The Glass Children

Many governments intend to restrict access to the internet and to social network platforms for children under the age of 16 for what is now recognised as severe harmful exposure to violent, pornographic or misleading internet sites.

Australia has led the way in this in part inspired by women whose daughters have committed suicide after internet bullying. France follows soon.

This heroic attempt to deal with the toxic consequences of exposure to the web will fail despite good intentions for the simple reason that parents utterly and unwaveringly are convinced that their children are fragile.

The medieval warrior and martyr Joan of Arc died at the hands of the English in 1421. It is difficult to imagine that an adolescent female could be placed in charge of a male army in medieval France. Yet this was only possible because the King of France, Charles 6th, believed that he was made of glass.

Charles became far too insane to govern and displayed an unfortunate tendency to attack and kill his attendants. His son, titled the Dauphin, became regent in his stead and quickly realised that he had to assert his control of France by throwing out English invaders so when the adolescent Joan turned up claiming that the voice of god told her to lead the armies of France against the invader, the Dauphin saw his chance.

IF this young woman could convince his soldiers that God was on their side they might find the courage to over throw the English and if they failed Joan could be condemned as a witch.  So from a mad King’s delusion the legend of Saint Joan was born.

This malady of the King became known as the Glass Delusion. More common in the insane at the time of Joan, the sufferers believed that they would shatter if touched and so went about carefully wrapped.

To my surprise I encountered a parallel belief in medical practice usually in mothers who seemed to believe that their children were made of glass.

So the delusion troubled the parent of the child rather than the child. One striking example was a mother who brought her nine year old daughter to me for a cold.

Conducting the usual medical examination I produced a tongue spatula and made to examine the child’s throat. To my astonishment her mother grabbed my arm and, crying out, “Gentle ,Gentle” as though I was about to injure her child, she restrained me from examining her.

As time went on I encountered more and more instances of this including mothers whose children had common respiratory infections which were causing the parent much more distress than the child.

For example in one instance I found a mother in the waiting room holding her child rocking back and forth crying volubly as though the two, mother and child,  were in an air raid shelter escaping bombs. She was almost inconsolable and at first declined to let me examine her the little one.

This is not confined to mothers. There are men who talk about their children as though they are so fragile that the smallest injury can be life threatening and criticism of their children is tantamount to the most severe existential threat to the family.

Teachers are one group who encounter this the most. One teacher saw me who told me that her principal had threatened her with suspension because when she chastised a boy who was misbehaving in her class the girl sitting in front of him complained to her mother that the teacher frightened her and the mother wrote to the school principal detailing her daughter’s history of anxiety and stating that the teacher’s harsh reprimand was not appropriate and she felt compelled to “support her child in her anxiety.”

In another example a grandmother or a child at a school found herself confronted by a petition from a group of women who worked at the tuckshop with her stating that they did not want her working there because she was insisting that each child who purchased something should be saying please and thank you.

We have begun to be very familiar with the image of the crusading parent who sails into a school to confront the principal about something a teacher has done or said to the parent’s child but now something new adorns this parent child relationship which is that children are so fragile that harsh words or any kind of discipline is likely to shatter and traumatise them.

Their children, they insist must feel that they are “safe” , and that if they are criticised in front of their peers, no matter the nature of the offense, they will lose self-esteem.

More and more that language adopted by parents acquires a hyperbolic tone. A parent will insist that when the child received a low grade for an assignment he or she is “devastated”.

The strange notion that normal children are so fragile that any reversal will cause them permanent injury  has become so entrenched now that special arrangements must be made if children give speech and oral presentations. They have to be filmed so they don’t experience performance anxiety.

Children are now provided with certificates from their doctors and psychologists to excuse them from duties or activities which may in any way cause them to be anxious even though avoidance from fearful stimuli is totally contraindicated in the treatment of anxiety where exposure and desensitization are the standard approach.

Allowing children or encouraging them to avoid activities and experiences which they don’t like is the most common cause of the current “epidemic” of school refusal.

Now 40% of students between the years 1 -10 are missing at least 1 out of 10 school days. A small proportion of these children have diagnosable mental conditions but most do not and parents and health providers oppose attempts to “make” them attend school claiming that any pressure is likely to cause genuine and ongoing mental symptoms.

In effect if the current and widespread myth that making children do things they don’t like without their express consent is harmful to them then society is powerless to solve this problem.

Why do parents find it so difficult to correct their children or make them do things they don’t want to do.  Parents see their children as the loving extension of themselves. They identify strongly with traits they see as the positive manifestations of who they are. They may make comments like, “he’s just like me”, or “my son is my best friend.”

Parents become afraid that if they confront their child about what he or she is doing or try to correct him or her in some way then the child will stop loving them.

Modern positive psychology has also informed them that punishing children or disciplining them in some way will cause permanent psychological harm. These views underscore the idea that children are fragile, so fragile that the slightest reversal will impair them permanently.

This provides the explanation for the dramatic rise in suicides among adolescent girls.  The standard teaching that exposure to stress and adverse experiences fortifies the personality to deal with future stress has been abandoned because psychologists tell parents what they want to believe which is that their child is special, unique and fragile.

This combined with excessive exposure to the internet in the absence of reading means that their children fail to develop a strong inner life which they can use to reflect on their condition and make decisions for themselves.

Instead they develop networks of friends on whom they rely to make decisions and whose approval they crave obsessively. When bullied and ostracised by the group they have nothing to fall back on and suicide.

It may appear to be a simple thing for parents to simply turn the computer or mobile phone off and deny their children access to social networks which endanger them but in reality most parents cannot tolerate the demands made by their children and believe that the acting out and insistence that the child must be reconnected will cause their children to be psychologically injured though there is entirely lacking any evidence that this occurs, indeed all the evidence is to the contrary.

One argument raised by the lobby that opposed the legislation banning children under 16 access to social networks is that minority and gay children will be cut off from the only means of connecting with others with the same gender identity but in fact what these advocates are not admitting is that these groups are especially vulnerable to access by adult sexual predators.

Of  the host of mental disorders attributed to children the most poorly understood and the most badly managed is anxiety.

The signs that this is being poorly treated from the outset are parents who cannot get their children out of the parental bedroom at night to sleep in their own rooms and children who at supposed to have elective mutism, speaking only to select people they feel comfortable with.

There are also children who are very fussy eaters or who cannot play outside without being observed or play by themselves and children who get their way by throwing temper tantrums and throwing themselves on the floor.

Parents cannot resist this acting out because they think it injurious.

 As I observed over the years in children and parents who presented to me complaining about childhood anxiety I noted a common and disturbing feature. The parents of these children often did not seem to want their children to get better.

These parents had just as must trouble separating from the child if not more than the child had separating from them.

This is what keeps the condition refractory to treatment. When these parents spoke about the child it was as though they was talking about a rare and fragile piece of crystal attributing all kinds of qualities the child clearly did not possess.

Given the opportunity the parent could talk for hours about their child sharing every tiny and completely mundane activity.

This is a troubling feature and, in my experience, indicative of poor prognosis for anxiety symptoms and problems separating..

The real solution to this problem does not lie on the psychologist’s couch. Indeed psychologists for their own reasons, usually fiscal, tend to continue and reinforce the disorder. The solution lies in the home and in the discovery by parents that separation, solitude and personal exploration form the best management.

The failure to encourage outdoor play in children has led to chronic eye disorders in the children of Singapore who have trouble with distant vision because of excessive indoor computer time.

Childhood play is being “over-supervised” by parents who now, more and more, attend children’s birthday parties so that they can keep an eye what is going on.

Child birth and rearing has become a hellish landscape for mothers, all of who now seem to be trouble with post-partum depression.

This “hellish landscape” has now been illuminated in the movie “If I had legs I’d kick you”. Here a mother, a psychotherapist herself attends regular sessions with her psychiatrist because her life has been upended by raising a toddler.

The heroine insists that she is “in control” of the life of her and her child when in fact her toddler totally controls her and has a mysterious “eating” disorder, really a form of childhood “fussy eating syndrome” which is in movie is converted to a serious medical condition which, prior to the movie,I have never encountered. In medical practice

The movie disturbingly paints a portrait of a woman whose life is a terrifying nightmare where every event and reversal is either treated as a catastrophe or converted to one by her reaction to it.

Her child is made of glass, as noted above, and in one incident when a man lightly bumps her car with his vehicle and gets out to assess whether there is any damage and finds nothing she screams at him that her child has been severely traumatised.

Unfazed he inquires about a small fury animal mother is holding at which point the animal, the child’s pet, tries to run away and is immediately squashed by a passing car.

This is child rearing courtesy of modern positive psychology and child rearing practices. 

As usual the parents who endure all this attend endless psychology treatments or try to take their children all of whom seem to have one spurious mental condition or another. It is all pointless and achieves nothing.

The children of glass are a recent phenomenon.

There are striking historical examples where young children, thrown on their own resources have proven to be robust and amazingly resourceful.

In my own family a senior patriarch travelled from Greece by himself at the age of thirteen and, arriving in Australia, a country in which he did not speak the language, found his way to distant Longreach to take up work.  

In 1922 Lennie Gwyther, aged nine, rode a horse “Ginger Mick” 1000 kilometres alone from Melbourne  to the opening of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.

These were exceptional examples though there were many lesser instances, but nonetheless children in the early part of the 20th Century showed stamina and endurance which appears to have entirely vanished.

In reality it has only vanished in the minds of modern parents who seem to prefer their children vulnerable, fragile anxious and dependent.

In the middle years of last century we explored the world on our bicycles, played outside unsupervised, built cubby houses and went camping.  Today parents attend children’s parties to sit around in a circle and watch them.

Children are taken everywhere by their parents, often in detriment to their schooling. The only times they spend alone is in their rooms staring at computers or texting on cellular phones.

The disturbing truth is that this is not really for the benefit of the children,. It is for the benefit of their parents.