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Still here
SOUL FOOD Column Editor: William W. Rankin, PhD
Still Here William W. Rankin, PhD
A
LIFETIME AGO, my parents kindly set me down on a university campus several hundred miles from home. Here, I would spend the better part of the succeeding four years. Like many before and many since, I felt the exhilaration, but also the bewilderment and the fears of being in such an unfamiliar place. Reassurance was not provided by the welcoming speech of the nattily dressed, dauntingly facile Dean of Freshmen. It contained these horrifying words: ‘‘Look to the left of you, look to the right of you. In four years one of you will not be here.’’ Thereafter, I would occasionally cross paths with the young man who had been seated beside me during the Dean’s talk. ‘‘Still here,’’ he’d say with wry humor. ‘‘Still here,’’ I would reply. More than a few of us wondered if succeeding as students needed to be as difficult as life in this place sometimes seemed. Later, the recurring dreams, or more aptly, nightmares, humorously (when recounted in waking hours) demonstrated the anxiety produced by college’s academic pressures. You might be familiar with a few of these: You show up for the final exam, but you never took the course. You race to the exam room, but you can’t find it. Or finding it, you discover that the exam has just ended. Former football coach–turned–sports commentator John Madden recently told of his nightmare: When he began to take a three-hour final exam, its subject turned out to be beets. Beets! Intimidating as the first weeks of college were, we had the relative security of knowing what the rules of the game were in that protected ethos. We could at least survive, and possibly flourish, if we lived by these, worked hard, and so forth; the parameters of our lives were more or less predictable. The frightening possibility of violence crossed
Address reprint request to William W. Rankin, PhD, PO Box 29110, San Francisco, CA 94129-0110. Copyright r 2000 by W.B. Saunders Company 0882-5963/00/1505-0010$10.00/0 doi:10.1053/jpdn.2000.9163 328
the mind only seldom, if ever. Eventually, to be ‘‘still here’’ seemed a manageable task. * Today, those luxuriously halcyon college years stand in remarkable contrast to what must be endured by many current students, including the very young ones. The tragic violence in high schools, and in earlier grades as well, is all too familiar. Akin to this is the violence in homes and certain neighborhoods that is witnessed by young children. When I met with Fred Rogers (‘‘Mr. Rogers’’) last year in his Pittsburgh office, I learned of his interest in assisting children traumatized by violence to which they were witnesses. His commitments should be assumed by nurses, teachers, clergy, and other adults whose access to children position them to notice symptoms that even their parents may not have seen. According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, and reported by WebMD (http://my.webmd.com/content/article/ 1728.55534), witnessing violence frequently leads to major, lasting emotional problems for children. This research documented anxiety, depression, and withdrawal as symptoms exhibited by a cohort of Headstart kids who had observed acts of violence. Many children who themselves were victims of moderate violence had become hostile, surly, violent. The number of children witnessing violence and the number of parents failing to notice their trauma are high. About 75% of the preschool children of 155 families in a Washington, DC neighborhood reported seeing a violent event or being victimized by it. Interviewers presented cartoons to the children portraying feelings of fear, appetite loss, sadness, and the like; these helped the kids to identify and express their feelings. Similar interviews were conducted with the parents in an attempt to fathom parental awareness Journal of Pediatric Nursing, Vol 15, No 5 (October), 2000
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of the children’s trauma. Mothers and fathers appeared to be insufficiently aware of their children’s experiences, and the perceptions and feelings engendered by these. The study demonstrated, for instance, that children had observed major violence unreported by parents in their behalf by a factor of 5 to 1. Similarly, fewer than 1% of parents believed their children were victims of major violence, though 31% of the children reported themselves as victims. Any adult working with children—including the very young—should look for the symptoms mentioned above. Once recognized, these should be assessed for possible internalized stress resulting from witnessing or even directly experiencing violence—including verbal abuse, televised violence, and neighborhood and family beatings, knifings, and shootings. * Today, the anxieties of getting along in scholarly respectability seem merely quaint. We live—and our children live—with more basic and disturbing
apprehensions: ‘‘Road rage,’’ for instance, and guns in cars, homes, even schools. (What does a child in San Francisco feel when he or she learns of the enraged man who reached into the car behind him, pulled out the driver’s dog, and threw it into freeway traffic? What does a child think about the gun in her father’s closet? Does she worry about what he will do with it?) Our culture valorizes morbid competitiveness, blunting any impulse to be considerate of others. Notoriously, television delivers images of violence directly to children. Movies and videos are filled with provocation and retaliation, one person’s problems solved by the killing of other people, and so forth. It is no wonder that there is a lot of violence to be witnessed by children, to their immense discomfort. ‘‘Still here’’—in the context of our current national life, this has become a phrase more gravid than previously imagined. As applied to the children and youth of America, it may signify an extraordinary triumph of courage, of perseverance in coping with images, experiences, realities no child should have had to endure.
Still Here William W. Rankin, PhD
A
LIFETIME AGO, my parents kindly set me down on a university campus several hundred miles from home. Here, I would spend the better part of the succeeding four years. Like many before and many since, I felt the exhilaration, but also the bewilderment and the fears of being in such an unfamiliar place. Reassurance was not provided by the welcoming speech of the nattily dressed, dauntingly facile Dean of Freshmen. It contained these horrifying words: ‘‘Look to the left of you, look to the right of you. In four years one of you will not be here.’’ Thereafter, I would occasionally cross paths with the young man who had been seated beside me during the Dean’s talk. ‘‘Still here,’’ he’d say with wry humor. ‘‘Still here,’’ I would reply. More than a few of us wondered if succeeding as students needed to be as difficult as life in this place sometimes seemed. Later, the recurring dreams, or more aptly, nightmares, humorously (when recounted in waking hours) demonstrated the anxiety produced by college’s academic pressures. You might be familiar with a few of these: You show up for the final exam, but you never took the course. You race to the exam room, but you can’t find it. Or finding it, you discover that the exam has just ended. Former football coach–turned–sports commentator John Madden recently told of his nightmare: When he began to take a three-hour final exam, its subject turned out to be beets. Beets! Intimidating as the first weeks of college were, we had the relative security of knowing what the rules of the game were in that protected ethos. We could at least survive, and possibly flourish, if we lived by these, worked hard, and so forth; the parameters of our lives were more or less predictable. The frightening possibility of violence crossed
Address reprint request to William W. Rankin, PhD, PO Box 29110, San Francisco, CA 94129-0110. Copyright r 2000 by W.B. Saunders Company 0882-5963/00/1505-0010$10.00/0 doi:10.1053/jpdn.2000.9163 328
the mind only seldom, if ever. Eventually, to be ‘‘still here’’ seemed a manageable task. * Today, those luxuriously halcyon college years stand in remarkable contrast to what must be endured by many current students, including the very young ones. The tragic violence in high schools, and in earlier grades as well, is all too familiar. Akin to this is the violence in homes and certain neighborhoods that is witnessed by young children. When I met with Fred Rogers (‘‘Mr. Rogers’’) last year in his Pittsburgh office, I learned of his interest in assisting children traumatized by violence to which they were witnesses. His commitments should be assumed by nurses, teachers, clergy, and other adults whose access to children position them to notice symptoms that even their parents may not have seen. According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, and reported by WebMD (http://my.webmd.com/content/article/ 1728.55534), witnessing violence frequently leads to major, lasting emotional problems for children. This research documented anxiety, depression, and withdrawal as symptoms exhibited by a cohort of Headstart kids who had observed acts of violence. Many children who themselves were victims of moderate violence had become hostile, surly, violent. The number of children witnessing violence and the number of parents failing to notice their trauma are high. About 75% of the preschool children of 155 families in a Washington, DC neighborhood reported seeing a violent event or being victimized by it. Interviewers presented cartoons to the children portraying feelings of fear, appetite loss, sadness, and the like; these helped the kids to identify and express their feelings. Similar interviews were conducted with the parents in an attempt to fathom parental awareness Journal of Pediatric Nursing, Vol 15, No 5 (October), 2000
STILL HERE
329
of the children’s trauma. Mothers and fathers appeared to be insufficiently aware of their children’s experiences, and the perceptions and feelings engendered by these. The study demonstrated, for instance, that children had observed major violence unreported by parents in their behalf by a factor of 5 to 1. Similarly, fewer than 1% of parents believed their children were victims of major violence, though 31% of the children reported themselves as victims. Any adult working with children—including the very young—should look for the symptoms mentioned above. Once recognized, these should be assessed for possible internalized stress resulting from witnessing or even directly experiencing violence—including verbal abuse, televised violence, and neighborhood and family beatings, knifings, and shootings. * Today, the anxieties of getting along in scholarly respectability seem merely quaint. We live—and our children live—with more basic and disturbing
apprehensions: ‘‘Road rage,’’ for instance, and guns in cars, homes, even schools. (What does a child in San Francisco feel when he or she learns of the enraged man who reached into the car behind him, pulled out the driver’s dog, and threw it into freeway traffic? What does a child think about the gun in her father’s closet? Does she worry about what he will do with it?) Our culture valorizes morbid competitiveness, blunting any impulse to be considerate of others. Notoriously, television delivers images of violence directly to children. Movies and videos are filled with provocation and retaliation, one person’s problems solved by the killing of other people, and so forth. It is no wonder that there is a lot of violence to be witnessed by children, to their immense discomfort. ‘‘Still here’’—in the context of our current national life, this has become a phrase more gravid than previously imagined. As applied to the children and youth of America, it may signify an extraordinary triumph of courage, of perseverance in coping with images, experiences, realities no child should have had to endure.