#011 Building Attachment
Lessons on attachment from parenting and teaching
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I’ve been reading Hold on to Your Kids by Gordon Neufeld and Gabor Maté. It’s helping me reflect on how I approach parenting, and I’ve also been reflecting on how I showed up as a leader in a dental practice, and as a teacher in the K-12 classroom.
I remember one of the first teachers I taught with during a co-op. It’s funny, I forget her name now, though I will forever have the image engraved in my mind of me crying in her car while she drove me home from a particularly gruelling day with some grade 8 students.
My practicum lasted two months with her, so I watched her teach for many, many hours. Her math skills were fine. She wasn’t as precise as other math teachers I knew, but she had a good general grasp of the math she was teaching.
I remember thinking at the time that my math knowledge and understanding were significantly deeper than hers. So I was completely perplexed: why did these students hang on her every word? Why did they choose to spend their lunchtimes doing math with her, instead of being outside playing with their friends? These students, who wouldn’t listen to a word I said or do anything I suggested, would settle down and quietly start working within minutes of her walking in to the room. She didn’t even have to do or say anything! Why was that? How did she do it?
It took me two years of teaching in a classroom to begin to understand what the above quote suggests in a few sentences. My first two years of teaching, I was supply (or “substitute”) teaching in other people’s classrooms. Either day-to-day supply teaching, where I was in a different classroom each day, or short-term supply teaching, where I was filling in for a few weeks or a few months.
Those supply teaching days were exhausting. My go-to strategy is always to get stuff done. But in those classrooms, it was very challenging to do anything. The kids just didn’t want to do what I wanted to do.
The breaking point came after those two years. I had just finished a three-month contract, where I had stepped in to finish a contract for another teacher who was on stress leave. Up to that point, I had given everything I had to the classroom. And the kids still weren’t listening. I knew something had to change.
My next contract was for four months, at the beginning of a school year. I had the opportunity to set the systems up myself, to get things running the way I wanted. I went in with the mindset that if the class works for me, then it will work for the kids. Basically, I increased my expectations around behaviour. And this went on like this for the next 10 years. I started to get really good at managing classrooms of students, and to get them aligned on tasks. If you had asked me, before reading this book, how I got good at it, I would say that it is a mixture of knowing the material, knowing how to teach, and having good systems.
But now, I realize that I completely missed the point. What I learned to do in those intervening years was to build attachment.
No matter how well intentioned, skilled, or compassionate we may be, parenting is not something we can engage in with just any child. Parenting requires a context to be effective. A child must be receptive if we are to succeed in nurturing, comforting, guiding, and directing her. Children do not automatically grant us the authority to parent them just because we are adults, or just because we love them or think we know what is good for them or have their best interests at heart.
Drs. Gordon Neufeld & Gabor Maté, Hold on to Your Kids, Chapter 1
It happened a bit at a time. One year, I decided to try out something I’d seen another teach do: I started to greet the kids at the door, before they started class. It seemed silly when I saw the other teacher do it. After all, this was a class! We had things to do. There was no time for chit-chatting. And at first, I thought the other teacher was doing it as a kind of power move, as in, “Welcome to my classroom, I’m giving you permission to enter here.”
But that wasn’t it at all. One of the things that they emphasize in Hold on to Your Kids is that parents (teachers, managers, authority figures) don’t really have any power. The power we have comes from the attachment people have to us. Greeting kids at the door was a way of checking in with them, to see how they feel. You know that moment of hesitation you sometimes have when someone’s name is on the tip of your tongue? That entirely goes away after a few weeks of greeting each kid by name. After a few weeks with a new group, I would be able to get a feel for how they were doing in just that few moments at the door. I would know if someone needed extra attention, or if someone needed some extra space.
Another thing I learned to do, and which was particularly effective, was to be strict with the group and nice with the individuals in the group. At the time, I would jokingly refer to it as Stockholm Syndrome, because it sometimes felt like I was being both mean and nice at the same time. For example, I would clearly say to the entire class, “This level of noise is unacceptable,” and then the noisiest kid in the class would come ask me if he could go use the washroom, and I’d smile, nod, and say, “Sure, no problem,” even though he was the one who was the most frustrating.
What I was actually doing in there was ensuring that my relationship with individual students remained intact. They could trust that no matter how they behaved, and no matter my personal mood, I would still appreciate them for who they are. (With occasional slip-ups, of course.)
I could go on with other examples, but the specifics aren’t really the point. These strategies are specific to each group of kids, and they come naturally to us once we have built attachment with that group. Once the relationship is established, the specific strategies come intuitively. We try things. Some of those things work. Others don’t, and we bang our heads against the wall for a bit, before giving that up (and sometimes breaking down crying) before trying something new. And that new thing works, or doesn’t work, but the cycle continues.