Working Children…Part I
What is “work” for your child?

Did you know that there are millions of young children, throughout this country, working 8, 12, even 16 hour a day jobs, under conditions that would crack the coping abilities of adults? Did you know that there is nothing illegal about this? Did you now that this may be happening to the child next door? Well, neither did the child nor his parents!

Every day in my practice, I see children brought in with symptoms that resemble – more than anything else – job stress. When we look at these children’s lives, it is not difficult to understand why. In most cases, we would find the parents of these children suffering the “grown up” version of these same symptoms.

We are not talking about “internal emotional conflict” here, but the daily circumstances of living, and the type of “work” required of children and adults in today’s world. While work that is fulfilling is an essential component of human emotional well-being, what I am talking about here is “impossible work.”

Some of the symptoms in children of impossible work are chronic anxiety – with headaches, stomach aches, tics, pulling our hair, sleep difficulties, etc. Other children show signs of depression – tiredness, loss of enthusiasm, school failure, lack of interest in friends, etc. All of these children are worried. None of these children can tell you what is wrong in their lives because they have no other way of living to compare their existence to.

Let’s look at a child’s day in terms of “work”. Work is composed of many aspects, among them are Time, Finishability, Skills, Benefits, Intensity and Fit.

TIME
For a child under the age of 5, all time spent away from the family is “work.” This does not mean it is bad, it just means that it takes energy and resources to be away from the family regardless of what activities the child is engages in.

This fact is taken into account when most kindergarten programs are scheduled as half-days, compared to full days for older children. On the other hand, it may not be so evident that 8 hours of day care is an 8-hour work day for a 4 year-old! Though the activities may not be academic, the time itself is work.

As children grow older, time away from the family may be less intense work, requiring less resources, but unless it is freely chosen time, it still is work. Even as adults we feel this. A low key day at work may be less taxing than a high pressure day, but we have no difficulty knowing that it is very different than a day off!

A young child with before and after-school day care may have a 12-hour work day. Add some homework, chores at home, and emotional work (which we will talk about later), and you can have much more than a 40-hour work week.

SKILLS
Work feels good when what is asked matches our skills. It is very costly to us, however, when what is asked falls far above or below our skills.

For example, a child whose chronological age and mental ability place him or her in first grade may still truly need a mid-day nap and mom-time. The child may just not be able to keep up with her peers and feel the constant stress of playing “catch-up.”

On the other hand, a child whose intellectual and physical abilities exceed peers may be seriously bored (a very stressful state) in a typical kindergarten environment.

Most of these children are being asked to do emotional work for which they do not have the skills. When they arrive home, the are still “on the job.” They may be latch-key kids who are asked to parent themselves, they may be asked to be substitute parents for siblings, they may be asked to care for the emotional needs of depressed or overburdened parents. They may be asked to help carry the burden of parents’ physical or financial hardships. If they are equipped with the skills to do these jobs, they will be OK. If they are not, they won’t. A child in this position may have no “time-off” at all.

FINISHABILITY
We all know that a job with no end point feels hopeless. We have to know that we really did finish or that we really did enough for today.

Many times children can’t see these endpoints for themselves, or we forget to tell them. For a fragile, sensitive child, 8 hours of day care may be eternal. For a child with undiagnosed learning disabilities, school may look like an endless vertical cliff. For a child driven by the desire to be the best soccer player, there may be no rest stop. For the child given the task of making a depressed parent feel good, there may be an endless treadmill.

BENEFITS
For work to be fulfilling, we need to see benefits. We need to see a product, that something in the world has improved by our efforts. As adults, we may find this in a paycheck, a creation, a repaired car, a healed patient, a smaller stack of papers on our desk.

It may be very hard for children to see benefits from their work. Did they just lose a day of their lives to school, or did they gain something? What got better while they cried themselves to sleep worrying about Dad’s lost job? How is the world a better place after an hour of homework?

INTENSITY
No one can thrive on a steady diet of either high or low intensity work. We need variability and we need to be able to control our work to some extent to fit our needs.

For many of these overworked children, the moment they wake up, they are already behind. The schedule and the demands control them. Time off may only come for illness or sleep, but that may just put them further behind.

FIT-Match of the Individual to the Job
This is a very important factor. It is somewhat different than having the skills for a job. For example, a very sociable, outgoing 4 year-old might find a one-on-one all-day babysitter a very taxing situation compared to daycare with lots of playmates. An introverted, sensitive child may find a group daycare unbearable and thrive on a one-to-one situation.

It may cost and intellectual child dearly to keep to the standards of sports excellence of his more athletic siblings, while a learning disabled child may suffer significantly in comparison to his academic-achieving peers. These children may be able to do the job, but it fits them very poorly.

THE SYNDROME
The job-stress syndrome I am speaking about here is one where the child is having a serious problem. All of us, at one time or another, find that the world asks of us things that are difficult to give. It might be useful for all of us to examine our lifestyles in terms of work, but as parents, we must do this for our children. They can’t tell us about their work because they have no perspective outside of their current lives. They may not even appear to want to avoid the situations which are causing them stress. Thus, if given a choice, they may choose to be placed in the very situations which are generating the stress.

We have to look for indirect clues of anxiety or depression. Sometimes they are dramatic – such as a child who has plucked out all of her eyelashes and eyebrows. Sometimes they are subtle, like a child who just doesn’t seem to put much value on his activities or possessions.

What can we do? In Working Children Part II, we will look at how we can evaluate our child’s work loan and make their jobs as do-able and fulfilling as possible.
                                                       Meg Alonso, M.A., V.M.D., NCPsyA