As a novice therapist and mental health consultant for preschool aged children, my heart broke for this child. I wanted him to feel good and to know that he was a lovable, worthy person even though his father had abandoned him. Seeing such a young child in so much pain is a difficult thing to manage. My immediate reaction was to be protective of Erik. Since my coping mechanisms for working with this age group were still developing, my feelings about him were raw.
At Erik's school, I had one and sometimes two other children I was working with in therapy. I was also acting in my role as mental health consultant for the teachers and administrators, helping them to support the children by supporting the whole school system. Needless to say, I was not only at the preschool to work with Erik. But that is not what he thought!
"What was going on with Erik this morning?" she inquired of me a little later in the day. I explained to her that Erik had apparently grown really jealous when he saw me with another child in the hallway. "I try my best to hide it from him," I confessed, shrugging my shoulders.
She paused as she contemplated this in silence. "Why would you try to hide that from him, Rebecca? You need to explain to him that you work with him and other children when you are here, and that you will come to get him when it is his turn," she explained casually. "The reality is that he knows it already. He is probably really confused about why you aren't being more straightforward with him about it."
I was dumbstruck by this conversation. I had never even considered how, in trying to protect Erik from his own feelings, I had actually made the entire situation a confusing, intolerable mess for him. It instantly clicked for me that by "protecting" him I was depriving him of the opportunity to learn the skills he needed to handle his frustration. I could not believe my oversight, particularly in light of the fact that this was Erik's very issue! Erik not only had to cope with the abandonment of his father, but he had an older sister who spent a lot of time with her daddy over the weekends. He could not for the life of him understand why she got to see her father and he did not. If I did not become more clear to Erik in explaining my intentions, he might jump to the exact opposite conclusion of what I wanted him to take away: that people reject him because there is something fundamentally wrong with him.
The insight that I learned from the Montessori Implementor that day was a turning point for me. It marked the beginning of an expansion in my psychological conceptualizations of people, particularly young children. Schooled as a psychodynamic psychologist, I was taught to identify pathology in patients and to treat their symptoms by bringing unconscious conflict to light. I was also taught to hone in on patient's feelings and find meaning and patterns in their behavior.
In the Montessori school where I was working, there was less of a focus on children's feelings and more of a focus on building their skills. This was achieved through the thoughtful layout of their classroom environment, and by providing them with materials that were interesting, developmentally appropriate, and just challenging enough for children to establish independent mastery over them. Skill building in the Montessori classroom was also achieved by the prevailing Montessori philosophy that children are competent and strong if you give them the opportunity to be so.
The difference between Montessori philosophy and psychodynamic psychology is epitomized by the phrase coined by positive psychologist Martin Seligman. "Doing well in the world versus feeling good." (Seligman, M. The Optimistic Child, Harper Paperbacks, 1996). According to Seligman, you cannot achieve the state of feeling good without first achieving competency, or doing well. As a psychologist, I was skipping right over the mastery building in my effort to relieve Erik's pain (and perhaps my own), in the service of making him feel better.
I have not traded my psychodynamic lens for a Montessori (or positive psychology) one. In fact, a large piece of my work as an Early Childhood Mental Health Consultant at the Montessori school has been in expanding the Montessori philosophy to include more of a psychological perspective in the classroom, given the large numbers of children experiencing mental health issues.
I still believe that psychodynamic psychology is greatly effective in alleviating people's pain and helping them understand how their early experiences shape the present relational patterns they find themselves stuck in. I find this approach particularly useful for parents of young children.
As for the children themselves, I am now very mindful about focusing on their feelings so that they feel nurtured and loved without trying to create a false sense of contingency (a world without pain) or unconsciously communicating that I do not believe they can handle things. Montessori has taught me that children are very resilient and have a great deal of ego-strength.
The very next time I saw Erik, I explained to him that it was my job to come to his school and take different children for "special play time" (e.g., therapy). "But," I continued, "I will always come to get you as soon as it is your turn." Erik showed no visible sign that this was a climactic moment of understanding for him. In fact, he continued to run out into the hallway to greet me when I arrived at his school, and to check if it was his turn yet. However, to our great relief, the hallway tantrums stopped. Erik was additionally more relaxed and secure in his classroom knowing what my intentions towards him, and the other children, were. Our "special play time" could now progress into deeper areas of psychological conflict.
