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The Madness That Is My Life…..a blog about my life

~ The madness that is my life…my thoughts, feelings and experiences as I go through life

The Madness That Is My Life…..a blog about my life

Tag Archives: behaviour

Can someone explain to me?

23 Friday Nov 2018

Posted by themadnessthatismylife in Emotions, kids, Motherhood, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

adulthood, alone, behaviour, childhood, children, mental health, schools

It’s been a while. I’ve got all kinds of excuses as to why I haven’t blogged but in reality I’ve just not had a strong enough opinion about something to rouse me out of my apathy to put pen to paper…..until now! I woke up this morning enraged and outraged by something which has drawn me to write, I’ve written about it before; I can’t seem to let it go or stop thinking about it so I thought I’d write about it in the hope it helps.

A friends child is in year 7 (that’s the first year in secondary school for all those who are used to the old way of making year groups) at an academy school that prides itself on its strict rules and regimented regimes. Anyway, late on Sunday evening this child suddenly remembered that their school shoes had a hole in them. Not a small hole, but a hole the size of a 10 pence piece. It was 8pm, the shops are closed, even if they had been open my friend doesn’t get paid until Tuesday next week and so my friend did what any sensible parent would do; she wrote a letter to the school explaining the situation and sent her child in wearing black trainers.

Back in my days at school that would have been the end of the issue. The school would have accepted the situation; maybe offered some financial help to get some shoes before the mothers pay day and everyone would have been happy. The child would be educated, the mother would have felt like a decent, hard working parent and the teachers would be satisfied that a child was learning and it would all be forgotten about as soon as the mother got paid and bought some new shoes. But not today. Oh no, not today.

Monday morning the child went into school in full school uniform, but wearing the black trainers. The child was picked out at the school gate by the teacher guarding it. The child was told to go home and change into school shoes, when the child then produced the note from the mother and tried to explain, embarrassed in front of school friends, she was sent to the school principles office, where she once again handed over the note and the headteacher made her sit while he called her mother.

The mother, also embarrassed explained that she couldn’t purchase school shoes until the following week and was told by the headteacher that her child would, in that case be put in isolation and have work set by her teachers to do there! There was no offer of help or understanding from the school.. They just put her daughter into isolation. For over a week. For something that was no fault of her own. Not for misbehaving, or not working, but as a punishment for something totally out of her control. Because her mother couldn’t afford to immediately go out and buy school shoes this child was to be segregated from her friends and her classmates for 6 days! She was going to have work set for her; miss out on the learning experience and the benefit of having lessons, because she was wearing the wrong pair of shoes.

I’m fucking outraged. As many of you will know I work with prisons. In a prison it is recognised that segregation is one of the worst forms of punishment. The impact that segregation can have on a person’s mental health is so great that there are prison service rules that mean that a person put into segregation has to have a full physical and mental health check undertaken by a clinician to agree that they are fit and mentally well enough to be there. It is seen as so damaging that this has to be undertaken within 24 hours of them being put there. There have been countless studies into the effects of it in prisons, in conclusion they nearly all say the same thing: solitary confinement has a negative effect on an individual’s wellbeing.

And yet we are socially and physically doing this to school children because they are wearing the wrong school uniform; through no fault of their own.

Let that just sink in a minute… We are risking a child’s mental wellbeing because their parents can’t afford a pair of shoes. We are risking them falling behind in class as they have missed the benefit of lessons, because a school can’t put education over a pair of shoes.

Countless studies have shown that the connections that teachers make with their students in classes make a difference to the child and an impact not only on their learning but their overall wellbeing and resilience. And. We. Are. Risking. This. Over. A. Pair. Of. Shoes.

I’ll just take a moment to let that sink in; Wearing the right shoes or having the right bag, or coat or haircut is more important than the education, and future mental health and the wellbeing of our children.

It is that simple. I get having rules. I get having a uniform. I understand that. But how can we say that a child can only have one day off of school after the death of a grandparent on one hand because the education they will be missing is too important:

Schools minister Nick Gibb warned in 2015 “taking just one week off during term time can impact a child’s GCSE grades…. Any absence, even if it’s illness actually, can damage the long-term chances of a child achieving good GCSE’s if they take just a week off a year.”

and then stop them going to class for 6 days over a godamned pair of shoes. And somehow, this is seen as a positive thing. Can someone explain to me how exactly? Schools mete out this isolation punishment as the first level of a behavioural policy, as if it is nothing. And yet it is damaging out children for things that are no fault of their own.

And we wonder why we have a disenchanted generation of children growing up.

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A new dawn. 

09 Thursday Jul 2015

Posted by themadnessthatismylife in kids, Life, love, Mornings, Motherhood, waking

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

behaviour, blogging, broken, children, chocolate, kids, love, motherhood, naughty, parenting

It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. A lot has been going on and I just couldn’t seem to decide on which thing to focus on; however this morning it became blatantly obvious. 

I am one of those people who wakes up and is ready to go. I don’t need to slowly waken and set lots of different alarms. Most mornings I’m awake before my alarm even goes off. And I savour those moment when the kids come in for a cuddle and tell me they love me. This morning the youngest told me that he is most comfortable “when I hold him”, which just about melted my heart. Those kids are awesome. 

So why is it that nearly every day, or so it feels. I end up just about ready to nail said child/children to the wall!!
Take this morning for example; lovely cuddles completed, I tell the boys to go get dressed. This shouldn’t be a problem, after all last night I laid their clothes out for them. It should just be a case of putting them on, a feat that, on a good day they can manage in under a minute. So why, today, did it take nearly an hour? An hour interspersed with me alternately sending youngest to the naughty step to get dressed, to me screaming at him to just get dressed, only to have him wander in 5 minutes later, wearing a pair of pants and s single sock, moaning that he can’t open the can of soap he just found in his room?!  WTH were you doing in your room, I ask? Why aren’t you dressed? “Because I want to wash my dirty hands” came the reply. Perfectly reasonable you might think, however, there was nothing dirty on his hands 5 minutes ago and now, when he was supposed to be getting dressed, somehow his whole hands are covered in red pen?! So, swallowing my rage, I squirt some soap into his hands and tell him to be quick about washing them and then, GET DRESSED. 

10 minutes later, he is back, this time he has two socks and a filthy school T-shirt on, that is most certainly not the nicely cleaned and ironed one is laid out for him the previous evening, and instead looks like he has used it to clean off a homeless guys bare feet. “Why aren’t you wearing the t-shirt I left out for you? Why aren’t you dressed? Where did you find that thing?” I ask astounded. To which the reply is that this was all he could find?!?! I damn near rip the filthy t-shirt off his head and walk into his room and pick up the neat pile of trousers and t-shirt I left sitting, prominently RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE OF HIS ROOM!!

I send him back to the naughty step to get dressed. 

5 minutes later progress appears to have been made; well he now has a clean t-shirt on, however now he has a new gripe! Last night in a clearly weak moment which I have regretted from the moment the words were out of my mouth, I agreed that he could have a packed lunch today. This is a rare treat that he is rarely allowed (I mean at his age they get free school meals, why would I do a packed lunch), so you’d think the child would be grateful, but no, not a chance, even the sandwich filling turned into a battle, him wanting PB&J and me insisting he couldn’t. Anyway, this morning he has decided that he wants to swap the contents of the lunch box I’ve made for him as there’s not enough in it!! Arrgghhh, GET DRESSED!!! And give me that lunch box so I can launch it out of the window! 

The flip side of this is that as he can see me getting increasingly frustrated with his younger brother, the middle one takes the opportunity to shine; he is dressed with no prompting from me, brushes his teeth at the first request, prepares his packed lunch and sits in the front room all ready to go calling out to his younger brother to stop being naughty. Yay. At least one of my children can behave thinks I, prematurely as it turns out. 

The next time I come downstairs, miraculously the youngest is now dressed and comes out of the kitchen carrying a bag of chocolate, which I happen to know was in the back of one of the top cupboards, asking if he can have it for breakfast. No. You cannot, and GET YOUR BLOODY SHOES ON!!! I scream as I grab the chocolate and slam it into the bin, “no one is having any chocolate in this house ever again!” A perfectly reasonable response I feel! 

It is then that the middle one, decides to tell me that when he had climbed the cupboards to reach said chocolate, he “may” have broken the door on the cupboard below! Closer inspection reveals that the cupboard below no longer actually has a door, it is more that a door is leant against the cupboard at a jaunty angle, and that the hinges have ripped out so spectacularly that there is no hope of ever securing it again. 

At this point there is no stopping the rage which I have been swallowing back nearly all morning. Both boys are dispatched to sit in the front room and behave until I’ve made my coffee and we can go.  Do they think this is good behaviour? Do they think I want to give them nice things and a new house if they can’t look after this one? I spend two further minutes berating them before I go off to make the much needed coffee! 

We leave the house without further incident (if you don’t count the daily squabble over who gets to sit in the front) and once we are all safely strapped in the car, I look across at them both and my heart melts. They are both grinning at me, and the youngest cheekily pokes his tongue out and tells me he loves me. The middle one leans forward to plant a kiss on my lips and a hug round my neck. They apologise.  Peace is restored. 

I drop them off and we have a hug and a cuddle, and as I drive away I am determined that tomorrow it will be different. Tomorrow I will be calm. I will not shout, I will be the perfect mum. It won’t happen though, I’ll try, they will try, but they are two mischievous boys and I am an overtired, harassed mum of three. Whilst it may not be ideal, and I’d  prefer we didn’t have the rows in the first place, the fact that we all forgive and forget so freely, that despite everything we all leave with a kiss and a cuddle, feeling loved surely says a lot more about our live than the fact we were at loggerheads 5 minutes before…doesn’t it?! 

Anyway tomorrow is a new dawn! 

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