We’re publishing a guest post this morning by Daily Sceptic regular Dr. Sinéad Murphy, an Associate Researcher in Philosophy at Newcastle University. She returns to the subject of Joseph, her autistic son, who had to go almost a year-and-a-half without schooling thanks to the coronavirus restrictions. She segues from reflecting on her son’s predicament to talking about his needs and the needs of all children and why those needs are being neglected by the ‘new normal’. Here’s an extract:
When Dickens’s Paul Dombey – pale and slight and destined to an early grave – first arrives at the boarding school to which his misguided father has sent him, he is left waiting in the study for someone to show him to his quarters. Weary and forlorn, with an aching void in his little heart, Paul is described as feeling as if he had taken life unfurnished and the upholsterer were never coming.
It is an affecting scene, of abandonment to a world without familiar sights and sounds and smells, peopled with strangers whose faces are not known.
I think that children with autism often feel like little Paul (who, as it happens, does not socialise normally with other children and is described by other characters as ‘old fashioned’). They feel as if life is bereft of what is really meaningful: of daily routines that are not to be departed from and that are entered into by all around; of familiar enduring objects; and of the faces of those whom they understand and who understand them. It is why they are drawn to small corners, why they clamber to sit behind you on your chair so as to be cushioned tightly between a warm person and a supporting world – one of Joseph’s very first words was ‘cozy’.
The responsibility of those of us who care for children with autism is to try to make them more cozy: to gather around them as much of meaning as we can; to furnish them with personal and palpable content; to establish routines and interact with objects and befriend people so as to thicken their being-there and being-with – to be the upholsterers of their lives.
But all children need what children with autism demand. All children feel ‘depersonalised’ when there are not people around them who really care, and all children feel ‘derealised’ when the world does not stimulate their senses. All children wish that the upholsterer would come.
As with all Sinéad’s stuff, this essay is very much worth reading in full.
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Kids need stability in any given environment. The nonsense around Covid, but it at school or at home, has destroyed that. Shame on all those involved.
I remember as a six year old, many decades ago, being in hospital for a tonsillectomy. It was a frightening experience. As well as feeling ill, I was separated from my parents, and away from home, for the very first time. That experience has never left me. In a place surrounded by unknown faces, many covered with face masks most of the time (one particular nurse that wore one wasn’t very nice at all) and eventually in a isolation ward on my own, it was a terrifying experience. My parents were only allowed to visit me a couple of times, and as result I pined for them, and became feverish AFTER my operation. When I was allowed to see them, the fever went. To this day I’ve hated face masks, and having to go away from home. Of course I have learned to cope with this but that inner terror is still there. Heaven knows how kids are coping now, my heart goes out to them.
I think some serious questions need to be asked about what happened to the children of people who were required to go into work and could not secure a place in school. There’s some suggestion from primary teaching staff that they might have been locked in their homes and left to their own devices, if it’s true then heads should definitely roll.
Dr Murphy this is so poignant, and so well explained, thank you.
Since the outset, the behaviour of teachers, the educational establishment towards our children baffled me, upset me, angered me. What you speak of de-realisation, the literal masking of children, segregation of friends, it’s impacts are wholly ignored and brushed over. I have had many interactions with my children’s school teachers, headteachers, I think they know what they are party too is wrong, but they justify it to themselves, as one said to me “we are in the middle of a raging pandemic” but he knew his words were hollow.
In Scotland teenagers wear masks as if it is like putting on a pair of shoes. It has become their second skin.
Teenage years are when you begin to sculpt a sense of yourself, your own individual identity, what defines you, it might be music, sports, hobbies, you start to question what life is about, you find your tribe. Instead we have isolated our children, cut them off, masked them, de-humanised them.
My child, no longer attends school, instead home schooling accessing the schoolwork from teachers online. She has blossomed, the change in her is stark. Whilst we remain “linked” with the school I am troubled at the prospect of her retuning, even on a part time basis, the expectation from the school is that she will start a part time return, but I have lost all faith in the institution/ profession.
That the teaching profession and even parents have condoned, actively encouraged the masking, segregation and now vaccination of children is something I will never accept or understand.
This is something that the teaching profession must face up too and answer for.
Succinct and honest – thanks, Dr Murphy.
Popular indifference to erasing the human face continues to astonish and there are few things more disgusting than the sight of anonymised, gagged children.
I agree, and I am, too, puzzled by this. It really taps into some Middle Age ideals of atonement and punishing the humans en masse for some unlocated sins, that we allegedly commited; in this case, I guess, perhaps against ruling classes, by our dissent and opposition (vide: protests all around the world pre pandemic, about the deteriorating living conditions of most of the society – property ladder, no jobs, growth of corporations and their superpowers). We are supposed to agree to live in a new Middle Age, carrying on with the replacement of processions and flogging – corporal punishments against our sinful bodies, while few powerful enjoy themselves and their lives (check stories of Holywood stars travelling freely all around the world for holidays, while we basically cannot cross the borders anymore).
The attitude of teaching professionals is disappointing, to say the least. Our toddler suffered through and because of pandemic, with the nursery closing and opening on and off, to the point where in the morning, when getting ready to go there, he would crawl on the floor crying desperately, because of all the changes, masked teachers, masked parents, “no mixing” orders, “no home toys” orders, and all the other hideous ideas about making lives of the smallest and most vulnerable in the society as hard as possible – because we need to protect some unidentified entity, whom we don’t even recognize anymore. Now, we are middle class educated parents, affluent enough to seek psychological help (he made a recovery quite well, thank God). How many children went trough exactly the same without that? And the attitude of the nursery management and teachers always the same: “it’s the law”. Inhumane.
They should all be ashamed of themselves. I’m a teacher, never wore a mask once and tried to make my classroom a haven of normality! Anyone who cares about children could and should have done this but most of the profession has had their heads up their arses! It was patently obvious from the beginning that children weren’t affected by this so-called pandemic. It was never their problem and their treatment and frankly abuse has been one off the most egregious and unforgivable aspects of the whole debacle in my opinion.
Horrible and inhumane indeed. Will they, and future generations, ever forgive us?
Little Paul died because life had nothing to offer him.
I see Grace Smith’s twitter is suspended.
We have a proper schoolgirl heroine in her, unlike that kid who goes on about climate change.
Greta Tintin Eleonora Ernman Thunberg has unfortunately made it to 18 years of age and is considered an adult in Sweden now, unbelievably…
Another brilliant article from Dr Murphy.
…and to be human is to be with people we know and understand and love. I thought that sentence is so powerful.
A really great article that reminds us all who have been, and will be, most affected by the global response to Covid.
I believe we can judge our Governments and political decision makers by how they treat the most vulnerable in our society. The very young and the elderly have been shamefully the hardest hit. Pre-Covid these two groups would also have been able to interact in a wonderfully beneficial way.
It is the children though that are our future, our hope. They should always have come first.