However young they are, children pick up on even covert interpersonal violence in the home.
“There’s so much violence all around us,” parents say today. “How do we protect our kids from it?” They are usually talking about violence that comes through to us from the news, from the media, from film and television programmes, and from electronic combat games. We attribute any of our children’s violent behaviour, angry outbursts, and other such incidents to the violence that they are being fed by the outside world.
This is overt violence. However, there is a hidden, and more subtle violence generated right within the family. And this has a much more immediate and lasting influence on our kids than anything that they watch on TV.
Adults in a family do commit and communicate a lot of violence. This may not be actual physical violence or out-in-the-open shouting and fighting. It may be something as simple as banging a door unnecessarily hard, muttering under your breath, overtaking someone rashly, honking hard, sneering and mocking at other people…All of it adds up in your child’s psyche.
Sometimes even silence is violent: for instance, when one adult in the family withdraws from another in cold white rage. How often people remember such things from their childhood and say: “It was the most frightening part of my growing years. I could have handled it better if they had just openly argued.” We may think that as long as children don’t actually see or hear anything, they don’t know how violently angry you are with your self/spouse/in-laws/boss/ life. But children absorb with all their senses and with many ‘micro-senses’ too. However young they are, however engrossed they seem in playing or in some other activity, even when they are not in the same room, children pick up on covert inter-personal violence.
When a grandparent undermines a parent’s authority in some way, when a child overhears you talking bitterly about another family member, when you wish some colleague ill and talk nastily about him, when you make disparaging remarks about some community…it all generates violent images and deep fear in your child. Our children watch and absorb this every day in many ways. And because they do not know how to process this, it comes out in surprisingly violent forms of social behaviour.
Of course, minor arguments, small irritations, even serious family discussions on possibly unpleasant topics – such things do not necessarily send out violent messages. Household disagreements, problems, discussions, crises – they are all part of family life. It is how much ‘heat’ we as adults bring to the situation, that brings in the element of covert violence. The tricky part is that this kind of violence is rarely out there for all to see. In some families you may never hear a raised voice, and yet there could be serious violence being perpetrated there. You can be sure that the child in such a family picks up on the unexpressed: unsaid accusations, silent resentments, wordless judging and condemning attitudes.
How does one tackle this? There is no hiding or clever camouflaging and disguising of such violence – so that the children don’t see it. It simply has to be addressed by us by our own inner work. If we give it some thought, and watch how we adults choose to interact, address or resolve issues in our day-to-day life, we can clearly detect and diagnose all our own hidden anger and violence. It is imperative that we work on and through such anger, so that we do not make this ‘loaded gun’ available to our children.