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13. A Child Needs a Reliable Adult or Mentor
The best way to prevent or remediate toxic stress, says Jack Shonkoff, MD, is
“having adults who are there to help children get through, to help them feel a
sense of safety, feel a sense of protection, and most important, to begin to build
their own capacities to be able to deal and cope with stress.” Often, children are
in trouble because they feel no sense of buffering and protection around them.
They lack “consistent, protective, reliable, supportive relationships with caring
adults to help them get through and learn to deal with adversity.”
What kids need most when there is a sense of threat, and they are caught up in
an ongoing stress response, is to know that there is someone they can count on.
Adversity is colored by the context in which events happen. And that context has
everything to do with whether there are adults to help a child through.
According to Dan Siegel, MD, reliable adult relationships are one of the most
important factors in establishing childhood resiliency. And this includes having
adults outside of the family to whom a child can turn, especially during the
tumult of adolescence. Throughout human history, Siegel points out, “We stayed
together as communities, with adolescents exploring and establishing
independence while maintaining a range of important and instructive interactions
with their adult elders.” Those strands of connectedness between generations
“are being stretched thin in today’s world. We don’t really have that in our
culture. But kids need to have other nonparental adults around, whether they are
teachers, mentors, or coaches.”
When children are still young, a mentor, a safe reliable adult, is a “place”
where they can go so that they know they are not alone, a safe haven. To have
one wise voice offering them sound advice, comfort, faith in themselves and
who they are can make all the difference.
Mentoring groups who work with at-risk youth and in underserved
populations use a rubric that includes forty developmental assets for adolescents,
one of which is “other adult relationships.” Mentoring groups suggest that young
people receive support from three or more nonparent adults. Those relationships
don’t take the place of developing a secure attachment with a primary caregiver,
but having other safe, reliable adults in their lives can help kids to believe in
themselves, in their own goodness.
Bernie Siegel, MD, tells the story of helping to take care of a teenager who
faced a great deal of early adversity and who was often suicidal. One day, this
young girl came in to see him and said, “You’re my CD.” Siegel asked her what
she meant. “She told me, ‘You’re my Chosen Dad.’ That is the impact we can
have on a young person who is suffering when we let kids know that they are
safe with us, and that we love them.”
In the course of doing interviews for this book, many individuals said that
there was one person in their life who acted as a mentor, who stepped in to
provide a safe environment—what we might think of as an emotional benefactor.
And having that one, safe reliable adult helped them get through, until they grew
up and were able to turn their experiences into grist for deeper understanding
and growth.
Even in the midst of Mary’s erratic home life, she had her friend Andrea’s
mom, who always had a spare bed for her, who taught her how to bake.
“Andrea’s mom was familiar with my dad’s drinking and how he spanked us;
she knew that he’d get loud and angry, and that there were these terrible pictures
on the walls, but she still loved me,” Mary says. “Andrea wasn’t allowed to
come to my house; I was always welcome at their house, no matter what time or
day it was.”
Cindy tells a similar story. “We had neighbors down the street who were so
good to me. They could that see things had fallen apart in my house, and they
told me that I should consider their invitation to come over ‘an open-door
policy.’ I was over there every day, for years. I’d even go on vacation with them.
Looking back, I realize that their family, and the mom especially, played an
enormous role in helping me to get through my childhood. She never turned me
away.”
Kendall talks about her older female friend who had watched how hard it had
been for Kendall growing up, and who helped Kendall make sense of her past,
encouraging her to seek therapy.
For others it might be a special family member, an aunt or a grandparent. For
John, it was his mother’s mother. “She was just such a huge influence in my
life,” he says. She always let me know that she loved me unconditionally. She
was the opposite of my father. Every chance she had she would tell me, ‘I love
you.’ I loved her with my whole heart. We would walk her dog and the moon
would be out and she’d just hold my hand and talk to the moon, ‘Oh, hello,
moon,’ she’d say. She helped me to see the beauty in the world through her eyes.
I think she might have saved me. Now, when I walk outside to take out the trash
and see the moon up in the sky, I think of her. I think of how her love was the
one great thing in my childhood.”
Kat feels her life might have been saved by the love of her grandmother, or G-
Ma, and the few years she spent living with her at the end of high school. “It was
just the two of us,” she recalls. “She never lost patience with me, no matter how
surly or quiet or defiant I was. She drove me everywhere I needed to go. She
made me a bagged lunch every day and wrote my name on it with a big, black
marker. When I was sick, she dropped everything to stay home with me and take
care of me. She made me homemade chicken soup. I started to call her my G-
Ma. That one relationship, her love, made an enormous difference for me—
though I didn’t understand that at the time.” Kat recalls how, when she began her
first teaching job, her G-Ma sent her a card on which she’d written,
Kat, Your
mom would have been so proud of you
. Her grandmother had underlined each
word three times. “It had been a long time since anyone had acknowledged that
I’d missed having my mom,” Kat says. “It felt like the first time in my life that
anyone had said they were proud of anything I’d done.”
Shortly after that, her grandmother died.
“I don’t think I would have been able to find that small part of me inside that
felt that maybe I deserved to heal, if I hadn’t had a brief period when I lived with
my grandmother, if she hadn’t been there to love me,” Kat says.
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