Childless at 52: How sweet it would be to be called Dad

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childless, Children, disconnection, family, Grief, loss, men, regret, women

Childless at 52: How sweet it would be to be called Dad

A few years ago, I was visiting a friend who has two daughters, a newborn and a two-year-old. Reflecting on his experience of being a father he said that he felt he loved them so much he could “take a bullet for them”. I wept all the way home. If only I could feel that intensely. And here I am, a man who would love to have a child, wondering how I let this happen.

Some people surmise, “It’s different for men. You don’t have a biological clock.” And that’s pretty much the end of the discussion. As a 52-year-old man, can I know something of the anguish of women who long to have a child? The biological clock is, after all, a reality for women – I could theoretically still have a child if I were 70.

The problem is that “it’s different for men” translates easily into “it’s easier for men” and it’s one small step more to “you can’t understand what it’s like for us!” And from this the debate about not having a child is sequestered firmly into the experience of women: women grieve for the children they longed for and men don’t. Maybe that’s true – I can’t claim to be surrounded by men who talk about this. I think that by and large we don’t.

I am not sure what I am allowed to feel and how that differs from what I actually feel. Do men feel grief over being childless differently from women? If so, how? Does it matter?

Daily encounters remind me of what I don’t have. Just this morning, returning from the local shop, I saw my neighbour standing outside the door of our mansion block. Our building is set back off the road and has a communal garden bordered by hedges. There she stood with her two tiny ones, a little boy and girl gazing curiously at the pearled intricacies of a spider’s web spun across the lower branches of our hedge. I say good morning to their mother and then to them. I crouch down to join their wonder, and agree with their mother that probably the mummy spider was having a rest after her hard work and we should not disturb her. I watch their faces, their cheeks the lustre of rose petals, full of wonder at the spectacle. Adorable.

Shopping isn’t easy either. Politely standing aside for the harassed family of four as they pass, trying to manage the strollers, the shopping and the children’s runaround energy, I feel socially inferior. Despite loving my job and enjoying strong friendships, I feel I am not a real member of society – an unmarried man without children. I can’t participate in the hullabaloo about schools, catchment areas, snotty noses, and playdates. I am outside, looking in.

How do I disentangle these feelings? It’s easy just to distract myself. I think the most accessible layer of feeling is a sense of regret – I remonstrate with myself for the chances I missed and sadness for the people I have hurt. I can’t help but replay moments in my life that I wish could have turned out differently. These are so painful. That evening six years ago when I managed in one short hour to say all the wrong things to the right woman, precisely because she was the right woman. I could not bear to have that which I most wanted. So I destroyed something that I really longed for.

Only a few days later, she met someone else and two years later got married. They have a child now. I really wish I didn’t know that. But I do. A little girl. And I can’t help but wonder what it would be like if that little girl were my little girl. Would she have my eyes? My smile? What is it like to see in a child little mannerisms, a way of doing things, moving, speaking, laughing, playing, that remind us of ourselves? Or of course, she may have the eyes of my loved one. And what a joy that would be, to see in our child’s face, our love; to bring into this world a beautiful child that was of us – a child that would grow into her own person but growing out of who we are.

So another part of my sadness is born out of absence – fearing that I will never feel those exquisite joys; that I will never hear my son or my little girl call me dad. How sweet it would be to hear that word from the mouth of my little girl or my small son. To see them take first steps, to comfort them when they cry, to tuck them in before sleep and read them stories. To kiss them goodnight and be with them when the world seems too much. It could still happen. But it feels less likely with each passing year. And just because theoretically I still could doesn’t mean I don’t feel the loss of all those could-have-beens. Also, with the passing of the years, would I now have the energy if it were to happen?

And what of those parents who might answer me and say, “this guy is clueless. Does he have any idea of how hard it is to be a parent?” No. I don’t. I don’t know what it’s like to be short of sleep for a decade. To be exhausted and overwhelmed and have no time for myself. To feel mind numb after reading the same story for the 20th time. No, I don’t understand these things. But I do know what it is like to feel incomplete. To be fit for a purpose that I cannot fulfil. I will probably never know if I could bear the exhaustion and sacrifice that being a father would require but I long to try, precisely because that is the only way I can express something essential about who I am. It is not simply that I would like to be a father. I feel I am made to be a father. And because I don’t have a child, and it saddens me very much to admit this, in some ways I don’t feel fully like a man.

Sometimes, however, I get invited into the club. Four-year-old Archie arrived with his mother, Maggie, for a gathering of friends yesterday. Of course, he didn’t so much arrive as explode through the door. “I’m here!” he shouted as he ran into the hallway. While we adults exchanged smiles, Archie pulled out a dozen assorted soft toys, including a penguin, a lion, a giraffe and a hippopotamus, and left them strewn around the living room floor where he set up camp – a play base from which to launch sorties of boy energy into the kitchen.

Under his arm, too large and perhaps too fierce for any bag, is a pink Tyrannosaurus rex. The first chance I got, I served up food and went to play with him. Once we agreed that Captain America really was the best superhero, we were firm friends for the day, and Lego building and soft toy wars could ensue. Later, as we walked to the local cafe for tea and cake, he took my hand. For so many parents, this must be commonplace – to feel a small hand neatly clasped around the fingers of an adult – but for me it was special. His mother and I swung him, one, two, three, and up he went, until our arms were tired. An afternoon replete with the small joys of spending time with a little boy as he negotiates his way through the world.

And then they go home.

 

How robots are helping children with autism

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autism, body movements, chest monitor, Children, classroom, communication, early diagnosis, emotion, facial expressions, family, feedback, interaction, modes, motions, non-threatening, non-verbal communication, reactions, research, robot, social interaction, social skills, teacher, therapist, treatment, withdrawal

How robots are helping children with autism

Anthony Arceri is seven and has autism. His clothes are covered in sensors, and he is standing in front of Zeno, a smiling, 2ft-tall robot. “What is your favourite food?” Zeno asks Anthony. “Chocolate milk and french fries.” “I love chocolate milk,” Zeno replies. The robot raises its arm, and Anthony copies. Zeno rubs his stomach, and so does Anthony.

It looks like fun – and for Anthony, it is. But researchers believe the interaction between Anthony and the robot also holds the key to early diagnosis and treatment of autism. Zeno is the result of a collaboration between Dr Dan Popa at the University of Texas at Arlington, Hanson RoboKind, Dallas Autism Treatment Centre, Texas Instruments and National Instruments – and is the brainchild of Hanson Robot owner and former Disney imagineer David Hanson.

Diagnosis of child autism has traditionally taken place through social interaction and speech exercises. This means that, until a child can speak, diagnosis is either a lengthy process, or can’t happen. But Zeno can interact with children through nonverbal communication such as body movements and facial expressions, speeding up diagnosis and perhaps even enabling it to be carried out before a child can talk.

Zeno isn’t just used for diagnosis. Children with autism can sometimes find social interaction threatening – making them withdraw, even from family members. Robots such as Zeno have features that look slightly human, but are obviously not human. This makes communication, with all its complex and frightening subtleties and nuances, less complicated and more comfortable for the child.

Anthony’s mother, Pamela Rainville, found out about Zeno from the Dallas Autism Treatment Centre, and thought the project might benefit Anthony. “It’s always good for him to be put in different situations, things outside his normal routine. Anytime he can be around other people, it’s a good learning and growing experience for him.”

So far, Anthony has had two therapy sessions with Zeno. Rainville believes he got more out of the second meeting than the first, and she expects he will get even more out of subsequent interactions with the robot. “This second time, Anthony fist-bumped Zeno, which was great. It shows he was a little more relaxed.”

Popa believes that Zeno is a good motivator for children as he is engaging and non-threatening: the children listen to the robot. “The idea is for the robot to instruct kids, give them some useful social skills and at the same time observe their reactions and calculate their reaction times. That calculation could form some kind of an autism scale.”

He says there are three ways in which therapists can use Zeno. “The first mode is called a scripted mode of interaction, where you pre-programme a certain sequence of motions. For the second mode, we have added a control system so we can have an operator or therapist control the robot by tele-operations. In this mode, it mirrors the motions of the instructor.”

In the third mode, the child can take control of the robot. “This can be unsafe as the child can do things – such as slap himself – that the robot will copy and possibly break. So we tend to use this third mode as entertainment only.”

Zeno now has a brother, Milo, as well as an international family. Zeno came first, and is used in research and classroom settings. Milo was created specifically to work directly with children. According to Richard Margolin, director of engineering at Hanson RoboKind and part of the team who developed both robots, some children with autism who had never spoken directly to an adult teacher spoke to Milo.

Milo looks very similar to Zeno. His expressive face is an important feature, because a characteristic of autism is the inability to read and connect with the emotions of others. Children are asked to identify the emotion shown by Milo from multiple choices on an iPad. Milo’s eyes are cameras, recording feedback. The child wears a chest monitor that records changes in heart rate and therefore emotion. A typical lesson would involve Milo and a child interacting one-to-one; the child responding to the robot with an iPad, and a therapist or teacher present to help if needed and record difficulties and progress.

One of Zeno and Milo’s international relatives is Kaspar, designed in the UK by the University of Hertfordshire’s Adaptive Systems Research Group. The size of a small child, unlike Zeno and Milo, Kaspar has a neutral expression so that children can interpret him how they wish. Research is under way to see how Kaspar’s use could support children with other developmental conditions, such as Down’s syndrome or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, known as ADHD.

Another distant cousin is Nao, who was created in 2006 by Aldebaran Robotics and is being developed as a “house robot”. Along the way, Nao has been used as an educational tool, and the University of Birmingham’s Autism Centre for Education and Research worked with Aldebaran Robotics on a version of Nao to help children with autism. But like Kaspar, Nao has an expressionless face.

What seems to be unique about Zeno and Milo is the way that their expressiveness defies long-held robotic conventions. Designed to be the first advanced social robots in the world, they could eventually have an impact far beyond the diagnosis and treatment of autism. RoboKind envisages a broader role for its robots in educating young children. In the words of his creators, Zeno represents the future of robotics and could be “a wonderful addition to every household”.

One in 10 do not have a close friend and even more feel unloved, survey finds

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contentment, employment, family, friends, health, loneliness, love, money, relationships, well-being

One in 10 do not have a close friend and even more feel unloved, survey finds

Millions of people in the UK do not have a single friend and one in five feel unloved, according to a survey published on Tuesday by the relationship charity Relate.

One in 10 people questioned said they did not have a close friend, amounting to an estimated 4.7 million people in the UK may be leading a very lonely existence.

Ruth Sutherland, the chief executive of Relate, said the survey revealed a divided nation with many people left without the vital support of friends or partners.

While the survey found 85% of individuals questioned felt they had a good relationship with their partners, 19% had never or rarely felt loved in the two weeks before the survey.

“Whilst there is much to celebrate, the results around how close we feel to others are very concerning. There is a significant minority of people who claim to have no close friends, or who never or rarely feel loved – something which is unimaginable to many of us,” said Sutherland.

“Relationships are the asset which can get us through good times and bad, and it is worrying to think that there are people who feel they have no one they can turn to during life’s challenges. We know that strong relationships are vital for both individuals and society as a whole, so investing in them is crucial.”

The study looked at 5,778 people aged 16 and over across England, Wales, Northern Ireland and Scotland and asked about people’s contentment with all aspects of their relationships, including their partners, friends, workmates and bosses. It found that people who said that they had good relationships had higher levels of wellbeing, while poor relationships were detrimental to health, wellbeing and self-confidence.

The study found that 81% of people who were married or cohabiting felt good about themselves, compared with 69% who were single.

The quality of relationship counts for a lot, according to the survey: 83% of those who described their relationship as good or very good reported feeling good about themselves while only 62% of those who described their relationship as average, bad or very bad reported the same level of personal wellbeing.

The survey, The Way We Are Now 2014, showed that while four out of five people said they had a good relationship with their partner, far fewer were happy with their sex lives. One in four people admitted to being dissatisfied with their sex life, and one in four also admitted to having an affair.

There was also evidence of the changing nature of family life – and increasing divorce rates – in the survey, which found that almost one in four of the people questioned had experienced the breakdown of their parents’ relationship.

When it comes to the biggest strains put on relationships, a significant majority (62%) cited money troubles as the most stressful factor.

The survey also found that older people are more worried about money, with 69% of those aged 65 and over saying money worries were a major strain, compared with only 37% of 16 to 24-year-olds.

When it comes to employment, many of those questioned had a positive relationship with their bosses, but felt putting work before family was highly valued in the workplace.

Just under 60% of people said they had a good relationship with their boss, but more than one in three thought their bosses believed the most productive employees put work before family. It also appears that work can be quite a lonely place too: 42% of people said they had no friends at work.

Nine out of 10 people, however, said they had a least one close friend, with 81% of women describing their friendships as good or very good compared with 73% of men.

Old enough to know better: how teenagers cope with a parent’s cancer

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adolescents, Cancer, Children, communication, family, information, parents, responsibility, teenagers, young people

Old enough to know better: how teenagers cope with a parent’s cancer

My daughter Maya is in the family room watching TV. I’m heading out to buy ginger sweets for my wife, Marsha, who’s upstairs in bed, feeling queasy after her latest round of chemotherapy.

“Going to get something for Mum; be right back,” I call to my 15-year-old.

“How is she doing?” asks Maya.

In my head, I think: “Why don’t you ask her yourself since she is just one flight of stairs away!” But I bite my tongue. I don’t want to add to the tension that cancer has already brought to our home.

Looking back, I realise that Maya wasn’t the only family member to avoid direct communication during the seemingly endless months of treatment for Marsha’s breast cancer. Consumed with all things cancer, my wife and I never asked her and her younger sister, Daniela, who was 13 at the time: “How are you doing?”

Many families find themselves in a similar situation: parent with cancer, teens in the house, not a lot of cross-generational conversation. Tens of thousands of children live with a parent who is a cancer survivor. Roughly a third of those children are 13 to 17 years old. While parents pay a lot of attention to the needs of younger kids, they may figure, as we did, that teens are old enough to cope.

“Adolescents are an unheard group,” says Shara Sosa, an oncology counsellor. Unfortunately, the nature of adolescence fights against openness of any kind, never mind the cancer in the family.

“With their kids locked behind a mask of teen indifference, parents are often intimidated and don’t know how to talk to them,” Ms Sosa says.

Teenagers are pulling away from the family, forging their own identity. The news that a parent has cancer yanks the adolescent back into the fold – exactly where they don’t want to be.

The reaction of a teen to a parent’s illness varies widely. Some respond with a disappearing act: after-school activities, shopping trips, sleepovers, you name it, they’ll do it to avoid the uncertain environment at home. It doesn’t mean they don’t love and care about the parent with cancer – it’s just their way of dealing with it all, says Maureen Davey, a family therapy Professor at the Drexel University College of Nursing and Health Professions, in Philadelphia.

Does that mean these kids are likely to turn to risky behaviour? Mental-health experts say that there are no data to quantify this and emphasise that most of the teens they work with do not act out. Yet typical teen temptations are always present.

Of the 100-plus teens who my daughter Maya and I interviewed for a book we wrote about teens and parental cancer, around 10 per cent confessed that they’d turned to drinking, drugs or vandalism as coping mechanisms.

Elissa Bantug, who was 12 when her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer 21 years ago, felt as if her mother had abandoned her. She drank, hooked up with an older boyfriend and forged her mother’s name 36 times on notes to get out of school. When the school asked her mother to come in for a conference, she felt too exhausted from her cancer treatments to turn up.

It’s impossible to say if Elissa would have acted out if her mother had been well. Still, looking back as an adult, Elissa says: “I felt like no one really talked to me.”

And she had lots of questions: would her mother be OK? What does it mean to be a cancer survivor? How would their family life change in the short run and the long run? Her rebellion, she says, was sparked by a lack of information.

Others respond by defying their developmental stage, assuming responsibilities that normally fall to the parents. Out of sync with their peers, these kids sometimes talk about their real age and their “cancer age”.

“I’m 16, and I have to act like I’m 40,” a teenager named Lyndsey told me. While her mother is in treatment for breast cancer, she says, “I have to cook, clean, make sure my mum eats, my brothers are fed.”

A “parentified” teen will inevitably feel frustrated. Teens may be “angry they have to take over everything and nobody appreciates that they’re doing so much more than they used to,” says psychiatrist Karen Weihs, medical director for supportive care at the University of Arizona Cancer Center in Tucson.

Stacy Hoover, a single mother, learned she had breast cancer when her daughters were 13 years old, and 18 months. She leaned on the older daughter, Megan, which took a toll. “Sometimes I wanted to go over to a friend’s house, but I didn’t want to leave my mum with the baby,” Megan recalls. When chemo made her mother irritable, Megan says: “It was hard not to yell back.”

No matter how the teenager responds, the parents can help shape the child’s frame of mind. That means sharing information, regardless of whether the news is good or bad.

Indeed, several studies establish the value of honest communication above all. Medical psychologist Stacey Donofrio looked at nearly 300 adolescents in the Netherlands who were coping with a parent’s cancer. She found that “the intensity of the parent’s treatment” for illness was not as important in influencing adolescent reactions as the way parents talked to the kids about it.

“Adolescents may feel especially uncertain if they feel their parents are not being entirely open,” she said.

Such an information gap elevated the tensions for Jackie Shmauch, a teenager whose father had leukaemia. One night, the 14-year-old fled her home in tears after eavesdropping on a call from her father’s oncologist. Jackie thought her father’s leukaemia was in remission, but she overheard a discussion of a bone-marrow transplant. After her parents found her at a friend’s house, they explained that the transplant was a preventive measure, not a sign that the cancer was back. That’s when Jackie delivered her ultimatum: “If there is information you have and you think you shouldn’t tell Jackie, that’s what I want you to tell me.”

Yet not every teen is like Jackie.

“If your child says, ‘Talking about this with you is not helpful to me’, it’s important to respect that,” says child psychiatrist Paula Rauch, who directs the Marjorie E Korff PACT Program (Parenting at a Challenging Time) at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.

It is critical for parents to remember that, cancer or no cancer, they still need to keep an eye on their teenagers – no easy task, especially when one of the parents is ill. The key, Ms Sosa points out, is listening closely even though “your head is in so many different places” because of the cancer diagnosis. That means asking follow-up questions, even challenging your teenager at times. If teens know you’re truly paying attention, she says, “they’re going to tell you all sorts of things”.

Some teenagers may just need a break from all the care-giving – perhaps by having other family members or friends shoulder the young person’s chores from time to time.

“Just to be 12 again, that was really quite a blessing,” recalls Bailee Richardson, now 19, who cared for her two younger sisters while her mother was being treated for breast cancer and her stepfather was working out of town.

A decade after my wife’s diagnosis, Marsha is in good health, but she and I are just beginning to understand how the experience affected our daughters. Maya tells me how uneasy she was with her mother’s bald head, courtesy of chemo, and that she found relief from the free-floating cancer anxiety that infiltrated our home by turning to friends, even if they didn’t quite understand what she was going through. And she’s sorry she didn’t help out more.

I, too, was sorry she didn’t step up. But I made the mistake of assuming that Maya and her sister could read my mind. I once exploded when my daughters didn’t rush to my aid as I dragged in bags of groceries after a day of errands.

“Can’t you give me a hand?” I yelled.

Maya calmly said: “We’d be happy to if you’d ask us.”

I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

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abuse, Children, dissociation, family, parents, relationships, sexual exploitation, support, Trafficking, trauma

I was sold by Mum and Dad to make images of child abuse

One of Raven Kaliana’s earliest memories is being taken to a family portrait studio by her parents, at around the age of four. The studio was in the basement of a department store in a town 50 miles from their home. Once they had arrived, they waited for another couple to arrive with their own child.

“Would you like to have your picture taken with this cute little boy?” her mother asked, before the parents left the kids with the photographer and retired to the cafe upstairs. But while they sat eating ice cream, the images being made in the studio down below were far from happy family portraits. Raven and her companion had just been sold into the child abuse industry.

It was to be the beginning of a 15-year ordeal, which saw Raven regularly trafficked by her parents and other members of an organised crime ring from her home in a middle-class suburb in the American north-west to locations all over the US and abroad. In her teens, the crimes were often perpetrated in Los Angeles, where many film studios provided ample opportunity for the underground child abuse industry in the 70s and 80s.

Her father, precariously self-employed after losing his teaching job, was violent towards her younger brother, but since she had become the family breadwinner, Raven was granted a peculiar status. “My father always favoured me because I brought in the money – I was supporting our whole family. My younger brother was jealous because of my dad’s special treatment of me.

“My father was also quite affectionate towards me whereas he would beat my brother to a pulp. Although he did hit me, he wanted me to stay intact because the less scars I had, the more I was worth.”

Inevitably, as she grew older, Raven’s value to her abusers decreased and subsequently the kinds of films she was required to take part in became more extreme and violent.

Yet from a young age, she had learned from her parents to rationalise and deny what was going on within the family. “It’s the same way that someone who has a problem with alcohol will rationalise their behaviour – ‘It’s only this many drinks. It’s before noon but, oh well, just today’.

“I remember my mother saying things like, ‘Oh, they’ll never remember it,’ like people do when they get their babies’ ears pierced. I told myself that my parents meant well, that what I was going through was what was necessary to help my family. It was paying our mortgage.”

As we sit talking in a central London cafe, there are two large suitcases on the floor next to us, both full of puppets she has made. A graduate of the puppetry course at the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama in London, Raven turned to this artform as a way of telling her story without the gaze of an audience focusing on her directly – something she finds too uncomfortable.

Her adult life has been driven by the belief that it is important for survivors of child sexual exploitation and trafficking to tell their stories, in order to make people realise that these aren’t crimes that happen “somewhere else, to someone else”. She moved to the UK to create Hooray for Hollywood, an autobiographical play in which the children are represented by puppets, while the adults – their parents – are only shown up to waist height, from a child’s eye view. This critically acclaimed drama has toured the UK, Poland and France, and has been made into a film.

One of the most shocking aspects of Hooray for Hollywood is the banality of the adults’ conversation, as they rationalise the choice they have just made to sell their children, from the cosy confines of a cafe. These appear to be ordinary people, struggling a little to make ends meet; not monsters or weirdos, but the kind of people who might be your nextdoor neighbours.

“You hear about a perpetrator being processed in a certain way, you hear about the police getting hold of the images, but you don’t hear about the reality for the children in those images – whose children are they? How did they come to be in this situation? And how have they been traumatised or damaged by what happened?”

Through her organisation Outspiral, Raven recently launched a national campaign to raise awareness of sex trafficking and familial abuse. She now uses the film of Hooray for Hollywood for public education and training for professionals working in social services, education, law enforcement and children’s charities.

The biggest challenge, she says, is getting the bystanders in the child’s life – neighbours, relatives, teachers, care workers, counsellors – to consider the possibility that a child might be a victim of this form of abuse. Child abuse is such a taboo subject, and the concept of parents being complicit in the crime so unthinkable, that frequently there is a failure to recognise that it might be going on. Yet since Raven’s childhood, the internet has led to an explosion in the industry, which now has a worldwide market value of billions of dollars, according to the UN.

Britain’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection Centre, a division of the police, says the number of indecent images of children in circulation on the internet runs into millions, with police forces reporting seizures of up to 2.5m images in single collections alone, while the number of individual children depicted in these images is likely to be in the tens of thousands. The commonest way that offenders found their victims was through family and personal relationships.

A report by the NSPCC highlighted the particular psychological suffering that children who have been sexually abused within the child abuse industry endure, especially through the knowledge that there is a permanent record of their sexual abuse: “There is nothing they can do about others viewing pornographic pictures or films of themselves, and sometimes their coerced sexual abuse of others, indefinitely.”

For Raven, the psychological effects of her abuse have been extreme. From an early age she began to experience dissociative amnesia – a psychological phenomenon common in victims of inescapable trauma, in which painful experiences are blocked out, leading to gaps in memory. “I started putting things into little rooms in my mind, and it was like: OK, we don’t look in that room,” she says. “When there’s no relief, there’s no one stepping in to save you, and it’s clear you’re just going to have to endure something, then your mind just does that. As a child, dissociation is a serious survival advantage, but in adulthood it can become a disability.”

It was at the age of 15 that the coping mechanisms of denial and dissociation began to break down. “At school, I started getting flashbacks – like remembering being in a warehouse the night before – and I could feel in my body it was true, but it was terrifying because I didn’t want those things to be true.”

Astonishingly, she passed through most of school without anyone picking up on what was happening at home. “I got good marks at school, so teachers tended to think everything was fine. Most survivors I’ve known who experienced extreme abuse did very, very well at school, actually, because that was their sanctuary, a place they could go to be safe.”

Eventually, however, a teacher noticed that Raven was getting thinner. Her mother, by now separated from her father but still facilitating the abuse, had simply stopped buying food for her. “The teacher invited me to stay after school and talk with her one day, and she asked, ‘Tell me the truth, are you anorexic? Bulimic?’ And I started laughing.”

Raven confided some but not all of what was happening at home, but begged the teacher not to report it for fear of reprisals. What the teacher did do, however, was to help her find the wherewithal to move out of home eventually, get a job in a restaurant, and start saving up for college.

At university, Raven finally made a break from her family, changed her name and started to get counselling – the beginning of a long road to recovery that still continues. “I got into a support group for rape survivors, and it was a great help because all of a sudden I was around other people healing from abuse, too. It also gave me some perspective about how the things that had happened to me were really on the extreme end. I saw people completely devastated by one experience of being raped by a stranger, so it was sobering to realise, ‘Oh, I’ve been raped by hundreds of people.'”

Once she was in a safe environment, finally the rage about what had happened to her bubbled to the surface. “I couldn’t believe how angry I was when I first escaped – so angry. In one support group they let us take a baseball bat to a punching bag and told us to think about a specific abuse event and imagine that we were fighting back against it, and that was very helpful.”

She also saw an integrative bodywork therapist, who used touch, guided movement and vocal expression. “Her premise was that post-traumatic stress is a physical reaction in your body, and that reconnecting the symptom to the source helps you let it go, helps you release it, and that you don’t have to talk out every single thing that ever happened to you. It was very helpful for me because there were a lot of strange things that my body was doing. For example, I used to find any kind of physical touch excruciating – even if someone brushed me in the street I would shudder. She told me that was called armouring, which happens when your body makes a shield out of its muscles to protect the bones and internal organs during physical abuse.”

The therapy made it possible for her to move on and start to enjoy life. “I realised that it is possible to get your life back. I started to gain an appreciation for life and a recognition that I only have so many breaths, so I’ve got to use them well.”

But Raven believes she will always need counselling and that her experiences have made it difficult not to fall into a pattern of emotionally abusive romantic relationships.

Perhaps surprisingly, sex has not been a significant issue, but love is inextricably connected for her with betrayal, as the people who were meant to love her most as a child were the ones who orchestrated her abuse.

Yet, incredibly, she says she felt love for her parents as a child and still does, although she has cut all contact with them. Despite their behaviour, she believes they did love her.

“When I screen my film, a lot of times in the Q&A session afterwards people want to know: how could parents do this to their own children? I tell them that abuse is generational: my parents were also abused themselves, so that was normal to them. They had dissociated in the same way I did; they were in denial. Unlike my generation, they didn’t have access to counselling when they were young, and weren’t born in a time when child abuse was beginning to be acknowledged by society. It’s important to recognise that they weren’t born evil – they were damaged.”

Raven thinks that the way in which child abusers such as Jimmy Savile are demonised is counterproductive. “Demonising the perpetrators elevates them to the realm of the surreal. We need to shift that, so people recognise that they are very sick humans and that there’s a context for their crimes.

“Only then can we tackle the source of this suffering.”

 Outspiral.org.uk

When a child leaves the nest, how does it affect younger brothers and sisters?

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anxiety, change, Children, dynamics, empty nest syndrome, family, home, parents, relationships, siblings, students, transition, university, withdrawn

When a child leaves the nest, how does it affect younger brothers and sisters?

It’s five years since my eldest child left home, but now it’s that time of year again, the shops filled with students buying value sets of crockery and stationery, harassed parents doing the Ikea run. I’m reminded of one of the most unexpected sides to our so-called emptying nest.

When my youngest child, seven years old at the time, became cowed with anxiety by day and unable to sleep at night, I thought at first it had something to do with his new class at primary school. It was a few weeks into the start of a school year, and our previously robust youngest had undergone a massive character change. He had been outgoing but was now withdrawn. He had been a joker; now nothing made him laugh. He started wanting reassurance at night.

It took days of probing to get to the root of the problem. No, he liked his new teacher. Yes, his friendships were all fine. When he admitted, reluctantly, that since his sister left home, it had felt to him as if a piece of the family was missing, I was dumbstruck. It simply hadn’t occurred to me that her leaving would make such a strong impact on him, especially as one sister was still at home.

“Every time I see any of the things she’s left behind, I feel upset,” he tried to explain.

At bedtime, he used to find the music and background chatter from his sisters’ rooms comforting. When one or both of them were out, he knew they would be there later. Now that the eldest had left, for good, as he saw it, he simply couldn’t get to sleep or think about anything but the gap that was left.

Empty nest syndrome is pretty well documented. Parents may well experience feelings of either grief or exuberance – a step towards regaining their freedom – as their brood take their first steps into the big wide world, but it hadn’t occurred to me to pay attention to the effect on her siblings when our first-born left.

On reflection, it seems obvious – even when other siblings remain at home, the departure of one of them affects family dynamics. Relationships shift and alter the way they have to adjust when a new baby is born, with roles altering and pecking orders changing. But there is no “empty nest” label for siblings to attach to their confused feelings, particularly those who are very young (the gap between our youngest and his 18-year-old sister perhaps exacerbated the problem), and my son, unable or unwilling to articulate his sense of loss, was suffering anxiety and sleeplessness instead. I suspect, with the instinctive perception of children, that he might also have avoided telling me why he was affected for fear of upsetting me – I may have mentioned how quiet the house seemed without the eldest or that I missed her, and he picked up some of that and didn’t want to make things worse.

Now I thought about it, I realised that her departure meant that other things had changed in the household, which must have felt unsettling to a young child. Our middle daughter, 16 at the time, had started going out more with her friends, and one or the other of us parents was usually preoccupied with work or study. The house became a place to sleep rather than the family home it had been. With only four of us, rarely all at home at once, we hardly ever gathered for family meals any more. We used to sit and watch TV or films together; now we never did.

What message had this given to our youngest? That it wasn’t worth the effort just for him?

The change must have felt catastrophic. Our first-born leaving was poignant for her parents. It was the end of an era, but it also meant we were embarking on a path that would eventually lead us back to living a child-free life again, to which in some ways we were looking forward.

For our youngest child, who had never known life without his older sister, the change was far more significant. It was uncharted and so potentially scary. It must also have felt final – he had no idea, as we did, that students come scurrying back home every holiday and often in between. As far as he was concerned, if one person could just leave, who was going to disappear next?

But all siblings are affected. Our 16 year old had lost a confidante and ally. The silence in the house was conspicuous now that the two girls’ gossip and summary of their day no longer took place nightly in their room. And, indeed, my middle daughter says it was a difficult transition for her too. “I felt really upset, driving away from her,” she admits. “And I missed her a lot,” she says.

The difference between her and the youngest was that she was able to express her feelings and fill the gap by increasing her social life and endlessly messaging her sister. But the result was that she too edged away from home, leaving the house all the emptier for her younger brother.

Once I began to think about the whole issue of siblings leaving, I remembered that when my elder brother went off on his travels, it catapulted me into adulthood. I was left at home with my younger brother, who at that stage seemed much less exciting, and I was lost. Who would I go to parties and gigs with now? My younger brother (who may also, like my youngest son, have had unexpressed feelings himself) withdrew into his room as he hit puberty, my mother returned to full-time work and my father was out more. When I got in from school, the house was silent, cold and tomb-like. I couldn’t wait to leave and made sure I did, as soon as I could.

Home was no longer the place of solace it had once seemed. Because, of course, accompanying the emotional changes when a child leaves, are economic and practical ones. Parents have to support their older kids through university and may take the opportunity – as mine did – to work more hours, in the process leaving the younger ones behind. The conflict is one I recognise only too well, as the need to earn more to support my older children through further education has been pitted against the responsibility of being around for the younger one. When you’ve been a parent for 18-plus years, it’s easy to feel that it’s time to ease off when they start to leave home, and to give yourself a bit of a break, pursuing interests you may have had to shelve during the child-rearing years, but younger children may feel – and indeed be – sidelined as a result.

There is also an effect on the parents’ relationship. Couples who have worked at staying together “for the sake of the kids”, may give up making the effort once there are fewer kids at home. A friend, the mother of two adult daughters, recounts: “We managed to hold our relationship together while the older one was at home, even though it wasn’t going well. I didn’t realise it at the time, but now I see there was a link between her leaving and our relationship ending. It wasn’t conscious, but it was there. I worry now that my younger daughter must have felt she didn’t matter as much as the older one because we held it together for her sister, but not for her!”

In the years since our first daughter left for university, she has been back to live at home and moved out again. The middle child has also left, but I made more of an attempt to be aware of how her brother may feel, and to remind him that her “leaving” didn’t mean she was disappearing for ever. But by then he was older and knew that such changes aren’t finite anyway.

There are, of course, advantages to a sibling leaving. Younger children have a chance to try on new identities, to expand into the space left, to have their own room – for the first time in some cases – to take on new roles, and, potentially, to grow closer to other siblings or their parents. My son is 13 now and reaping the benefits of having siblings who have left home. “It was difficult when I was little,” he says. “But now they’re living in London it’s like I’ve got a second home,” he says.

For me, it was a salutary lesson in how strong the bond between my own children really was and how much more sensitive I should have been to the change a child leaving would make to her siblings in the first place. It seemed to me that my children became closer when they started living apart, but perhaps, and more likely, it was simply that I hadn’t realised how close they had always been. We are often the worst witnesses to what is in front of our noses within the family. I am also aware that while for us, the parents, it was a step towards a couple-only lifestyle, for my youngest, life really would never be the same again.

Perhaps these two recollections from friends best illustrate the sense of the gap that can be left when a sibling leaves home. “My sisters shared an attic bedroom just above my room. When they’d both left, I used to lie in bed aware of, and terrified by, the dark, empty hole that was left. I loved it at Christmas when they came home and that dark hole filled with the light and noise of their presence again.”

Another friend, who shared a room with her older sister, recalls how when she left home she wondered who she was going to talk to at night. “I found it devastating when my sister left, and I used to carry on the conversations I would have been having with her when she was there,” she says. “For months after she left, I just kept on talking to an empty bed.”

When the Bully Is a Sibling

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abuse, aggression, anxiety, Bullying, Children, Depression, family, Self-esteem, siblings, young people

When the Bully Is a Sibling

Siblings have been bickering and trading blows since the time of Cain and Abel. But the torment and fighting that is often shrugged off as normal sibling rivalry may not always be so benign.

New research suggests that even when there are no physical scars, aggression between siblings can inflict psychological wounds as damaging as the anguish caused by bullies at school or on the playground. The findings offer an unusual look at an area of family life that has rarely been studied, in part because infighting among brothers and sisters is widely considered a harmless rite of passage.

But ordinary skirmishes over the remote or joystick are one thing, experts say, and chronic physical and verbal abuse, particularly when it is directed at one sibling, is another. The new study, which involved thousands of children and adolescents around the country, found that those who were attacked, threatened or intimidated by a sibling had increased levels of depression, anger and anxiety.

Corinna Jenkins Tucker, the lead author of the study, which was published in the journal Pediatrics, said that behaviors among siblings that cross the line into abuse deserve more recognition.

“Historically, the general thinking has been that it’s not a big deal, and sometimes it’s even viewed as being a good thing,” said Dr. Tucker, an associate professor of family studies at the University of New Hampshire. “There appears to be different norms of acceptability. Peer aggression is unacceptable, but it’s not the same for siblings.”

Dr. Tucker said that the growing number of programs and public service announcements aimed at stopping bullying and violence in schools and other settings should include a focus on sibling relationships as well.

“The aggression among siblings should be taken just as seriously as that among peers,” she said.

While normal rivalries with siblings can encourage healthy competition, the line between healthy relations and abuse is crossed when one child is consistently the victim of another and the aggression is intended to cause harm and humiliation, said John V. Caffaro, a clinical psychologist and the author of “Sibling Abuse Trauma.” Parents who fail to intervene, play favorites or give their children labels that sow divisions — like “the smart one” and “the athlete” — can inadvertently encourage conflict.

Nationwide, sibling violence is by far the most common form of family violence, occurring four to five times as frequently as spousal or parental child abuse, Dr. Caffaro said. According to some studies, nearly half of all children have been punched, kicked or bitten by a sibling, and roughly 15 percent have been repeatedly attacked. But even the most severe incidents are underreported because families are loath to acknowledge them, dismissing slaps and punches as horseplay and bullying as boys just being boys, he said.

“Our society tends to minimize child-on-child violence in general,” he added. “We have these ideas that if you’re hurt by a child it’s less injurious than if you’re hurt by an adult, but the data don’t support that.”

In the new report, Dr. Tucker and her colleagues studied 3,600 children using data from the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence, which collects information on children and teenagers under 17. Previous studies of sibling violence, which are few in number, have typically been small or narrowly focused on specific forms of aggression.

But the new research, conducted through interviews with children and their parents, measured the impact of a broad range of violence. It looked at physical assaults with and without weapons and the destruction or stealing of property, as well as threats, name-calling and other forms of psychological intimidation.

The researchers also measured the same types of behaviors perpetrated by peers outside the home and accounted for them in their findings in order to tease apart the specific toll of sibling violence.

Over all, a third of the children in the study reported being victimized by a brother or sister in the previous year, and their scores were higher on measures of anxiety, depression and anger.

Catherine Bradshaw, an expert on bullying and the deputy director of the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins University, said the study was impressive in its scope and scale, and noted that it showed that all types of sibling aggression, from mild to severe, were associated with worse mental health.

“Parents at times might be thinking that their kids can fight it out or that a little bit of victimization might not be so bad,” she said. “But these findings suggest that the threshold is pretty low. It’s not just the rough stuff you have to keep an eye out for.”

Dr. Caffaro said that the effects of sibling abuse often continue into adulthood. Over the years he has treated patients who struggled with emotional issues and sabotaged themselves in their careers because of repeated humiliation they experienced at the hands of a brother or sister.

“It can erode their sense of identity and their self-esteem,” he said.

Stroke survivors and their families left to deal with the emotional impact alone, says report

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anxiety, carers, confidence, Depression, family, relationships, stress, stroke, support

Stroke survivors and their families left to deal with the emotional impact alone, says report

Stroke survivors and their families feel abandoned by health and social services after being left to deal with the emotional impact of stroke alone, a report reveals today.

The report, ‘Feeling Overwhelmed’, published by the Stroke Association, marks the beginning of Stroke Month and details the emotional strain of strokes on survivors and families after they have left the hospital.

More than half of survivors experienced depression and two thirds anxiety, in addition to lack of confidence and fear of recurrent stroke, the association says.

A high percentage of stroke carers are also reported to have experienced depression, stress, anxiety and frustration. Relationships are proven to suffer, with almost three in ten couples separating or considering it following stroke.

Of more than 2,700 people surveyed at the end of last year, 79 per cent claimed to have received no information or advice on how to cope with the emotional consequences of strokes.

Claire Whitehouse, 23, from Bournemouth, suffered a stroke when she was 19. Following her release from hospital, Claire suffered from depression and anxiety which also led to anorexia. She said:  “I wish someone, when I was in hospital, gave me a big leaflet with everyone I’d need to contact and said This is what you’re going to experience and this is the group you need to go to’. We need some information to tell us what’s going on.

“I can push myself to become physically able, but emotionally it’s much harder.”

In response to the findings, the Stroke Association is calling for psychological and emotional support to be as integral to recovery as the physical rehabilitation. It wants information and support to be accessible to everyone, survivors and carers, who have been affected by the illness.

What health professionals should know about eating disorders

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consequences, contact, counsellors, diagnosis, early intervention, Eating Disorders, family, friends, GPs, health professionals, health service, help, myths, nurses, psychiatrists, psychologists, recovery, sensitivity, social workers, support, symptoms, treatment, weight, young people

What health professionals should know about eating disorders

Over the course of two years, I have met with 40 young women and men who have shared on film honest details about their experiences of eating disorders. Their hope is that sharing their stories will help other people who are similarly affected to feel less alone and encourage them to seek help.

The research shows that common myths about the illness have prevented many young people from getting the treatment and support they needed, from family, friends and even the health service.

During the course of their eating disorder, young people came into contact with many different types of health professionals including GPs, nurses, counsellors, psychologists, psychiatrists, dieticians, social workers and other support workers.

There are some things that health professionals should know when dealing with a young person living with and recovering from an eating disorder.

Anyone can have an eating disorder

Anyone can become ill with an eating disorder. Eating disorders affect people of all ages, backgrounds, sexualities, both men and women. You can’t tell if a person has an eating disorder by just looking at them.

First point of contact is often critical

This first contact with services was often a huge step for a young person. People often found it very difficult to talk about what was going on, trying to hide their problems and it could take months, even years, to seek help. The way they were treated at this point could have a lasting, positive or negative, impact.

Young people hoped that the health professionals would realise just how hard asking for help was and to help nurture and support their confidence to stay in contact with services.

Early intervention is key

Young people often felt that people struggled to recognise the psychological symptoms of eating disorders as well as the range of different eating disorders.

If those who haven’t yet developed a full-blown eating disorder could be recognised, they can also be helped earlier. This is critical, as the longer eating disorders are left undiagnosed and untreated, the more serious and harder to treat they can become.

Effective, early intervention could be achieved when health practitioners were knowledgeable, well trained, sensitive and proactive.

Eating disorders are about emotions and behaviours, not just about weight

A common myth that many of the young people had come across was the thought that people with eating disorders were always very underweight. This idea had made it harder for some to get treatment and support or even to be taken seriously by their doctor.

In some cases, young people felt that the only way for them to be taken seriously and be able to access eating disorder services was to lose more weight. This could have serious consequences; the more weight they lost, the harder it was for them to be able to seek or accept help.

See the whole person, not just the eating disorder

Once in contact with health services, above all else, young people wanted not just to be seen “as an eating disorder” but to be treated as a whole person. It was important that they felt treated as individuals and for health professionals to realise that everyone responded differently.

A good health professional also tried to engage young people on other things than just the eating disorder, hobbies or interests.

Respect the young person

Feeling respected, listened to and being given the space to explain things from their perspective was important for young people during treatment and recovery.

Professionals should take their time and find out what was going on for that particular person, not act on assumptions. Health professionals shouldn’t patronise or dismiss issues that were important to the person in front of them.

This research, funded by Comic Relief, has now been published on online at Youthhealthtalk.org.

Ulla Räisänen is a senior researcher with the health experiences research group at University of Oxford, and was responsible for conducting the study published on Youthhealthtalk.org

Social workers need training to help them better understand self-harm

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autism, awareness, education, family, online support, physical health, self-harm, social workers, support, training, understanding, young people

Social workers need training to help them better understand self-harm

It is estimated that one in 12 young people have self-harmed at some point in their lives, according to charity YouthNet. The charity says 3,000 people aged 16 to 25 visit its digital support service TheSite.org every month after looking up self-harm on a search engine. Yet, despite these statistics, self-harm awareness training for social workers is not always as comprehensive as it could be.

Nushra Mansuri, professional officer (England), at the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), says while some social workers – such as those working in mental health – may be sensitive to the issue of self-harm, there needs to be more awareness of the problem within the profession and that self-harm training is patchy.

“Whatever client group you work with, it will be a feature – it [self-harm training] should be integral because you are working with people whose lives are in crisis – there is a high correlation between the people you work with and people with a propensity to hurt themselves,” she says.

“Social workers need a greater awareness of the issue and need to understand why people self-harm. I wouldn’t lump everyone together, but it can be the impact of trauma, it can be a cry for help, it gives someone, who may have had control taken away from them, a sense of control.”

What mistakes could a social worker who lacks awareness of the issue of self-harm make? “An untrained person may have a tendency to look at the superficial and not go beyond that,” Mansuri says. “A social worker may be out of their comfort zone and not be able to deal with it – dealing with someone’s raw pain is really hard.”

Mansuri adds that social work “doesn’t have all the answers” when it comes to self-harm and that more education is required. “There is an underestimation of the importance of looking at self-harm,” she says.

Jennifer McLeod, managing director of self-harm training provider Step Up! International, says in some regions self-harm training for social workers is inadequate.

“Social workers ought to be trained in spotting the signs; if they aren’t spotted, it could be fatal,” she says. “It’s about listening to what’s not being said, looking for physical signs and emotions – they [people who self harm] are generally hiding something.”

McLeod adds that well-trained social workers will broach the topic with the young people and their families. “There might be denial from parents and social workers will have to find ways of eliciting information from young people.”

McLeod says delegates at Step Up! International training courses are often in a state of panic about the issue as they are uncertain about how to deal with the problem or even broach the subject.

“Some professionals don’t feel confident about bringing up the issue directly, they daren’t ask about it as they think it might make it worse”, she says.

McLeod suspects self-harm is on the increase – and is being talked about more – because of the current economic climate.

“In addition to the emotional and biological changes [young people experience], there is the recession, labour market issues, parents being made redundant – parents may not be managing and may be economically struggling,” she says.

Caroline Hattersley, head of information, advice and advocacy at theNational Autistic Society (NAS), says people with autism face a “raft of challenges” that might make self-harm more likely.

“Autism does bring specific difficulties – we’d like to see more training on understanding autism and its relation to self harm,” she says. “The key is understanding the individual and understanding the underlying causes.” Lacking this understanding could lead to a social worker misinterpreting why someone is self-harming, Hattersley adds.

“The individual might not have done it before, they may be hitting their head because they may have communication difficulties and they’re trying to communicate a physical problem – you might miss an ear infection,” she says.

Hattersley acknowledges that it can be difficult for professionals to admit they are struggling with the issue of self-harm. NAS has set up Network Autism, a forum where professionals can read research, and discuss with each other, the issue of self-harm and how it relates to people with autism.

YouthNet’s chief executive Emma Thomas says all practitioners working with people who self-harm would benefit from a better understanding of the problem. She adds: “If social workers are more aware of services like TheSite.org, many more young people can be directed to safe, anonymous online support to complement the vital offline support they need.”