Children who grow up in a family, from the time they were small babies, know the story about their life. They love asking their parents to tell them about the time that… they were born, their siblings arrived, they hit certain milestones, the family moved house or had big celebrations, and so on. By talking about these things, sharing memories and stories, by watching photos and videos these children build up their life story. And their life story includes a narrative from the time of which they have no memories.
Our life story is important for our sense of identity. It plays a role in our image of who we are. Unfortunately, for children in alternative care it is very rare to know about their entire life and to have a complete life story to hold on to.
If a child is lucky and he gets placed with his extended family or with family friends, there is a good chance that he will be able to piece together his own life story. Because he lives with people -and/or is in contact with people – who have known him his entire life. They can fill in the blanks of things he does not remember or was not aware of at the time.
If a child ends up in a stable, long term, foster care placement, or is adopted, at a young age, he may still have a relatively good sense of identity and most of his life story. Information on the very start of his life may be sketchy or missing entirely, but after that, there is a flowing narrative that is uninterrupted through the years.
However, if a child grows up in an institution or is moved from one foster care placement to the next – either because there is not enough preparation and support to allow the placement to succeed or because the child has had a very challenging, traumatic start to life, leading to challenging behaviour that is hard to deal with without the proper training and support – the child will know very little about his own life, because there is no one around who shares the experiences and can tell him about them. So the only thing the child can rely on are his own memories, which may be distorted by lack of understanding of what was going on, or having been given false information.
At the Trauma Informed Practice Conference, in Birmingham, in September, Lisa Cherry pointed out that if at a later age an adult who was in care decides he wants to find out more about the details of his earlier life and looks at the files that were put together about him, he will get a very distorted view of his past. Because the notes in these files are all reports on things that went wrong, and they are often written in a very subjective way. There are no reports included of progress made, of accomplishments or of celebrations, only about disruptive behaviour and difficulties.
Lisa Cherry pointed out that this is very damaging. Because our life story is the basis for the narrative that we have about who we are and what we are capable of. This narrative has a very strong influence on how we live our lives. When the only input that you receive to build this narrative on, consists of ‘you are always making trouble’, ‘you don’t even try’, ‘you are going from bad to worse’ and ‘you will never amount to anything’, these are going to be the things that you believe about yourself. And believing this about yourself, is likely to make you give up on things before even trying and possibly even to give up on yourself.
It is very important that we give children access to as much of their life story as we are able to. By helping them gather information about and document information about their lives, and by making sure that this includes information about their achievements and successes, we help give them a life story to hold on to. And that life story allows them to build a positive narrative about themselves, one that propels them forward, rather than one that holds them back.
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