Children's Needs

As a social worker who sees many children from a variety of different family situations, one thing that stands out is how difficult it is for young children to emotionally remain children in our society. Parents often tell me that their child loves video games, that TV or games are the only things that seem to entertain their children. Some parents have the TV on all the time, background noise that they don't filter for their children. Their children watch daytime "talk shows" that show adults yelling, fighting, and telling about the odd realities of their lives, the lies they have told, the many people they have had sex with, or whatever else has made them "interesting" enough to be on these shows.

Other parents structure their lives around adult activities, their children exposed to adult situations on a frequent or continual basis. They have lives filled with visiting adult friends, spending the night at one house, then another as the adults party and enjoy their relationships with each other. These parents seem to feel that, as long as their child has something or someone to play with, the child is "happy." Later, when the child is older and begins to have problems with peer relationships, teachers, and parents, the parents don't seem to understand that it was this instability and severe lack of what young children need that contributed to their child's chaotic and sometimes dangerous, belligerant and defiant behaviors.

A young child needs predictability in her life. She is beginning to hone in on people and things and to have a sense of connection with them. She needs to know the routine: dinner with the people I live with, bath, reading time, and bed time. She needs to sleep in the same bed most of the time. Not 51% of the time, but 90% of the time.

She needs to know that the people around her are safe, and they have good boundaries. She won’t know these things if they are present, but she will learn them quickly if they are not present.

She needs to be around adults who are sober, whose behavior is consistent, and kind. This is how she will find and connect to sober and kind people in her lifetime, and this is the behavior she will model throughout her life. If she becomes comfortable with people who are kind sometimes, too close so that she is made to feel uncomfortable sometimes, gruff or angry with people around them sometimes, and absent for periods of time because he or she is angry or high or “needs space,” she will develop an insecurity about people that will last well beyond her childhood.

She needs a parent (preferably two parents) who are constantly checking her environment to ensure that she is safe, that she isn’t being exposed to foul language, inappropriate media such as adult programming or music that is full of negative images, anger, lust, and sex. Her young brain is not equipped to handle adult situations or concepts. They become a source of anxiety until she develops the ability to block them out completely. I have had so many parents tell me that their kids love watching adult horror movies such as the “Chuckie” series, and they say their kids aren’t disturbed by what they see. In reality, the children have had (and may still have) terrible nightmares about the movies and the images of terror, bloody violence, and death. But the human mind becomes numb, and the child begins to act out the scary parts so that she is protected in some sense. She becomes the monster in her play, rather than the victim because that would be too horrible to experience, even in play. This is how children’s behaviors are impacted by inappropriate media. They act out and attempt to become what they are afraid of to ward off the terrible possibility that what they saw can happen to them.

Children have the same response to being victims of sex crimes by either adults or other children. Once a child has had a sexual encounter, that victim child frequently tries to act out what has happened to them on younger children. When they are successful, they are no longer a victim, but a perpetrator. Being a victim is emotionally much more difficult for a mind to deal with than being a non-victim. Children don’t see that what they are doing is attempting to stop feeling hurt. And their actions with other children don’t really make things better. They just change the dynamics into something more easily tolerated.