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RAISING
A NON-VIOLENT CHILD
Part ll:
The Importance of Affiliation
by Bruce D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D.
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How children learn to connect with others—the third core
strength they need to be humane and to protect themselves from
violence
Babies are
born dependent: In order to survive and thrive they need other
human beings. As children grow they form many relationships and
weave complex networks of give and take which create the healthy
interdependence of family, community, and culture. People do this
well because we are biologically designed to live, play, grow,
and work in groups. We are, at our core, social creatures. Affiliation
is the strength that allows us to join with others to create something
stronger, more adaptive, and more creative than any individual--the
group.
The Roots of Affiliation
Your family is your child’s first and most important group,
glued together by the strong emotional bonds of attachment. Yet
your child is also connected to other groups with far less powerful
bonds—she is part of a culture and community. Membership
in all of these groups will shape her life. In turn, as she grows
she will influence them. It is in groups that your child has thousands
of brief emotional, social, and cognitive experiences that help
define her development. The capacity to join in, contribute to,
and benefit from groups is essential to her healthy development.
But children must learn how to join in—to communicate, listen,
negotiate, compromise, and share. These skills are not always
easy to master. They are acquired over a lifetime, starting from
the lessons learned in their early relationships with family.
Affiliation has its roots in attachment (the ability to form and
maintain healthy emotional relationships) and in the capacity
to control one’s frustration and anxiety. Without these two
strengths, no child can begin to form and regulate the relationships
with others necessary to develop affiliation skills.
How Children Learn to Engage
From his primary relationship with you, your child has learned
certain social language and rules of interaction. The importance
of these rules is reinforced by his dependence on you and your
inherent size, strength, and power. However, none of these factors
is present when your child first starts to interact with other
young children. Because of this, children tend to be better at
engaging and affiliating with adults than with other kids. The
“rules” of social engagement and communication between
children take time and experience to learn. Children learn to
join in with other children in steps. First they observe and explore
jargon; then, they negotiate the transition to more complex, multi-peer
groups. Learning and mastering the rules of groups is a very important,
yet difficult process for many children. “Best” friends
emerge. Temporary alliances form and may exclude one child and
then later incorporate her. Being “in” or “out”
can shift from hour to hour and day to day. Some children manage
this process well. Others do not—these are often children
with immature attachment or self-regulation skills. In some cases
a child struggling with affiliation skills may still be very interactive,
confident, and appropriate with adults.
How Children Grasp Group Dynamics
As children grow, they become more capable of maintaining and
managing multiple relationships. Structured and regulated group
interactions such as those common to an early childhood classroom
help develop these skills. Picking a partner to work on a task
or play a game with provides opportunities to wait, share, take
turns, cooperate, and communicate with others. The games and the
tasks increase in complexity as the child grows.
Problems arise when there is a mismatch between the child’s
social skills and the demands of the game or task. Some team sports,
for example, are introduced far too early. Five-year- olds playing
soccer can mimic play, but they are not playing as a team—all
nine kids are chasing the ball everywhere on the field. Only later
can kids really understand how to work together. While it is fine
for young kids to play soccer, it is important for parents and
other adults to understand that that they will be limited not
just by their physical skills but by their social skills.
How to Help a Child Who Needs Support
The majority of children who have problems in groups have yet
to learn how to self-regulate or reach out to others. They do
not easily learn social cues and often act in impulsive or immature
ways when they do not get what they want. This makes other children
avoid them, which creates a negative cycle—fewer opportunities
to socialize leads to slower social learning. Over time, these
children stand out further and further from their peers in their
capacity to be a comfortable part of the group. A distant, disengaged,
or impulsive child—one who is also weak in these other core
strengths—won’t be easily welcomed in a group. And in
fact, if he is part of a group, he may act in ways that lead others
to tease or actively avoid him.
The excluded, marginalized child can take this pain and turn it
inward, becoming sad or self-loathing. Or he can direct the pain
outward, becoming aggressive and even violent. Later in life,
without intervention, these children are more likely to seek out
other marginalized children and affiliate with them. Unfortunately,
the glue that holds these groups together can be beliefs and values
that are self-destructive or hateful to those who have excluded
them.
Bruce
D. Perry, M.D., Ph.D., is an internationally recognized authority
on children in crisis. Dr. Perry leads the ChildTrauma Academy,
a pioneering center providing ser-vice, research, and training
in the area of child maltreatment (www.Child-Trauma.org). He is
the Medical Director for Provincial Programs in Children’s
Mental Health for Alberta, Canada.
Reprinted with permission from Scholastic Parent & Child,
February/March 2002. All rights reserved.
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