CHILDREN-AT-RISK ARE TEACHERS’ CHILDREN TOO
Like a few types of offspring in nature, the offspring of our species cannot look after their own biological needs and survival until many years after birth. Thus, the child needs adults in order to survive. Older people have to supply the child with basic things for survival such as food, water, shelter, medical care, and protection from harm posed by their own body and external environment.
As a social being, the child also needs caring and supportive mental and emotional stimulation and interaction with a constant group of people that can be called a family, existing within a stable and peaceful community.
Thus, the ideal environment for the child’s well-being and development is one wherein the child’s physical, mental, and emotional needs are adequately met. The child’s well-being and development are imperiled if physical, mental, and emotional inputs are lacking or inadequate or disrupted, or the child is unable to make use such inputs. Such is the case when the child is without a family; is within a deprived, disrupted, or dysfunctional family; is part of a troubled, oppressive, or unstable community; has suddenly become a victim or survivor of trauma from human atrocity or natural disaster; or has certain types of disability or illness.
Children exposed or undergoing these unstable circumstances are most likely to be considered as children-at-risk. Children at risk bear the memories of their deprivation, abuse, exploitation, or neglect. Where the experience was so severe that the child had to survive by forgetting, the memories are repressed. In any case, their bad experiences can bring about expressed or unexpressed feelings of confusion, hurt, fear, guilt, shame, depression, selfblame, anger, helplessness, or hopelessness. The feelings can result in certain maladaptive behaviors like withdrawal, aggression, substance abuse, or suicide among others.
Helping these children deal with painful memories and consequent feelings and learn more adaptive behaviors necessitates a profound understanding of their situation. There are different strategies that can be used to understand them better. There are also different treatment techniques that can be implemented. Nevertheless, laymen or common adults without specialization can deliver the basic but critical interventions in order to help the children at risk. Teachers, in particular, are in good position to supply the basic intervention to learners within their domain or school as teachers are predisposed as being the frontline guidance counselors of their pupils and students.
Basic to both assessment and treatment is communication – the child communicating freely and openly as well as the helper communicating understanding, empathy and unconditional positive regard to the child. When the helpers are committed to doing the best they can for children in their care, procedures not entirely based on rigorous psychological standard can be very helpful (Velazco, 2010).
Meanwhile, another battlefront which should be addressed and strengthened is the home itself. The home could be the usual suspect on the causes of unstable behavior of children, but it is also the best source of the cure for children-at-risk. Parents are the most permanent anchor of a child’s psychology and behavior. Therefore, for the advocacy of saving children-at-risk become realistic and achievable, a partner advocacy on cultivation of responsible parenthood should be conducted along with the former.
In this line of reason, teachers have both the responsibility and the power in saving the children at risk among the learners. It is a gargantuan task but dedicated teachers, consciously or not, have always been in this type of battleground because their nature of vocation and the very work environment they dedicatedly planted themselves give them both the challenge and opportunity to help all types of learners, including those who need it the most.
-oOoThe I at Dapdap High School, Bamban, Tarlac, Division author is Teacher of Tarlac Province
ARCANGEL Q. BAÑEZ, Jr.