Who among you will fall on the floor in an old style faint if I say that I don't really think that kids are as "resilient" or "adaptable" as we think? Because every person, to a tee that I have spoken with about our big school change (or any other change of ours for that matter) has been sure to inform me of just how resilient kids are. It's a way to placate the worried mom, got it.
Since my son no longer eats turkey bacon, only pork bacon, I beg to differ. I suspect, actually, that children just have a limited emotional vocabulary and even more limited selections for responses to emotional situations. I mean, I'm no child psychologist, (lucky for the children who have been saved from that "therapeutic" experience), but it seems like people get more versatile and controlled in their reactions the older they get, not the younger they are.
Take my baby. That drooly one who helped me to decide on not attending private school when she ate the bill. Remember her? She is one year old now and she has vastly increased her emotional reaction repertoire. Now she sits around, laughs AND cries. Before, see, she only cried and sat there. 33% increase in just a year! Well, she is exceptional of course, but wow!
I remember a time in 6th grade (according to this theory I'd then have 12 different emotional reactions in my arsenal although I bet the growth rate slows at some point). We grew up as K-Mart shoppers, not department store people, but once we went to a department store. I identified the most amazing "winter" coat. It was barely stuffed with Polyester, not quite the thick down numbers that New England winters called for. Anyway, long story short - I remember it well. It cost a very very shocking $110. Really, 30 years ago, that was a lot. It's really kind of a lot now too, right? Well, my Mom very kindly bought me this coat that I was clearly planning to pass away without. She bought it, though, in October, saying that it was "one of your Hanukkah presents". I agreed to this logic because nothing could have been more important than this coat and I knew I was pushing my luck by having it at all. But I forgot the deal. And on the first, most festive night of Hanukkah, when I unwrapped a giant gift that turned out to be the coat, I ran away immediately, with only the coat in question for protection from the elements.
In the 16 minutes that I was gone, my emotions ran the gammit. The one that I didn't quite have in check though, was resiliency. I wasn't quite ready to look at the coat I'd been wearing for 8 weeks, well up with tears and say "thanks".
For my 30th birthday, someone close to me who should have been giving jewelry, procured for me a calphalon omlette pan and an electric can opener. It did take a few moments to register the shock (if you don't know what's wrong with that, you should probably double check your shopping carts) and to translate it to a "thank you" but the next day, maybe even that evening, we continued as normal. I'm not saying that I had perfected adaptability and resiliency but I was on my way.
What I'm saying is this. I suspect that children are emotionally limited, not particularly resilient. I further suspect that they are taken by their every day activities, by the joy of jumproping 20 times or the devastation of being teased for mismatched attire. Perhaps young elementary aged children just live in the moment and transfer all of the great traumas of that moment until later in their lives when they have some capacity to think through that and accept or dismiss it as important to who they were to become. In the moment, though, I still worry that each thing we do that seems to "go pretty well" and has no apparent impact, is being stored in a secret databank waiting for some point of maturity to surface.
Today, my pork bacon and chocolate eating guy came home having studied Johnny Appleseed and having had an very cool apple fest at school. He was convinced to bring apple fritters (we literally bought all they had at Starbucks on the way to school) as his contribution to the festivity but was not ever planning to touch one himself. By 3:24pm when the bus rolled up, he was really excited to have brought home a green apple. Why? Because apparantly he loves apples. Green, red and yellow ones - yellow topping the charts. I asked him what happened that changed (since I offer him an apple pretty much every day and am met with a look of total horror). "We walked around and the serving people put them on the plate and then we had to put our favorite on a graph so I had to eat them to figure out what to put on the graph to get a prize". Hmph. Why didn't I think of this graphing n' prizing plan?
This guy isn't resilient or adaptable. This guy is living in the moment and seeking the joy of a prize and the pride in pleasing his teacher and not disrupting the class. He isn't running away over a coat, he wouldn't really think of that as a choice quite yet. He isn't drawing pictures of people with x'd out eyes or anything creepy either. People say "see how well they are doing with the school change - kids are so resilient". But that's not because he's resilient, it's because he's limited in his emotional repertoire.
Who among us can say that we are perfectly resilient. That we can be handed any of the hard knocks that come to the door and just bounce off smiling. Maybe we are all still growing our emotional databanks and the older we get, the more we can deal with from our childhoods. So, I wonder, what are my children storing up from this experience? What arsenal will their future therapists be faced with?
I hope that, when the time comes, they'll have grown to understand as I strive to, that nothing stays the same and without change we'd be, well, a bunch of cavemen.
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