FAMILY COUNSELLOR IMPRESSED

As he looked around the room and saw about thirty odd adolescents playing, arguing and fighting the Family Counsellor told us that we seem to have some really well-balanced young people using our youth centre. Here we were standing in the middle of a melle in an Inner-Sydney Youth Centre, where the Police often asked to take the kids away on a camp somewhere so that for at least one week-end there would be a pause in the Redfern crime rate.

We honestly though that this North Shore professional Counsellor was well and truly off his rocker, these kids, our kids, ‘normal and well balanced?’

We looked at the kid that stole cars and then posted a notice that if he found it them would happily accept a reward of $50, then at a girl whose mouth when she was in a good mood was just foul-mouthed but if she was in a bad mood would tell a dozen things that your brother or sister could do with a broomstick besides sweep the floor.

The girl who was pregnant with her fourth child at seventeen because as she put it herself “its the only thing I’m fucking good at”

These ‘things’ we worked with were being described as well-balanced?

We let the matter drop until the centre was closed for the night and then asked for a clear explanation for such an astonishing statement. We knew the guy had extraordinary success rates with troubled young people still with their families, as were most of ours, so we were keen to learn how he arrived at such a position.

Once must mention at this stage that this occurred prior to Smartphones, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter and all that other technical shit but the situation has changed little for the child even now. The situation might have changed but the facts remain the same. Unless kids face conflict directly in the eye, face-to-face nothing will improve for them.

“Up on the North Shore” he said, “ we have middle to upper class families, living in detached houses, with all the toys a kid would need to amuse themselves and supportive parents. So we have a situation where a child feeling threatened can just go tell Mum and Dad to do something about the bullying or simply retreat to their backyard until the storm blows over and then return to the street and rejoin their previously estranged friends. All is well until conflict arises again and the process starts again.

Here in Redfern and Waterloo you have young people who live in high-rise government housing, a high adolescent crime rate, all of the main phobia's, the majority coming from poor and socially isolated single parents who don’t have a backyard, or even a front yard for that matter, to where a kid can retreat for safety.

The result is that when conflict arises the child has no fallback position, they either face up to the challenge diplomatically or get a fistful of fives to the face.

So, your kids have to learn tact, diplomacy, co-operation and teamwork the hard way. When confronted with a problem they can either talk their way out of it or fight their way out its up to each individual. Rich kids don’t face this same problem and so conflict is something they never learn to handle. What results is an eruption of violence when faced with conflict.

Oddly enough its conflict with helicopter parents and other children, even in the kindergarten sandpit that allows them to develop into balanced young people able to handle the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”

He was of course, in my opinion quite right. It is for this reason that I believe today's young people who don’t communicate directly with each other, who can friend and unfriend each other electronically, the toys in the backyard, that has created the perceived increases in violence among young people. It’s always been there, disrespectful teenagers, wild parties and pub brawls (been there, done that) right back to the middle-ages. However, until now children growing up have not had to come face-on with conflict as often in the past and so, when confronted in the street do not have the skills to negotiate their way out of trouble and violence arises from frustration.

I'm going to go out on a limb here by suggesting that maybe 'some' bullying is a good thing it is part of out development as humans.