Therapeutic Use: Empathy for the Self
There are over half a million children in foster care in the US; in Canada, nearly a hundred thousand. Whatever the reasons for their removal from home—violence, drug abuse, and/or neglect —they do not know how to make sense of what has happened to them. They are just children, after all. They try to make sense of their world in the way children who can’t understand do, inwardly by blaming themselves and feeling shame, outwardly by acting in ways that don’t even make sense to them or their parents.
These children have often witnessed and experienced horrible, frightening, and hard to understand events that create awful feelings. They rarely have consistent others in their lives to help them process any of this. They just get moved around, severed again, without the hope that relationships can last. This makes it very hard to grow up because to grow up you need a reliable, sensitive connection to at least one other person.
Ideas of Connection
Where’s Home? is a story about CONNECTIONS and I wrote it especially for foster children because they have so few, if any. My hope is that all the threads of connection when interwoven can act together as a kind of emotional safety net for a child who needs one.
The story presents a protagonist who will be familiar to most foster children, only this character happens to be kitten and the story’s language includes no ‘system’ terms like foster, child welfare, adoption, or even therapist. This approach makes it easier for the child to let down his guard and engage with the heart of the story. In developing an emotional engagement with Littleprints, he may connect more fully to his own life and be able to experience himself as part of a narrative that not only makes sense but that makes the difficult events he's experienced seem part of a cohesive whole over time.
The story also demonstrates ways in which individuals may feel connected to one another and ultimately how they use their connections with special others to soothe themselves as well as to feel safe and to develop.
There is another element of connection here, and that is the implicit and abiding connection between the child and the storyteller. Portable inside the book, the teller is the voice of caring, understanding, and paying attention. She offers a voice that can sing to him of himself whenever he needs it.
Reading to children: A way of connecting
Every child deserves the ritual experience of being read to. A routine of nightly reading together as part of the entire bedtime ritual provides both the necessary predictability of this time with a parent and the opportunities for closeness, comforting, and connecting. For foster children especially, this is crucial.
Reading-to and reflecting-with creates the very sort of interpersonal environment that the story of Where’s Home? encourages. It’s about the relationships, so reading-with is an important and non- threatening way to enter into a shared space and shared focus with a child.
Reading together with a caring other can offer the safety and structure required for a foster child to begin to develop trust.
Why We Need Stories of Ourselves
As small children, stories about ourselves help us organize our first and fundamental experiences of who we are. They help us form our sense of self. When children say: “Tell me a story about me,” they are saying in part: “Let me see myself through your loving eyes with you so we can share this pleasure in me and I can feel how treasured and enjoyed I am by you.” “Remind me of who I am (to you).” The story, like a parent, becomes a containing other, holding the child’s memories and a sense of his value, holding an understanding of him. Ultimately the child’s identity narrative is co-created in this interaction —here, around the telling and listening and re-telling.
When good enough Others and Stories don’t happen for children—as when they have been maltreated, neglected, or raised in chaos-- their sense of themselves is patched together from disconnected bits of a life. They often then interpret their world as hostile and unsafe and see themselves implicated as unworthy and bad. This makes it especially important that disenfranchised children have stories of themselves that help them make sense of and accept their disjointed but unique lives. These stories can also help others help them.