What Lasts A Lifetime?

Speakers: Steve Biddulph, Naomi Stadlen

It hardly needs saying that the past year has proved to be an exceptionally challenging one for all of us, including our youngest children and their parents. These children have experienced the pandemic and its disruption for a large part of their short lives, and how they experience this time will, indeed, affect their whole lifetimes and will be critical for their physical and mental health. The two distinguished speakers at the What About the Children? conference in 2021, Steve Biddulph and Naomi Stadlen, were chosen for their ability to address the question of how babies, toddlers and their parents can best be supported at such a time.
This was the second such conference to take place virtually using Zoom. It was held in the morning of on March 24, with Steve Biddulph giving the first presentation from his home in Tasmania, where it was late evening.

Being Human: A Better Way of Using your Mind

Steve Biddulph is a psychologist with decades of experience in practice and an author of several popular books, including the million-selling The Complete Secret of Happy Children and Raising Boys. He began his presentation with an anecdote about one of his patients: a young mum and part-time GP. He described how she had encountered a young man at a station who had called after her – as it seemed, for help – but something ‘in her gut’ warned her against stopping and she drove home. There, she discovered that the same man had been arrested after trying to abduct a young woman at knifepoint. The ‘gut feeling’ that spelt out danger had saved her from an unpleasant experience, or far worse.

Gut feelings like this one are very common, although their effects are not always so dramatic, and over the last 5 years or so they have become something of a focus for neuroscience research. They arise because our senses take in more than we can consciously process, but we do so subconsciously and we can pull it out if it is needed, and not only if, as in that example, we are in actual danger. He gave another example of a patient: a veteran of war in the Far East who felt irrationally anxious when around Asian people and sought help to ‘re-educate his amygdala’ – part of the brain that processes emotion – that they were harmless. He ended up adopting children from Vietnam.

He then said that if we were a face-to-face audience, he would ask us the question ‘what is a human being?’ and that he wondered what our answers would be. We might turn to biology and describe ourselves as mammals, or we might describe ourselves in terms of our relationships. We have physical bodies with basic needssuch as food and sleep, but we also need love, and our culture has taught us to hide strong emotion. He described running a training weekend in 1987 the day after his wife had miscarried a girl and, later, finding that he could release his emotion through the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’. We need to be able to be comfortable with strong feelings and, when we are looking after small children, to understand that their feelings matter as much.

It is useful to think of each of us as being like a mansion with four interconnected storeys: body, emotion, intellect and spirit. In order to be fully human, we need to ‘inhabit’ each of the storeys, but some people find themselves ‘stuck’ on one level or another. Unexplained physical problems may be caused by a problem on another level, as was the case with a woman whose persistent migraines only vanished when she divorced her husband for a persistent affair.

This unbreakable link between our emotions and our bodies explains the link between adverse childhood experiences – which can range from serious but limited illness or parental divorce to severe abuse – and problems in adult life. Early in his career he often encountered young men who had difficulty fitting into the role of dad, often because of their own remembered difficulties with fathers who had been physically or emotionally absent. Both men and women need to become comfortable in their own skins before they can be comfortable as parents. Another angle on this can be found in the work of Carl Rogers, a pioneer of modern counselling methods who was one of the first to give his clients the space to ‘unpack’ their own lives. In most people today, deep emotions or ‘gut feelings’ – products of the unconscious mind – are under-appreciated and underused. We need to be aware that when we raise small children, we are programming their unconscious minds from our own. Children pick up stress from the adults who care for them, and we should try to be aware of all the dimensions of our, and their, personalities. The spiritual level is not theological or ideological but expresses who we really are, how we relate to each other and how we raise our children.

Mothering during the Pandemic

Naomi Stadlen is a psychotherapist based in London; she is the author of several acclaimed books on motherhood, most recently What Mothers Learn Without Being Taught (April 2020). Like Biddulph she is a parent and grandparent herself and an experienced public speaker, moving to Zoom seamlessly when the pandemic hit. This most recent book contains mothers’ own detailed descriptions of their babies and small children. Like What About The Children? itself, she aims not to be ‘finger- wagging’ but to support mothers to do the best they can in the situations they are in. Almost always, children will thrive with ‘good enough’ parenting.

She divided her talk into two sections, the first covering mothering in general and the second mothering during the pandemic. Mothering is universal and ancient, and the first books on the subject date back to ancient Egypt. She has run discussion groups for mothers of small children since 1991, when her own youngest child was nine years old. Throughout that time, she has noticed that while first-time mothers tend to feel daunted by their new role, more experienced ones will ‘set the bar lower’.

Adults who lost their mothers in early life describe feeling a universal sense of loss, or, as one interviewee said, ‘a sense of suffocation and helplessness’. She told a story of a man called Harold Haig who was sent to Australia as a boy in the 1940sand was told, wrongly, that his mother was dead. While he was growing up, he felt that he didn’t belong to anyone. Sadly, when he searched for his family as an adult, he was able to locate an aunt and learned that his mother had only recently died. Perhaps the most vivid description of the damage caused by a lack of mothering comes from the story of the young orphans discovered in Romania after the fall of the Berlin Wall who were ‘simply rocking backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards’. This is of course an extreme example, but many people feel that their mothers are the bedrock of their families. Since the pandemic started, some mothers in her discussion groups have reported their older children’s fears that they would die of COVID: ‘you are the glue that holds us all together’, said one.

But what makes a mother, a mother? It is the love that our children sense even without touch; it can be seen in the expression of pride when a baby reaches a new milestone, or of shock when a toddler reaches out to touch the kettle; it is a strong emotion, almost automatic, and almost always enough. If a mother asks whether she is ‘giving enough’ to her baby, the answer is almost invariably ‘yes’.

Since the pandemic hit, Stadlen has held her discussion groups on Zoom and gauged mothers’ reactions to the situation as it developed. Many mothers have commented on the extra things they had to fit into their lives, including home- schooling older children. ‘Cajoling and sometimes yelling at my [home-schooled]children’, as one mother put it, was not considered to be ‘mothering’, but something that prevented them from doing their ‘real’ jobs, as a mother and often also as an employee.

One striking feature of mothers’ experiences, however, was a sense in which just becoming a mother had prepared many of them for the sudden and disruptive change when the COVID crisis hit. Most of us can date this change exactly, and in England, probably to March 23, 2020. This fast, dramatic change from a largely carefree life to a more limited one that is dominated by vigilance can be likened to giving birth, and the anxious ‘new normal’ to caring for a vulnerable new-born. Becoming a mother and entering a pandemic are both sudden, irreversible changes. Therefore, mothers of young children who can remember these changes may have been better prepared for this sudden crisis than people with no recent memory of this type of experience. Today, we are in a constant state of flux between vaccines and variants, loosening and tightening restrictions, and we constantly question when, how and even whether we will get our pre-pandemic lives back. Living through a pandemic, like motherhood, is experiencing a series of unpredictable changes. Many mothers have reported that they lose their tempers with their children more, particularly when home-schooling, and respect for teachers has grown.

Another way in which the experience of COVID mirrors that of early motherhood is in disruption to sleep patterns. Mothers of young children (and particularly first children, when anxiety levels are highest) report sleeping very lightly and often ‘feeling like a zombie’ for lack of sleep. The beginning of the pandemic, too, was marked by an epidemic of insomnia and lesser sleep problems. The Anglo-Saxons had a word for this perennial problem: uhtceare, the experience of waking up before dawn and worrying about the day ahead.

During this last year illness and death have been at the forefront of our lives in a way that they were throughout most of history but not in most peoples’ memories. We will not be able to see the effects of this until well after the pandemic has passed, but we can tell, from experience of past traumas, that many of us – even those who are children now – will have experienced some positive change. Mothers, and others with responsibility for small children, can help them come to terms with it by teaching them that they have some responsibility, for example to keep away from others. One mother reported that her toddler wants to wear a mask too, ‘even tho’ it keeps falling off her little ears... it’s a ‘me too’ thing’. Older children may be helped by reading stories of children affected by war and other trauma. Just as invisible virus particles can harm us, mothering is invisible and can help children heal, and those of us who are not ourselves mothers can help those we know to do just that.

Both these fascinating talks were followed by lively discussions. How What About The Children? conferences develop in the next few years, whether they return to being face-to-face events, hybrid or on Zoom, they are all guaranteed to be excellent value.

Speakers Latest Book Titles:

N. Stadlen, What Mothers Learn: Without Being Taught. Piatkus (2020). ISBN-13: 978-0349412443
S. Biddulph, Fully Human: A New Way of Using Your Mind. Bluebird (to be published May 2021). ISBN-13: 978-1509884759