Why labelling a child a naughty boy can damage him for life

By ANDREW DON (the little boy above) who says it took decades for him to realise he wasn’t so bad

THERE was a dream which haunted me during my turbulent adolescent years in which my mother had left home to live somewhere else because she couldn’t cope with my bad behaviour any longer.

I used to wake up, heart racing, but resolute. If I changed my ways, Mum would come back. We’d be together.

But then would come the crushing truth. It was too late. Mum was dead. She was never coming back. And the fresh wave of sadness and anger I felt each time would all but consume me.

Boys like me are often misunderstood. Labelled naughty, loud or disruptive as youngsters, surly, uncommunicative and rude as teens, we’re written off. Told we are ‘difficult’ when really there’s a lost soul trapped inside that’s desperate to be heard.

Behaviour in boys is so often a window to their emotions.

We’re no less sensitive than girls, it’s just the idea of the stiff upper lip is so ingrained in the male British psyche, we are not able to show how we feel and that, as I know, is so destructive.

As far back as I can remember, everyone — Mum included — was always telling me how naughty I was. It was even implied, after she’d died, that my ‘terrible behaviour’ had made her ill in the first place, so I grew up believing I was a difficult child.

Now, many years later and a father myself, I realise I was anything but.

In fact, I was a sensitive boy who loved animals; introspective, yet I cared deeply for others if only anyone had cared to ask. I was mischievous, perhaps. Inquisitive, definitely. But I was only difficult because everyone said I was. I never stood a chance.

My childhood ended when I was just 14 during a cruel year in which I helplessly witnessed bone cancer destroy the person I loved most: my mum.

I saw radiation therapy claim her long hair and chemotherapy make her vomit black fluid. I heard her call out in pain, held her when she cried that she didn’t want to die, and saw diamorphine render her imbecilic.

When I left her for the last time to see relatives, I had no idea she was close to death. The last image I have of her is stooped over a Zimmer frame as I kissed her goodbye at Heathrow. A fortnight later, in late August 1977, she died, aged 44.

I was staying with family and I remember my aunt placing her hand on mine one evening. ‘It’s Mum, isn’t it,’ I said.

Auntie Wendy’s grip tightened and she nodded. I screamed. Forty years later, I can still hear that 14-year-old’s scream.

I was desperate to go home, to see my mum’s coffin lowered into the ground. I needed to see with my own eyes that it was true, that she was gone.

BuT instead, Auntie Wendy invited her friends to the house for traditional Jewish mourning prayers. ‘I wish you long life,’ these strangers said to me, one after the other, shaking my hand. But I did not want a long life. I wanted to die. I felt I could never be happy again.

After Mum’s death, my dad and sister seemed to be able to get on with their lives. My sister Judith, who is three years older than me, suffered in her own way. A social butterfly, she turned to her supportive female friends for help.

But I could not move on. How could the immature boys at school fathom what I was going through? All that happened was my ‘difficult’ behaviour deteriorated even further as I struggled to cope with overwhelming emotions I wasn’t able to express.

I was troubled, withdrawn and anxious. At school, I could not sit in a semi-circle in class without feeling painfully self-conscious. I could not read aloud without shaking and stuttering.

I did have three or four close friends, but the grief of losing a mother was impossible to explain to them and they were no substitute for her. Mum had been the centre of my world. A diminutive woman — all of 5 ft 1 in — she had always been feisty. No one dared cross her, but I worshipped her.

The only place where I could express myself was at her grave, where I’d leave poems and letters for her. I begged her to appear.

I would talk to her in my head and ask her to help me. I was lonely, scared. I was desperate for Mum’s love. I felt no one would understand me like she did.

I did talk to my dad sometimes, but we had never been that close, and he had his own grief to deal with. I suppose the problem was he did not know how to help me, and who could blame him? Childhood grief is enormous, and he simply wasn’t equipped for that.

Besides, at that stage, I couldn’t have shared my misery with anyone. All I could feel or see was my own pain, and the way I expressed this was through my behaviour. My rages, moods and tantrums.

By my late teens, this affected how I acted towards the opposite sex. I either came on too strong or was painfully shy and couldn’t find the courage to ask women out. I wrote poetry and songs, sent flowers, wore my heart on my sleeve. All I wanted was someone I could love and be loved by.

But I was too damaged and it showed in either extreme extroversion (when drunk), or extreme shyness (when sober). If I did pluck up the courage to ask a woman out and she rejected me, it devastated me. At sixthform college, I fell for a girl whose birthday was the same date as my mum’s. When I found her flirting with the president of the student union, I felt destroyed.

At 19, I met a beautiful girl and we started dating. She wasn’t my first girlfriend, but she was the first I was physically intimate with, the first I fell in love with.

She was stunning and blonde — I never imagined someone like that could love me. Our relationship was passionate, but all too brief. She dumped me after five months and I never understood why. I suppose she was young and I was emotionally immature. But it felt like another bereavement. I was inconsolable and withdrew further into myself.

I wanted all or nothing. I took umbrage easily if someone hurt my feelings and I would hate them with a vengeance. But it was myself I really hated — and my growing dependency on alcohol and Valium to mask the grief I could not come to terms with.

As an adult, I became increasingly angry; angry I was dependent on chemical crutches, angry I had a dysfunctional life. I hid my troubles by channelling my efforts into my work as a journalist. I became an expert at deception.

YET I was terrified of presentations, hated meetings and suffered panic attacks. I felt I could have detonated at any time. I was scared of what I might do.

It was a friend who finally recommended her excellent counsellor to me. The sessions were painful. I worked through anger, grief, regret and fear, and was forced to face up to unpleasant realities about Mum’s parenting.

The good cop/bad cop roles she often switched between meant my happiness depended on her approval and I was in danger of forever remaining the naughty boy who could not be forgiven.

I finally accepted that we would never have the chance to resolve our differences. My mum wasn’t perfect — and neither was I.

I was able to accept that, in some ways, her own childhood

traumas — her father was an addicted gambler — had affected the way she treated me. She couldn’t control her father’s behaviour, so she controlled me. She raised me up and knocked me down. I learned a more realistic and adult way of looking back at our relationship.

I came to an understanding of myself that enabled me to enjoy friendships and romance, not to require so much of others but to accept and love them, warts and all.

I joined a health club. Exercise is an antidote for anxiety and depression. Pounding the treadmill with rock blaring through headphones is exhilarating and dissipates residual anger and nervous anxiety.

I met Liz when I was 30, and we were engaged six weeks later. I told her about Mum and my early life a few weeks into our relationship. It came out naturally while walking in countryside. She understood. And she loved me.

It is our 25th wedding anniversary next year, and we have faced a lot together — a late-stage miscarriage in which Liz nearly died after she had pre-eclampsia that wasn’t spotted in time.

Again, dreadful grief, but one we shared. I wrote a book about it, Fathers Feel Too.

I have no difficulty telling my wife how I feel. At risk of sounding cheesy, she’s completed me. I’m now very open and aware of my feelings and those of other people. I am no longer estranged from my father and sister.

I am someone people can rely on, from working with my sister, to supporting my father with his Alzheimer’s and supporting my wife, whose mother also has dementia. Together we went through a challenging experience in our adoption of two children.

I have learned so much more about my own childhood through our kids, now adults, and seeing how being separated from their birth mother shaped their lives, too.

In the past few years I have had another version of that teenage dream, most recently two weeks ago. This time, instead of searching in vain, I find my mother.

When I was younger, I felt newly bereft when I awoke. Now I feel comforted. I turn to my wife lying next to me and the dog curled up at the end of the bed and I feel that I’m the luckiest man on earth, rather than the naughty boy who never grew up.