While I do work with some teenage people from time-to-time I don’t work with young children much, for a lot of reasons such as it really irks me when someone brings in their child and essentially tells me, “I don’t like the way this little person is acting and I want you to fix it.”  

I remember one mother brought in her young son, he was maybe six or seven, and after I asked the same first question I always ask a new patient (‘what brings you in?’) she leaned in toward me (as if to share a secret), hooked a thumb in her son’s direction, and stated quite loud and aggressively, “I’m getting too much attitude from this one!”

Of course the son did not respond well to this accusation and proceeded to defend himself the best he knew how, which the mother did not like so she proceeded to state what constituted in her mind the “evidence” of her case.  From my perspective what this process appeared to be was about 3 minutes of total meltdown on both sides of the argument.

I let the meltdown proceed until I had seen what I needed to and pretty much couldn’t stand it any longer.  When I stopped them from fighting and walked them through a couple of mindful deep breaths I began asking the questions I have come to believe no parent actually expects from a psychologist they have brought their son or daughter to for repairs.  In this case my first question was something like, “you think your son has an attitude problem and you are confused as to where it came from?”  Which was followed by the explanation I will get into below.

Like most of the parents who bring their children to me she was expecting me to say something to the child or about the child which she could then use to a) feel better about not liking her child and b) cause the child to act in ways she wants.  

Sorry to disappoint, but I am not in the business of making children, of any age, more compliant or less annoying. I also, on the occasion when a child is in my office, rarely address the child directly.  Their behavior, as I will discuss below, is mostly a reaction to and with their parent and they are not really capable of participating in the type of psychotherapy I conduct, so I mostly observe the child while I am speaking with the parent.  Most parents don’t expect this and more than a few have been rather upset by it.

In the immortal words of Neil de Grass-Tyson, “Children are agents of chaos.  One does not have a child and expect everything in the house to remain in order.”  To which I will add, one does not have children and expect everything to continue to make whatever degree of sense was being made prior to their arrival.  (I will write something in the future about the uselessness of wanting things to “make sense” soon but probably not in this piece)

Children are independent little creatures, at any age, but increasingly so over time.  As they age they gain more confident control over their bodies and their bodily functions and they become more and more slaves to their curiosities.  Dr. de Grass-Tyson refers to children as little scientists, because they are constantly testing and retesting the objects and concepts in their environment, and he isn’t the first or only one to make such a comparison.

What this mother didn’t realize prior to her appointment with me and what she did not appear to accept as the session progressed and eventually ended was the two main truths I inform all parents of.  Parents lack of accepting these truths and my displeasure in having the discussion with them is the primary cause of my being irked and the primary reason I don’t like working with young children and will not work with most teenagers who are brought in to see me.

Those truths are simple but in my mind quite powerful.  The first is the child’s mood at any given time will be mostly dependent on the mood of the mother.  Now this is not a Freudian ‘it’s always the mother’s fault’ thing, though I believe this may be how he came to that conclusion.  Before I go on, yes the father’s mood also plays a role I the child’s mood but again not as much as the mother’s.  With very young children and infants this “mostly” dependent is more like “completely” dependent.

This is true for two reasons, the first is rather simplistic and maybe traditional in nature, it is an issue of proximity and understanding. This truth also can and is being resolved to a large degree as our society drifts away from the former methodology of child rearing and toward a more conjoined or integrated model (yes the answer to society’s ills is the coniunctio).

Historically the father went out to work and the mother stayed home to raise the children.  This meant that the children spent the majority of their lives with their mothers and in doing so they got to know and really understand how their mother’s moods worked.  They learned when she was in a good mood or bad and they could tell the difference in an instant.  So if mom was upset about something (they don’t know why mom was in the mood she was in, they only know what her mood is) they too would become upset.  If mom was sad, they too became sad, or happy or scared, or anxious, or whatever.

But what about the father’s emotions you say?  Well those are a mystery to the child.  They learn over time that there is a difference between mom and dad emotional presentation, but as there is also usually a difference in the way each parent treats the child, these difference aren’t the focal point.  In an ideal household the father comes home from work and spends time with each of his children, alone and in groups, so as to maintain the bond and be the focal point of masculine energy and training for the children.  This training, as the energy itself, is extremely important to the children (especially in this age of near complete misunderstanding of the role of men in society let alone the family as most of our collective energy seems to be spent on destroying the “patriarchy”), children require it to survive historically and to thrive today.

Of course we don’t live in an ideal world and fathers come home tired and grumpy from the unfulfilling careers they feel obligated to maintain, and that’s if they actually exist in the home at all.  Sadly many families don’t have a father figure presence in the home, even when relationships are maintained after childbirth.

The reason why so many mothers refuse to believe this today is a combination of the logical results of the patriarchal society in which we live (they are justifiably sick and tired, if only on an unconscious level, of being blamed for their children’s behavior out of hand) and the fact that children, especially the very young, do not display or process emotions in similar ways to adults.  Yes a sad child may look sad, but he or she may also look and act angry or tired or cranky as my grandmother would say.  Also if you were to ask a child what they were feeling most would have no idea what to tell you.

Children do not process emotions in the same way that adults do.  They don’t have the experiential knowledge to know what is happening or that they will actually survive the emotional process.  Add to that the fact that they are not yet cognitively developed enough to think about why they may be feeling one way or another and what you get is a little person who is acting out.  That is one reason for a child to throw a tantrum and is the primary reason why children will incorporate their traumatic experiences into their play—they are trying to figure out what the heck is going on around here.

And when the child acts out that is the point when their parents decide to take them to someone like me, for a tune up.  Like their cars, they only pay attention to them when they are doing something they don’t like.  Of course children don’t have check engine lights, but I digress.

As raising children becomes more of a team effort and less one sided this aspect of childhood mood development is likely to change.  Of course that will depend in part on us menfolk learning to accept and display a wider variety of our own emotions and to accept and master our own masculine energy.  But that is a topic for another day.

The other reason and the one I do not believe Freud went too far into is a matter of both biology and psychology.  

Biologically speaking at the early stages of childhood development the child, in the form of a fetus, literally shares a body with the mother.  I won’t get too technical here but the truth is the father contributes a 50% portion of the child’s DNA through the act of fertilization and that’s the end of his role in the creation of the baby.  His role then shifts to caring for the mother which includes fetching snacks (yes you should make her a sandwich or go get her some Panda Express or a pizza in the middle of the night) on command and rubbing her feet and back and whatever else she says needs rubbing.  A man’s role is, and should be, one of providing for the mother in pregnancy and then providing for the mother and child after pregnancy. No that is not sexist, it is an evolutionary fact.  Yes of course the phrase “providing for” has, and should have, changed over the years, but think about it this way; a couple of hundred thousand years ago the female of our species needed the male to literally provide the food, shelter, and protection she required during pregnancy and in the first few years after the child was born.  It was a wild and dangerous place back then and those of our species who could not provide for themselves died (that is one of the reasons it has been theorized the emotion of love and the construct of a committed relationship evolved in the human species).  As time progress those needs were facilitated by the income his job provided but that may have also been in large part because women were literally not allowed to work outside the home for most of the last 2000 years, but again I digress…..

The woman’s job is just beginning after fertilization.  The body of the fetus literally grows out of the body of the mother.  In cases of lack of adequate nutritional resources the mother’s body will literally digest itself to provide for the needs of the fetus.  That’s why prenatal vitamins are always recommended in the case of pregnancy.  Mother and child share a circulatory system, a respiratory system, a system of elimination, all the systems.  Physiologically speaking the mother and fetus are one body.

That unity also includes aspects of the Self from a psychological perspective.  The mother and the fetus share a single unconscious.  The fetus has no conscious self yet and also has no need of one. From the perspective of the fetus there is no difference between self and environment and therefor it has no use for a consciousness.  This means that the source of the mother’s emotions, her unconscious, is the source of the fetus’s emotions.  While the child’s unconscious connection does individuate through the nine months of development it is only after birth do the mother and child truly separate psychologically but the child’s emotions remain intrinsically connected to the mother’s emotions.  In the early years of life the child’s emotions continue growing more disconnected but even later in life research has shown a strong connection between and good deal of influence of mother over child emotionally speaking.

The result of this in my professional life is me having to tell a person, who is overwhelmingly the mother (we have a way to go yet), that the child is acting this way (grumpy, mouthy, cranky, or whatever) because you are anxious/sad/angry/whatever—your child’s mood is dependent on yours, so if you want the child to be more calm, you need to be more calm.  This is a conversation which will occasionally lead to the mother discussing all the aspects of her life which are unmanageable.  

I suppose the short version of this story is that your child does not require psychotherapy, you do.  I’m sure you can imagine that statement doesn’t often go well.

How did it work out with the mother and son, you may be wondering?  Let me tell you in brief

As it turned out this mother was no longer in a relationship with the child’s father, which happens.  This loss of relationship does affect the child but so long as the relationship between father and child remains intact the lack of relationship between the parents can be overcome.  Unfortunately in this case the son was also no longer in a relationship with his father.  It had been a couple of years since he had even spoken to him on the phone, let alone seen him, which at his age means he is rapidly losing all the memories he has of his father. Unfortunately this happens all too often and it is nearly impossible to overcome because of the emotional response it creates in the child, abandonment.

As a result of his father’s absence from his life the son felt powerful and deep abandonment.  Abandonment is a very difficult emotion to deal with as an adult but as a child it is devastating.  From the child’s perspective the belief system is something along the lines of “I am so worthless or flawed (translate as “bad” to the child) that I do not deserve to have a father.”  In short the child believes the father left because of something the child did and doesn’t come back because the child does not deserve for the father to come back.

Add to this the fact that sons require their fathers for a complex multitude of reasons both conscious and unconscious and you get, to be simplistic, a very unhappy little guy.

If that was all this child was dealing with it would have been more than enough to keep some psychologist busy in the future but unfortunately it was not where this little guy’s bad luck ended.  I was able to ascertain from the mother that she had over the past year moved her and her son into her boyfriend’s house and recently given birth to a daughter.  You want to guess when it was this child’s “attitude” started or when it significantly worsened?

Yup, his “attitude” started about a year ago and worsened after the baby was born.  Why would that be you might ask, was the boyfriend not a good man/person/father?  While overwhelmingly the statistics on child abuse show that the step child is most often the target of abuse and that most often that abuse is physical or sexual or both, that was not the case in this instance.  I guess he managed to dodge at least one bullet.

While there was no abuse, at least that I was able to discover, this child was convinced he was being replaced.  In fact his world was being replaced one item at a time.

First his father, whom he could barely remember was replaced by the boyfriend.  This was not just a replacement of father figures, this was also a replacement of the love his mother had for him.  When a child is the mother’s whole world, as in the case of separation, he gets all the love and attention.  When mom meets a new person (man or woman makes no difference in this aspect) he can literally feel the attention he used to get being directed toward this other person.  As you can imagine children don’t like this.

So from the son’s perspective my father was replaced by this imposter and now he is getting all my love and attention—that is to say he is replacing me in mom’s eyes.

Then on top of that we add the new baby which just so happens to be a girl and you get another set of issues revolving around the son’s belief he is being replaced.  First mom got a new man who got some of my attention, then she got a new child who is now getting the rest of my attention.  This can happen with a new addition to even the most ideal family.  The oldest child who used to be the sole object of love and attention (from their perspective) now has to settle for a smaller piece of those pies because of this interloper’s arrival. This is one of the sources of sibling rivalry.

In short the child thinks I have been replaced.  Not only was this child’s belief he was being replaced completed by the arrival of the new baby, but by the mother just doing what all mothers should do with a baby, focusing a lot of attention on it and doting on its every whimper and coo, because the new baby is a girl, the son in this started to believe the very reason he had to be replaced was because he was a boy. 

“You see,” he told me in session as if I was the child who needed his adult wisdom and guidance, “I’m a boy and my mom wanted a girl.  Now she has one and doesn’t need me anymore.”

My heart burst at that moment and I needed to use all of my effort to not become overwhelmed by his frank and honest statement.  The mother on the other hand started doing what a lot of parents do in these circumstances.  Her words didn’t help, in fact they only confirmed the child’s beliefs all the more.  She blamed him for his reaction to her treatment.

“That’s ridiculous,” she said reaching out for her son, who pulled gently but determinedly away from her, “I don’t want to replace you.  You’re my little buddy!”

I’m sure she meant that last part as a reassurance but really it sounded even to me more like a mockery.

The session ended there and with the child muttering something under his breath which the mother either didn’t hear at all or refused to acknowledge hearing.  She was too busy congratulating me on my brilliant insight and thanking me for the great advice I had given, is more of a deflection than it is a recognition of my obviously sharp psychological skills.  

As I opened the door and she turned to leave my office she was saying something about how much more committed she was going to be to making her son feel like part of their new family (compounding his belief in the replacement theory) and smiling broadly as if all was again right in the world.

I suppose it is possible she just didn’t hear.

But I heard and it broke my heart even more.  Not only did it break my heart all the more but it also brought a flash of insight into the path of destructive behavior this poor young man was likely headed down.

“I’m not your little buddy anymore.”

It should go without saying but it bears repeating nonetheless.  This, like all my posts about patients, is not a story of a specific patient or a single interaction.  It is an amalgamation of patients and interactions.  Any resemblance it may have to actual people and events is not only coincidental it is likely a result of projection on the part of the person claiming the resemblance.