Three things I have been thinking about since Alton Towers

 

Yesterday I was sitting in a café near Alton Towers. There was a dad on the next table and he was talking to an older couple on the table behind him. The gist of the story was that he had been to the park that day with his kids and they had observed a little girl of about six or seven who was screaming and hitting out at her mum, in front of a very long queue of people.

The older couple didn't ask any more questions. They knew straight away what the problem was. The child needed more discipline, more consequences, essentially her parents needed to parent her.  They were doing the thing that all of us do, which is to see a behaviour and reach for the story that makes quickest sense of it. A child behaving badly must mean a parent who isn't doing their job properly.

I have been thinking about that conversation ever since, and there are three things I keep coming back to.

One. Some children just feel things more

Nobody at that table wondered about the little girl and why she had become so dysregulated in that moment. Theme parks are fabulous but they are also loud, bright, hot, crowded and unpredictable. For a lot of children this is brilliant. For some children it is simply too much.

Our children don't all arrive with the same settings. Back in the mid-2000s two researchers called Thomas Boyce and Bruce Ellis were looking at how children's bodies respond to stress and they found a group of children who were much more reactive to their environment than everyone else.

Think about the two plants for a minute. A dandelion will grow in a crack in the pavement. It doesn't much matter what you do to it or don't do to it; it just gets on with it. An orchid is completely different. Get the light or the temperature or the watering wrong and it will really struggle. Get it right and you get something quite spectacular. The orchid isn't a worse plant; it just depends far more on the conditions it is given. And our children are the same, which is why Boyce and Ellis called the more reactive children, orchid children and the less reactive dandelion children. Most children sit somewhere between the two.

What this means is that two children can be standing in exactly the same queue on exactly the same day and be having a completely different experience of it. So, when we see a seven-year-old fall apart in a queue we are not looking at poor parenting. We are looking at a nervous system that has reached its limit in a place that was designed to push limits.

Two. Sometimes doing nothing is doing everything

The dad's description of the mum was that she "did nothing." She didn't shout back and she didn't physically remove her daughter. What she did do was block the hits and stay exactly where she was. To the people watching this looked like doing nothing. But it was the most useful thing she could have done.

When a child is that overwhelmed, they can't learn anything from us. The thinking part of their brain has gone offline and the part running the show is the old part that is driven by emotions. We can't reason with them, we can't bargain with them, and any consequence we deliver in that moment doesn't feel like a lesson, it just feels like more threat. What actually brings a child back to a regulated state is another nervous system that is calmer than theirs, which was exactly what this mum was doing.

This doesn't mean the behaviour gets ignored, because hitting your mum is never OK and it does need talking about. It just means the talking happens later, in the car on the way home or at bedtime, when there is a child sitting there who is actually able to hear it.

Three. Nobody in that queue was neutral

We tend to think of ourselves as neutral when we are watching something like this. We are just standing there, we haven't said anything, we are not involved. But we are involved, because that mum can feel us.

There is a lot of research on what actually raises our stress hormones and one of the most consistent findings is that the situations that do it most powerfully are the ones where we have very little control and where other people are watching and judging how we are doing. A parent in a queue with a screaming child is about as good a description of that combination as you could ask for.

So the judging isn't a separate thing happening alongside the meltdown. It goes straight into it. The steadiness that little girl needed to borrow was coming from her mum's nervous system, and every raised eyebrow and every pointed sigh in that queue was quietly making that harder to hold on to. We can make that mum's job easier or we can make it harder, but we can't stand there and make no difference at all. Supporting that mum might be as simple as a quick warm look. Often it is just turning back to our own business and giving that family a bit of space, because a parent who doesn't feel watched has a lot more left to give their child.

I have no idea what happened to that little girl for the rest of that day. But I have thought about her mum quite a lot since.