When I wrote Sometimes I Feel… I knew the illustrations would be tricky.
The book was written in almost desperation as a response to having heard very small children tell me or other adults that they felt ‘depressed’ or ‘anxious’.
Now, I’m not a diagnostician, but I can be fairly certain that mostly, small children don’t develop language like that spontaneously! These are words they’ve been given by grown ups who, with all good intentions, want their children to be able to communicate their feelings.
The thing is though, anxious and depressed aren’t commonly found in children – they exist, for sure, but the number of children formally diagnosed with such conditions is minute.
Why?
Because in the same way that we are what we eat, we are what we’re told about ourselves.
Children’s understanding of their feelings and emotions can only ever be as sophisticated as their own access to language is – thus, if we give children words like ‘depressed’ and ‘anxious’, when what we mean is ‘sad’ and ‘frightened’, we’re pathologizing perfectly ‘normal’ responses to stuff.
The danger of dishing out pathologizing labels is that that potentially, that label will impact a child’s view of themselves FOREVER.
Children’s brains continue to develop rapidly until they reach the end of adolescence, so we try to not label children in ways that might have fitted one snapshot piece of ‘behaviour’ observed when they were six, but which will continue have an impact on them when they’re sixteen and that ‘behaviour’ (presentation, if you prefer) is long gone.
Feelings are transient things, it’s perfectly possible that we’ll go through hundreds of different feelings in a single day and our children are no different.
They too, will experience many different feelings in a day and encouraging them to name those feelings appropriately and be open to discussion about them can only be a good thing.
Thus, SIF was born. A book full of child-friendly, age-appropriate words that accurately describe lots of typical child feelings in ways that encourage their adults to be curious.
If someone told you they felt ‘fizzy’, what would that mean to you? I bet it isn’t the same as it’d mean to the person feeling it!
If someone told you they were feeling anxious or depressed though, you’d probably have quite a clear idea of what that means to you AND them.
SIF aims to get children and their adults talking about feelings in ways that don’t encourage labelling or provoke conditioned responses from a system that will potentially engage the child in reams of unnecessary ‘intervention’ and ultimately, lifelong labelling.
If a child told you they were depressed, what would you say back to them?
If a child tells me they’re depressed, I always ask, “Like sad?” and usually, they agree that sad is an accurate reflection. Likewise, if they tell me they’re anxious, I always ask, “Like frightened?” and guess what… They usually agree with that, too!
Sad and frightened might not conjure up positive responses in the adults, but sadness and fear are both inarguable realities of adult life. ALL change is scary – even if it’s for the better (just think about walking into a new job on the first day, or joining a new class or activity…)
If we’re working from a child-centred pint of view (and, IMHO we should be!) then the outcome of the above is that the adult will decide the child needs a pathologizing label not because they believe the child to be anxious or depressed, but because labelling removes the adult’s responsibility for changing whatever it is that’s making their child sad and frightened…
All change is scary, remember?
Sometimes I Feel… is intended to open conversations about feelings and encourage adults to hold space for and be curious about, those things they don’t feel comfortable with. Its intention is to reincarnate the idea that sometimes, things are just shit and there’s little to be done about it except show the requisite resilience to bounce back and go again.
It wants to remind parents and other adults that it’s not their job to prevent ‘bad stuff’ happening to their children (run-of-the-mill ‘bad stuff’ like friendship issues or academic struggles), it’s their job to make sure their children have the tools to deal with the ‘bad stuff’ when it inevitably does happen.
It wants to get people talking about the importance of allowing ‘negative’ feelings in and understanding that their purpose is to enable us to grow our resilience and coping strategies.
It wants people to think about whether the ‘behaviour’ they’re seeking to have labelled really is exceptional, or whether, in the grand scheme of things, it’s an entirely appropriate response to entirely inappropriate circumstances – if the child in question is living with an adult who IS suffering from depression and anxiety, it’s not unlikely that the child’s presentation will be a reflection of their adult’s mindset, is it?
Does that make the child depressed too…?
Nope!
It means there’s a child in front of us who is displaying perfectly reasonable (or usual) reactions and responses to a thoroughly unreasonable (or unusual) set of circumstances.
Appropriate and proportionate should be the yardstick for this sort of decision-making…
Is the reaction or response appropriate and proportionate to The Thing that happened (even if the ‘behaviour’ observed is inappropriate)?
Yes?
No diagnosis required – that’s human nature doing its thing!
No?
Now, this is important…
By whose standard is the response disproportionate or inappropriate?
If the standard is the adult who is already suffering from a condition that necessarily makes their own reactions and responses to stuff inappropriate and disproportionate, it’s probably not the most realistic reflection of the CHILD’S situation…
If the standard is adults with professional qualifications and experience, and importantly, more than one discipline – ie school staff AND social care staff – then perhaps further exploration is justified.
Sometimes I Feel… is a very useful tool for establishing ‘reasonable and appropriate’ because it gives children other options to describe what they’re feeling.
I started this blog talking about tricky illustrations and I know that it would appear that I’ve gone off on a total tangent but, here’s the golden thread to pull it all back together…
There are many, MANY adults out there currently who are seeking to have children diagnosed with lifelong labels for their own reasons – reasons not to do with the welfare or best needs of the child, but to do with themselves. Very few of these adults will enter into discussions about alternatives to pathologizing because they’ve already made their minds up and they believe they know best…
It's very easy then, for them to disengage from or dismiss anything they perceive as a challenge to their decision-making.
If the characters in Sometimes I Feel… had been human, they’d have immediately alienated SOMEONE. Someone who would have said, “But that doesn’t look like me!” or “That’s not what my culture / belief is”
In creating the Feelie Beans, we immediately made connections with the CHILD. There’s literally nothing that could be deemed offensive or ‘ist’ about a group of cartoon critters! There’s no opportunity for a child to think, “That representation of a human doesn’t reflect me”
By personifying the feelings and de-personifying the characters, we hope we’ve created a non-hierarchical, non-judgemental, entirely representative and equitable group whose ONLY job is to make it feel safe for ANY children to identify with them and therefore make it easier for the child to speak up about how they’re feeling.
We all know it’s good to talk, right?!
Sometimes I Feel… and its companion resource, Sometimes I Need… My Beanie Buddies form the basis for the JLTS EQ (Emotional Intelligence) Toolkit, suitable for EYFS and KS1 children.
Top Tips
If you’re genuinely worried about your child’s mental health, seek advice from a mental health professional. Start with your GP and ask for a referral to a specialist service such as CAMHS. It’s important to remember that a ‘discernible mental health condition’ will be CAMHS referral requirement, and if they turn the referral down, it may indicate that your child IS struggling, but they’re more likely to be suffering from stress or trauma-related issues than a mental health condition (and this should be seen as a good thing!)
Be clear about the language you use with your children when talking about this stuff. Especially adolescents and especially now when every other social media account is proclaiming the world’s full of narcissists and being ‘triggered’ is a daily occurrence. If you mean “Cheesed off and stressed out”, say that! Be clear with them that mental illness is not a fashion statement nor a trend they should want to be part of, it’s an horrific thing to try and live with and we should all be doing everything we can to be clear about the difference between “Cheesed off and stressed out” and “Depressed, triggered, and anxious” (all of which have very specific and serious definitions and implications in their correct, medicalised context)
Before you go ahead and try to get a child diagnosed with anything, ask yourself whether their whole context has been considered. Is this a child who is living with adults who are struggling? Are you seeing a reflection of chaos or unresolved trauma in the family unit or is this definitely a stand-alone phenomenon in the child? Mistaking trauma or chaos for mental illness won’t help anyone – chaos and trauma can be addressed successfully, but dealing with one person’s ‘behaviour’ among a sea of unaddressed chaos and trauma will only usually make things worse when the ‘interventions’ for the mental health condition fail to help. Our Holistic Assessment Framework is designed precisely to find all of this contextual information out and help inform decision-making about what may or may not be helpful to the child.
If you hear hoofbeats, think horses not zebras. In other words, don’t go diving straight for the pathologising lifelong labels. Occams Razor (you can read our blog on that here) states that the most likely outcome is probably the right one. So, given that the amount of children who really DO suffer from mental health conditions is infinitesimal, it’s far more likely that you’re dealing with a child who is struggling with something emotionally challenging, or whose parents may need support, or for whom there is something specific in their current or historical context – for example, the child who lived with domestic abuse for the first five years of their life isn’t depressed or anxious, they’re traumatised. The child whose grandparent died last year doesn’t need an ADHD diagnosis, they need support around their grief.
The ‘symptoms’ of ADHD, Autism, grief, or age-appropriate developmental exploration (to mention but a few) are often exactly the same… A child with difficulties will present itself to an uninformed world as a difficult child… See a child differently and you’ll see a different child. By exploring context and being curious about what happened five minutes ago, or even five years ago that might cause this seemingly inexplicable, inappropriate and disproportionate ‘behaviour’ to suddenly be reframed as appropriate and proportionate, we remove the desire for ‘fixing’ or ‘punishing’ and replace it with compassion and a desire to help. That can only be a good thing, can’t it?!
Buy Sometimes I Feel… and make a regular date with your children to read it and add new feelings words of your own to the Feelie Beans’ collection! (Send us any good ones and we’ll consider giving them their own Feelie Bean!)
See our Therapeutic Stories page for our series of Therapeutic Stories, or visit my author page on Amazon to buy them!
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