not longer the ‘screen time’ bogeyman, it’s real life. 7/.
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It’s the pressure, the lack of choice, the loss of time to play, the relentless competition and the behavioural charts. It’s the way that school is organised, with a curriculum planned out by someone miles away who had no idea of the interests of this group of kids, today. 4/.
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I'm a clinical psychologist. This means that I use psychological theory and practice to help people with their mental health. I have two doctorates, one in developmental psychology and one in applied clinical psychology. In the therapy room, I hear stories. People tell me things.
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For no, I can’t make children attend school without protest when every part of their body is telling them that it isn’t the right place for them. I can’t make them less anxious when anxiety and shame are being used to motivate them. There’s nothing wrong with the children. 6/.
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When we instead join with them, we give them the message that we are interested in the things they enjoy. Even if we aren’t interesting in gaming, we can be interested in our young people and what makes them come alive. We can value the joy. 9/.
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I’ve been talking to young people who have struggled with school attendance. Sometimes called school refusers, or phobics, or those with emotionally based school avoidance (EBSA). Here’s what I’ve learnt. 1/.
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I talk to young people who are furious about rules controlling every part of their lives which have nothing to do with learning - hair styles, silent corridors, black-shoes-not-trainers and wearing a blazer on the way to and from school. If they refuse, they are 'disruptive'. 4/.
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We need to think differently about children who aren’t fine at school. We need to stop saying the problem is them. We need to stop the interventions which assume their feelings are irrational. That’s what I’m talking about next week. Come and join me.
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What should we do about attendance? Here’s a pathway I hear way too often. Child manages primary school fine, is happy there and excited to go to secondary school. They start, bright eyed and bushy tailed, and like many eleven-year-olds they find the transition hard. It’s a big.
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Families often tell me that when their child protests loudly about going to school, teachers tell them that if they take them home, this will 'reinforce bad behaviour' and make it likely that they will 'throw more tantrums to get their way'. Here's why that advice is wrong. 1/.
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I meet many parents who say they have no idea what their children do on their devices, that ‘screen time’ is time for them to get on with other tasks. They treat screens in quite a different way to their children’s other passions. They don’t see it as worthy of their time. 6/.
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When adults start to force a child repeatedly into a situation whilst they resist, we are setting the stage for trauma. The child cannot say no, they cannot trust the adults around them to listen, and their voice is being ignored. 10/.
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If you want more, I'm doing a webinar on school trauma next Wed. One word of caution.I won't tell you how to make them go to school if they are unhappy there.I won't tell you how to ignore their protests.Look elsewhere for that.This is different.
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Today I talked to a young person who stopped going to school in Year 7. He told me, when we looked around the school they said that detentions were only for when you did something really wrong and most people didn’t get them. Then, when I got there, I found out that in nearly.
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The problem with these approaches is that they don't listen to the reasons why the child doesn't want to go to school.They have decided that the problem is the refusal, rather than the things which have made the child refuse.They encourage parents not to listen to their kids. 8/.
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A Thought Experiment. What would happen to our schools if young people had the right to leave? If they could say, this isn’t for me, and go somewhere else where supportive adults would help them do the things which mattered to them? 1/.
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School Absence Laws are harming our young people. Yesterday I talked to a group of child therapists about trauma and neurodiversity. Spontaneously, they brought up the effect of government attendance policies on the young people they work with. Here's why we need change. 1/.
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School trauma is much more complex than school refusal. We need to start asking 'What's going wrong here?', rather than 'How can we make them go?'. We need to see school refusal as feedback, sometimes the only feedback children can give. 12/.
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Who's measuring the side effects of the way we educate? I see them in my clinical work every day. Educational research typically measures the wanted effects, but ignore the results we'd rather not see. Here's what I mean. 1/.
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I was talking to a grandmother last week about schooling. ‘I can see the difference’ she said. ‘When my children were young, primary school was relaxed. If the weather was good, they went outside and ran around. If they were sick, they stayed at home. Now with my grandchildren
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One of the basic tenets of trauma therapy is understanding that people experience the same event in different ways. For one person, an accident ‘near-miss’ leads them to feeling lucky and blessed, whilst another feels terrified. Someone else is furious with the driver. 1/.
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We require them to sit still when they are desperate to move. To stay in their seats when they want to crawl under the table. To keep quiet and listen when their body wants to play and shout. 2/.
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What is it that is so crucially important in school that we should prioritise attendance over everything else, and no matter what suffering it causes? As someone who missed a lot of school, I'd really like to know. 3/.
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To all those arguing that micro-control at school prepares teenagers ‘for the real world’ - you’re wrong. In the real world people have to make decisions for themselves. Micro-controlling teenagers denies them the opportunity to learn self-control. Submitting to being controlled.
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What would happen? What would be happening in those school buildings which was so amazing that it would be worth the suffering and distress it would take to insist on everyone being there? 2/.
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I talk to children who tell me that the noise and smell of the dining hall hurts them, and the chaos of the playground frightens them. They're doing okay academically and so school says there's no problem, just keep coming in. 3/.
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