Emotional Poverty
It is time, my friends, for a story. A springtime story.
Once upon a time, long ago (pre-COVID), there was a high school teacher named Emily. Emily's students were working on a creative writing project that involved going outside for several days in a row. Knowing that the temptation to wander and get distracted was greater outside than in, Emily laid down some ground rules for the students that she expected them to follow every day.
One of her students, Roger, consistently refused to abide by one of those ground rules: to keep his shoes on.
Now, Emily knew this rule had to appear "petty" to Roger. What was so wrong about freeing his feet to enjoy the cool spring grass? Well, Emily had explained repeatedly, she had to forestall the risk of injury to the soft winter skin on the soles of her students' feet. Sticks and thorns, random glass shards and even bee stings were a threat that Emily simply wanted to avoid so her students could focus on their work.
Roger didn't care. Day after day he kicked off his shoes and spent the class period barefoot. Try as Emily might to get Roger to put his shoes back on, he breezily refused.
On this particular day, Emily was at her wit’s end. How could she encourage cooperation without imposing a consequence? She tracked Roger down and told him he had to put his shoes on or she would write him up for a detention.
Roger responded to Emily's threat with rage. But it was hyper-controlled rage: he spoke very quietly so that no one else could hear him. Emily had led Roger away from the other students so they could talk about her request; she sat down at a school picnic table, and Roger, who was tall, remained standing -- that is, he towered over her. He proceeded to verbally attack her, telling her she was a terrible teacher, she had ruined his education, etc., all in that unnervingly flat, quiet voice. Emily listened to him for a while and eventually, when she realized she was frightened and angry, told him several times (very quietly – matching his tone of voice) to go to the office. He finally did.
Emily was completely undone by this experience. When she shared it with me, she told another story from a few years earlier, when Roger was 11 years old. Back then, she had been a para in Roger's class. One day, when Roger was acting out on the other students at his table, Emily took him into the hallway and asked him why he was behaving that way. He said, "I don't know!" and started to cry. Emily did, too. The two of them cried quietly together until they could return to the classroom. (Weirdly, another version of this heart-breaking story appears here.)
Roger's transition from such honest and heart-rending vulnerability just a few years ago to this frighteningly controlled, threatening rage stunned Emily.
What had happened?
Roger's family was wealthy. But his father had left the family years before, and his mother was a politician who was rarely home. Emily and I guessed that Roger had been deeply neglected in his life and so did not know what it was like to be "held." Without parental guidance, we guessed, Roger had learned he was master of his own destiny and, further, that any authority figures he encountered were fundamentally unreliable and uninvested and, therefore, easily hoodwinked or steamrolled. In short, Roger was emotionally deprived; he was
emotionally poverty-stricken.
Emily had done the right thing with Roger. She had noticed her strong and alarming feelings of anger and fear (perhaps similar to Roger's?), had sent Roger to the office to protect herself, her students, and Roger, and had informed the administration of her grave concerns. Fortunately, the administration supported her by setting up a structure within which Roger had to function until the end of the outdoor unit: he was to do his writing in the computer lab.
But what about Roger? What about that rage that rose like bile when his teacher imposed a simple and, frankly, harmless rule? How will Roger's wealth and entitlement combine with his emotional and relational poverty in his adulthood?
And what about Emily? How can a teacher "encourage cooperation without imposing a consequence"? What can teachers do in the face of emotional and relational poverty?
These aren't idle questions. Just as we must fight economic poverty for our children's and our country's sakes, so we must fight emotional poverty. And, unlike SES, which can appear as a number (income) or a type of eligibility (for free and reduced lunch), emotional and relational poverty can be difficult to discern. It strikes at all economic levels and can have dire, far-reaching ramifications in so many domains: mental illness, addiction, crime, trans-generational trauma.
And, of course, it shows up day after day in your classroom.
How to address the scourge of emotional poverty?
You know what I’m gonna say next:
To help you process these experiences and empower you to respond in ways that just might heal.