I’m at a Casey Family Programs conference in Seattle that is looking at applying science to early learning in kids. The people here are learning about brain science and the results of early adverse childhood experiences and what the science can tell us about how we should react in the policy sphere to create healthy kids, families and societies.
The keynote is by Jack Shonkoff, who is a leading brain researcher in this field and who has been sharing some of the basics of what we know about brain science, relationships and healthy societies. Here are some of his key points:
Experiences build brain architecture. What happens is that neural circuits develop to reinforce behaviours, emotions, motor skills and so on. Babies brains build a basic architecture by forming synapses and then a more complex architecture develops on top of that. For the first three year of life, babies’ brains form 700 synapses a second. Genes provide the template for this work, but experiences turn the genes on and off. So early life experiences are built into our bodies, encoded in our brains – for better or for worse. To promote healthy brian architecture you need language rich environments, supportive relationships and “serve and return” interactions with adults are the three things that promote health brain architecture. Prolonged stress and reduced exposure to supportive relationships – in other words, what are known as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) – create the conditions for heart disease, diabetes, and other diseases that are a result of disrupted development of organ systems.
Toxic stress derails healthy development. In babies, stress is alleviated by contact with a caring adult. If a child is exposed to stress in large amounts, the brain loses the ability to turn off the stress responses, and the stress becomes toxic. Nurturing, stable and engaging environments are the antidote to stress. It’s interesting that in North America we don’t treat stress with much compassion – “get over it” is a common response. In the USA especially, a hyper individualistic culture diminishes the importance of stress.
Some positive stress is a good thing however – what we call in the facilitation world “The Groan Zone” which helps learning and helps healthy development. There is always stress associated with learning new things or doing things for the first time. In healthy development, adults help kids with this kind of stress and the kids learn strategies for dealing with stress, which amps up the heart rate and blodd pressure and then reduces it. Supportive relationships help children to learn adaptive and coping skills.
Tolerable stress is serious and temporary – death of a family member, natural disasters, war and violence, an experience of extreme despair and other things that can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder. This kind of stress is also buffered by supportive relationships. Families, extended families, friends, neighbours, supported programs need to step in and provide the buffering that reduces stress to baseline levels.
Toxic stress however is prolonged activation of the stress response in the absence of protective relationships. This includes living alone in violence, or with adults that neglect children or who are unable to care for children because the are sick or depressed. If you don’t have access to caring adults, the stress becomes toxic and the stress system is built into your brain architecture, placing hardship on your organs, your nervous system and your hormones. This is the kind of stress that leads to long term health and development issues.
Neglect can be as powerful as abuse. It doesn’t matter to the baby’s brain whether your lack of relationships come from neglect or abuse. It has the same effect on the brain, and it keeps the stress levels high. Seven hundred synapses a second don’t care what an adult is doing if there are no compassionate relationships. Reducing stress by reducing the numbers and severity of adverse early childhood experiences results in better outcomes. This doesn’t mean that we have to solve poverty and subsistence abuse overnight before we get better outcomes – it means we need to make policy decisions that ask the question about whether we are supporting healthy and supportive relationships. In other words, the social safety net needs to work both at the systemic level to reduce inequalities, and at the acute level to create spaces where people can learn and experience healthy supportive relationships at every age.
I’ve been listening here thinking about the implications for this in organizations and communities. To sacrifice relationships at the alter of work or learning is to not only inhibit the sustainability of what is going on, but also creates the conditions for unhealthy families, groups, communities and organizations.
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From my recent work in the labour movement, a quote to inspire you in your work for social change:
Howard Zinn: ”Ž”To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we… see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places–and there are so many–where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
I’m in Prince George today and tomorrow working with the BC Government Employees Union in a great regional conference that is looking at forging the links between unions and communities. There is much organizing capacity and heart based action in the labour movement and much need on the ground here in the north of the province. Putting one to work on the other is a huge and easy capacity building thing to do.
So today a cafe on where we can go to work in community to make a difference, and tomorrow a short Open Space for people to ground action and make some plans to get out there.
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In the middle of a four day gathering of indigenous child and family services organizations here in British Columbia. I’m back in my room even though it’s after lunch and our meeting was supposed to have restarted because history just got made.
To understand what this means, you have to have an appreciation of how the state has related to indigenous communities in this country since colonization began. The essence is that tools of law and legislation have been used repeatedly to deny the jurisdiction, rights and responsibilities of First Nations from nearly the moment European governments set eyes on this continent. Nowhere has that become more of a hot point than with the issue of children.
For more than 100 years the stated policy of the federal governments was to place First Nations children into the care of the state and the churches by sending them to residential school. The residential school system was designed originally to educate the “Indian out of the child” and to assimilate people by breaking up communities, punishing kids for speaking their language and subjecting them to slavery, by forcing them to work to keep the schools running. This one policy alone has left a legacy of unhealthy family structures, weakened cultures and multiple generations of vulnerable children. When the provincial government stepped into to take responsibility for children in the 1960s the infamous “sixties scoop” happened whereby kids were removed from their families to be raised by non-native familes. By the 1980s the sixties scoop had ended and the residential school system was shut down. From that time onwards, Aboriginal kids were at the mercy of the non-Aboriginal child welfare system. In BC alone, the percentage of kids in care who were Aboriginal skyrocketed to today where it is now more than 50%.
In the last 20 years, First Nations have become more proactive in creating their own child and family services agencies and taking back responsibility and later control over the system. Starting at a historic meeting in 2002 in Tsawassen, BC, the provincial government began the process of recognizing the authority of First Nations communities to look after their kids. A process that began in 2002 (which I was involved in primarily on Vancouver Island) saw the creation of regional authorities around the province to oversee the establishment of First Nations child welfare systems. These authorities, had they been passed into law, would have taken all responsibility short of law making authority and placed it in the hand of communities through regional authorities.
The problem with the regional authority model was that it didn’t work well with the inherenet jurisdiction of the First Nations governments in BC. Problems began to appear in 2007 between the provincial political leadership and the leaders of the regional authorities. At the last minute, literally as the enabling legislation was to hit to the floor of the Provincial legislature, the provincial political leadership – against the wishes of many First nations cheifs – shut the process down. For a couple of years we were back to the status quo, and things looked grim.
But behind the scenes, the provincial ministry of child and family development was working to transform the child and family services syste. Led by a deputy minister, Leslie Du Toit, the ministry worked to help nations develop their own systems and did it from a position of recognizing the authority and jurisdiction of First Nations to care for their kids. As a result the 15 and more projects that are gathered here got off the ground, reestablishing a child and familiy services system that is deeply ingrained in the cultural, spiritual and political power of the Nations themselves. It has been a hugely decolonizing experience (the children of the Haida Nation even wrote their own declaration of their rights which is to be passed into law).
So things are ticking along and this has brought us to today where we have gathered 120 people to share their experiences and accelerate their work together. It has been a good meeting so far, conducted in ceremony and working productively and positively. Today the deputy minister made an announcement though that has rocked us all. She announced today that provincial government was now opening the door for First Nations and Metis groups in BC to create their own legislation to replace the Child and Family Services Act and to enbale indigenous child and family services systems to be established and supported designed and delivered by the Nations themselves. It is the first time anyone can remember the colonial government ever stepping out of the power they have and giving over the legislative jurisdiction to First Nations.
Suddenly our meeting has got a lot more interesting. Accompanied by the National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, Shawn A-in-shut Atleo, she stood for the principle that only a system created by the people for whom is it intended will be the right system. Everything we have been working towards suddenly is a reality. The chiefs are excited, the people who have been developing and delivering the indigenous systems are elated that their work will be made the formal system for their people in the province and everyone is buoyed by the right thing happening at the right time.
Suddenly we are all on the same side. My long time mate David Stevenson who is an Art of Hosting steward is right at the centre of the work in his job as the Executive Director of Aboriginal Services for the Ministry. Many other people who were with us through the regionalization process on Vancouver Island including Marion Wright, Kyra Mason, Pearl Hunt, Bruce Parisian and others are here celebrating and preparing for the hard work ahead. We are taking a break now while we get ready to go to the Sts’ailes longhouse for an evening of singing and speaking in ceremony. Tomorrow when we come back to work, we’ve thrown out our agenda and will just spend a half day in Open Space to articulate the opportunities that we have among us, all of us hosting together the very first steps on what will become the next chapter in a historic journey.
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Running an Art of Hosting workshop this week for employees of the City of Edmonton. We are about 30 people all together looking at the art of hosting participatory process, convening and leading in complex environments where certainty is an artifact of the past.
Naturally because these people work for a municipal government, the conversations we are having tend to be about systems. We are working at the level of what it takes a system to shift itself as well as what it takes of an individual to lead when the answers are unclear.
For me, lots of good insights are coming up. A few that cracked in a cafe conversation this morning included these three:
- The fundamental question facing governments is not why or what or who, but HOW. How can we deliver services differently? How do we change to include more public voice in our work without losing our mandate? How do we cope with the scale of change, chaos, interconnection and complexity that is upon us? These questions are powerful because they invite a fundamental shift in how things are done – the same question is being asked of the Aboriginal child welfare system at the moment in British Columbia, which is looking to create a new system from the ground up. Shifting foundations requires the convening of diversity and integrating diverse worldviews and ideas.
- New systems cannot be born with old systems without power struggle. As old ways of dong things die, new ways of doing things arise to take their place. But there isn’t a linear progression between the death of one system and the birth of the new: the new arises within the old. Transformation happens when the new system uses the old to get things done and then stands up to hold work when the old system dies. While old systems are dying, they cling to the outdated ways of doing things, and as long as old systems continue to control the resources and positions of power and privilege, transformation takes place within a struggle between the new and the old. Ignoring power is naive.
- A fundamental leadership capacity is the ability to connect people. This is especially true of people who long for something new but who are disconnected and working alone in the ambiguity and messy confusion of not knowing the answer.
Its just clear to me now that holding a new conversation in a different way with the same people is not itself enough for transformation to occur. That alone is not innovation. The answers to our most perplexing problems come from levels of knowing that are outside of our current level. The answers for a city may come from global voices or may come from the voices of families. Our work in the child welfare system was about bringing the wisdom of how families traditionally organized to create a new framework for child welfare policy and practice, and that work continues. Without a strategic framework for action, for transforming process itself, mere reorganization is not enough.
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I recently wrote a white paper for a First Nations organization on participatory community engagement. The paper outlines several models, principles and processes that I am mcurrently working with as I help groups design and implement longer term community engagement processes.
Here is the most recent version of the paper for your reading, in .pdf format. The paper talks about mental models and comes from a perspective of decolonization. I’d love to have your thoughts in the comments so I can refine it further.