Many adults tell me that they reached the end of their education with little idea of what interested them. They say things like ‘I studied science because my school encouraged it, even though my passion was writing’ or ‘I did history because I thought I’d get an A, even though it bored me’. They knew what they should be doing, what others thought they were best at, and what others valued most highly. They knew what would get them the best grades. They made their choices based on that – and years later, they regret those choices. They burn out or change life path in their 40’s and 50’s. They say they are finally getting back to making choices for themselves.
It’s sometimes said that children must just learn to ‘follow the rules’ It sounds reasonable, after all. We all have to follow rules to get by in life.
We are told to standardise our children. We compare and contrast, from the off. We buy books of expectations which tell us when they are meant to first smile (6 weeks) and roll (4 months). And when they don’t do it on time, we fret. We worry about what that might mean, and what we could do about it – can you compel a baby to smile? What if they are just feeling serious?
When I work with families, one of the things they are most worried about is this. ‘What if this never changes?’ This worry starts early.
Some of you may not know that I am a EMDR trainer, as well as a clinical psychologist. EMDR is an evidence-based therapy, recommended in the NICE guidelines for PTSD and I’ve been using it since 2005. Most recently I have become an accredited trainer, meaning that I can now train other therapists in EMDR.
What a strange thing we do to our young people in this culture and time. We make them spend several years learning things that they often have no interest in, that they have not chosen and that they will in many cases never use again. We tell them that these things are vitally important. Then we sit them in rows and make them write about the things they can remember for an intense few hours. We compare what they have written down with everyone else of the same age, and then we rank them.
1. The exam results are referenced against earlier cohorts, meaning that around 30% will get failing results every year. This is built into the system. This is in contrast to (for example) a driving test, where what matter is whether you are a good enough driver, not how well everyone the same age as you could drive. 2.
It’s an inconvenient truth than when you make someone do an activity, they enjoy it less and want to do it less in the future. Even if it was something that they were originally motivated to do. It’s a consistent finding in the research.