by
Vibeke Lasson
During
a visit to the United Kingdom as a Consultant last spring I experienced
the difference in the opinions we can hold as to what constitute
good environments for children. It was not my first visit as a Consultant
at an English Child care residential home, and I had already experienced
the fear of paedophilia as a restrictive influence on the care of
children.
This fear may particularly strong in England, because this is the
only country in Europe where qualifying training is not a requirement
for staff working in children’s homes. In consequence, these
homes are mostly run by untrained staff, and the staff change faster
than the children they are there to care for because they cannot
cope with the work, which is very demanding. Staff supervision is
not “a must” either!
During my way around the home, it was intended that I was to note
obvious shortfalls and failings concerning the organization of the
home and its routines for a later discussion with the staff.
The children’s bedrooms in English children’s homes
today generally have space for 2 – 3 children. The beds are
placed at an angle to the wall. The individual child has a detached
cupboard for his or her relatively small wardrobe. As is normal
in the country, the children wear a school uniform. Only rarely
are the rooms decorated, and private belongings are sparse. Tables
for doing homework or other activities seldom exist. The room is
meant for sleep!
As I did not see towels or hooks for towels either in the bedrooms
or in the bathroom and shower, I naturally asked the reason.
“The
children are handed a towel when they shower in the morning”.
“Do they get a clean one for each bath?”
“Yes!”
“How do they dry themselves when washing before bedtime?”
“There are paper towels in the box next to the wash hand basin”.
“What would staff say if they had to wash their faces and
dry themselves with paper towels?”
“They would not like it at all”.
“Do you think children like it? And what about the resources?
Are the children to learn, “You throw your towel out for the
laundry after each bath”?
Is this the future, that human beings are to dry themselves on paper?
Shouldn’t they learn to have their own towels, kept in specific
places for each of them?”
The cupboards looked like most children’s do, rather untidy.
“Who puts the clean laundry in its place with the children?”
“The lady who does the laundry places it in the cupboard herself.”
“Are the children to live a life with personal servants?”
The frustration about my questions began to show on the face of
the Matron.
We then had a look at the bathroom.
“Where do the children keep their toothbrushes and toothpaste?”
“The brushes are handed to them with toothpaste on!”
(I had only seen a single toothbrush among the clothes in a few
cupboards).
“Where do the children keep their combs, deodorants etc.?”
There was no answer to my question. My conclusion was that maybe
it was sheer coincidence as to who was on duty, - and not because
of a decided plan, which affected teaching about hygiene for the
children.
The shower room consisted of a square room about twenty feet square.
“Where do the children place their towels when showering?
And is the door left open?”
“I do not know. English law tells us that no adult must be
present in a residential setting when a child takes a bath or shower.”
“How can you then control, praise or instruct the child about
washing oneself?”
“We cannot; we have to trust the child.”
As for the towel, apparently no thoughts had been given to the problem.
“Are you supposed to be with the child when consulting
a doctor?”
“The child has a right to be on his or her own with the doctor.”
“How can you then be sure that the child listens to and understand
the explanations of the doctor, or will be able to follow the doctor’s
instructions?”
Afterwards, I was not quite sure I could personally use this insight
into English matters for anything. I spoke to the Director about
the (to me) unnatural attitude concerning children of age 6 –
12 years being exposed to regulations which were likely to influence
their attitudes towards their bodies as being something very secret,
something which they as children were to be responsible for, not
the adults.
Nakedness had become unnatural. During a conversation later in the
day with the Director, I was told that when going to the local swimming
pool, the Director was the only person to shower without a swimsuit
on before jumping into the pool.
I recalled the Romanian girls from the children’s homes who
stayed with us on a visit around 1990. I was to take them to “Pool
Land” in Nyborg. It was out of the question that the neat
Romanian female staff would join the girls in Pool Land. If the
children were to try the fun, I would have to join them. A big and
unforeseen problem arose. I could not make the girls remove their
underwear when showering. They only spoke and understood Romanian,
which I knew nothing of. It took many tears and 15 minutes to make
them understand that: No shower without clothes was equal to no
play in Pool Land! The carrot was too big, and finally they understood
the consequences and even seemed to accept and understand the hygienic
part of the problem.
Last June the headlines in the media announced that at least 3000
children in Denmark, with a population of 5,5 million people, experienced
physical violence. Doctors, teachers and pedagogues are unaware
of this. It is estimated that the number is much higher. I wonder
how something like this can happen without adults being aware of
it. English law and my recent experiences suggested a possible explanation
about the lack of adult awareness of the problem.
In Scandinavia we have had a fine tradition of a natural attitude
towards the human body. We have had public baths where children
and adults were naked together. Children learned that their bodies
looked different from daddy’s and mummy’s bodies, which
again looked different from grandpa’s and grandma’s.
Bathrooms are a relatively new development. It is not long ago that
washhouses and kitchens were used for most “rinsing”
of the body. Here the water for the tub was heated. Mummy scrubbed
daddy as well as the children and vice versa. Since the rooms available
to a family were usually few and often cold, the warm kitchen or
washhouse was also the room where one stood and waited for one’s
turn.
With the building of many new institutions in the second half of
the 1800s, new ideals of cleanliness took hold after the contagious
epidemics which had been ravaging the population in the earlier
half of the century. Staff of residential institutions became responsible
for the residents’ hygiene. It was natural to scrub and rub
the residents - adults and children.
Everybody enjoyed being rubbed dry and cosseted. One had one’s
hair washed and nails cut. Clean underwear was handed out and naturally
talk about the process went on during the procedure. The staff could
give the body of the child a professional inspection during the
whole procedure and in this way notice changes or bruises, as well
as have a talk about how they had come about.
“Yesterday I fell from a tree.”
“Jimmy kicked me when we played ball.”
“I had a fight with – .”
“I was naughty and my mother hit me.”
“I ran into a cupboard –.”
At the annual regular health check the children had to wait in a
row dressed only in under wear, and the doctor had a good chance
to inspect the body language of the individual child beforehand,
in the presence of the teacher, later supported by the school nurse.
Here fancy words were not used, but in an everyday language the
talk was about whether the child enjoyed playing, sport, embroidery
etc. Nowadays the talk concerns physical training, mobility and
social ability.
During my 30 years of work at Udby Treatment Centre we maintained
twice-yearly health checks for the children. There were several
reasons for this. The doctor came to the unit, where the unit leader
or his deputy and I, being responsible for the meals and health
of the children, were present.
We
started off by weighing and measuring each child. Their urine was
examined. The individual child was involved and was always eager
to know how much he or she had grown, gained (or lost) during the
last half year. Generally the children enjoyed being the focus of
the activity. This created a natural opportunity for the doctor
and child to talk, for example about weight problems or other matters
which were worrying the child. The responsible adults could fill
out the memory of the child with additional remarks. I attended
the examinations regularly and this way I had a natural opportunity
to know the strengths or weaknesses of the individual children’s
physical development. The doctor attached to the Treatment Centre
was splendid at creating a dialogue with children, and in this way
teaching children to become interested in their bodies and eventually
to talk about their problems and worries.
It
was, then, my experience over many years that I was able to integrate
my responsibility for planning diets with my insights into children’s
treatment plans and my knowledge of the problems they faced at home.
The unit leader took notes about each child for their records. At
the following treatment conference on the child physical problems
were considered together with his or her other problems and addressed
in the treatment plans of every single child. The staff provided
their observations, and inexperienced staff learned what they needed
to observe and look out for.
- Does Peter need more body awareness, and how do we accomplish
this?
- Does Peter need to be controlled when eating, because he tends
to become overweight?
- Does Peter need to strengthen his muscles?
- Peter has to be taken to an eye doctor.
- Peter often has bruises when he returns from weekend!
- Peter’s spine is not straight, because the one leg is
shorter than the other one; he has to se an orthopaedist.
- The reason Peter is not paying attention is that his hearing
ability is reduced.
- If the testicles are not at place in the scrotum before his
13 years birthday---
- Peter has a phimosis; we can first try ---
- And so on.
As
the years passed on, a change appeared with these 6 – 12 year-old
children. Previously they had arrived for the examination easy and
natural in underpants, with the girls now and then with a T-shirt.
Now they entered the examination room in a bath robe wearing all
their underwear beneath.
I instructed the children: “Remove everything apart from the
pants.” This normally did not cause problems, but slowly it
changed to protests from several children, who obviously were more
shy by comparison with children in earlier times.
In the same period we had got rid of one of the two baths in the
shared bathroom of the unit, making space for two showers to spare
hot water and reduce the time filling up the bath after each bath.
All children had a shower in the evening before bedtime to go to
bed clean after the many physical activities of the day, and in
the morning, so that the group was not divided into enuretics and
others, leading to labelling. “You have to have a bath because
you urinated in your bed last night”.
We kept one bath for children who needed a back or shoulder massage
or just to relax tensed bodies.
We also had fewer practitioners on hand helping with breakfast,
picking up food from the central kitchen with the children etc.
This allowed for less supervision of bathing.
Newly-built institutions in this period only had showers installed,
and in some cases each room (which were now single) had private
bath. In private homes they also started leaving out baths to save
on the expensive hot water. New private homes had more than one
bathroom.
Furthermore both parents took up employment and thus they had less
time to supervise and nurse the children in a natural way when it
came to personal hygiene. It was not natural to shower together
and get wet in order to scrub your child.
Porn became available in the sixties and slowly children became
used to seeing magazines in the shops with nude, but generally idealised,
bodies, (as there is no money to be made from old, decayed, overweight
and worn out bodies). Here nakedness all of a sudden was turned
into shameless and interesting entertainment.
Adults now have their own bedrooms; likewise their children. Adults
have become insecure about the accepted borders to conduct and what
is natural when being together with children.
In school children from ethnic minorities have arrived with different
cultures, which have to be respected. It is difficult for the teacher
to demand Danish children to shower when little Sheba is not to.
The teacher simply cannot cope with the conflict, but therefore
also loses the opportunity to look over and monitor the bodies of
the children in a natural way.
It is too easy for the individual child to prevent others from seeing
his or her body, if he or she has been exposed to any type of violence
at home. Furthermore there are no more routine annual medical examinations
at school, where an experienced doctor can step in on seeing suspicious
scars and bruises.
During the same period much has been written about paedophilia,
which has influenced many working with children, as the risk of
being accused has risen a lot. Pedagogues and teachers are themselves
from the “middle generation” where not everybody dare
be firm in addressing children, as Sheba’s culture has a right
to be respected. Thus Sheba’s culture easily is accused of
a drift away from something which was unique in Scandinavia, our
natural approach to our body. Here I talk about the naturalness,
which is regarded by many foreigners as Scandinavian immorality.
Well, young Scandinavians are free, but on the whole their moral
sense, the borders to their conduct and their norms are all right.
When today we see young girls in the street with a piece of bare
stomach, this is not a sign of immorality, but the need of the youth
to try new styles and show themselves off. We have to protect the
ethnic Danes, so that they do not have to change their culture because
of demands from outside culture. The newcomers to Denmark have chosen
to come here, to a country with maybe a very different culture.
They must show respect towards the fact that they have chosen to
come to Denmark, which has this different - but not wrong - attitude
towards the body and the way of dressing.
The fact that we worship the sun is part of our culture. The sun
has a strong part in our northern mythology and has moved on into
modern life simply because we need the sun after the long and dark
winter. We need to take care of this culture as part of our tradition
for a natural treatment of each other. We need to be free of Victorian
prudery which, together with the problem of porn, may easily create
a very unhealthy cocktail.
Let us secure for children a childhood and youth where falling in
love can develop nicely and quietly, and where a teenager may dare
to talk about:
-
what he/she experiences about getting to know, and become attached
to, a partner,
- what it is like to settle down, and
- what it is like to give and receive emotionally, in accordance
with the stage of one’s development at the time.
Vibeke
Lasson is a Consultant with 30 years’ practical experience
in residential Child Care.
H.C.Ørstedsvej 17, st.th.
DK-1879 Frederiksberg
33 79 37 47 - e-mail: lasson@privat.dk
