Victoria White: We need to image ourselves in the confusion of our adolescents

Right now we need to show our kids we “have their backs” by imagining ourselves into their confusion and giving the Sixth Year some hint of a Leaving Cert date. Picture: Denis Minihane

Teenagers don’t have as much life experience to “diffuse the enormity” of what is going on, writes Victoria White

It’s high time we did more for adolescents on lockdown than tell them to “Have our backs”, as one psychologist suggested on RTÉ radio.

The people who excoriate youngsters for breaking the rules and exposing the adults to Covid risk seem to have entirely forgotten what it is like to be young.

I have two such adolescents in the house, one in Fifth Year, the other in Sixth.

That’s probably why I feel nothing but compassion for kids their age.

What’s it like to lose Fifth Year from March 12, for instance?

I’m not talking about school work, some of which can be done online.

I’m talking about that potentially magical Spring of self-transformation, relationships made, careers imagined, new identities forged.

All these decades later, I can still remember Fifth Year clearly.

It started with my killer bob.

It was more Nana Mouscouri than Audrey Hepburn but I didn’t know that then.

I had discovered fake tan and I thought I was gorgeous on the days I didn’t think I was horrible.

I had and broke off a couple of love affairs. I explored new friendships.

Most of all it was an intense period of trying to become me.

“I’m listening to the youth that’s coming up and all I’m hearing is me, me, me,” vented Caller Caroline to Liveline on March 19 when a Leaving Certificate student rang in to complain about the cancelled oral exams in Leaving Cert languages.

It’s called adolescence, Caroline.

Adolescents are focused on themselves because they are busy trying to turn into adults and they don’t know what kind of adults they’re going to be.

The years of adolescence seem endless because the job involved is endless. It marks us, for good and bad, for the rest of our lives.

At this stage of my life, barring tragedies and tragic diagnoses, life rumbles on from year to year with incremental changes I hardly notice, like my worsening eye-sight.

My Lockdown Hairstyle may be a cause of alarm to neighbours as they hurry by at a distance of two metres, but I will forget it the day I plunge my head back into my hair-dresser’s basin.

I still remember the Fifth Year ‘bob’, however. Back then time went by more slowly and mattered more.

Emma Maynard, senior lecturer at the School of Education and Sociology at the University of Portsmouth and a mother of teens herself, cautioned in this newspaper earlier in the week that kids need a routine during the lockdown.

When I followed up with a phone call she explained the difference between my concept of the time spent on lockdown and that of an adolescent in terms both obvious and striking: “It is a greater proportion of their lives.”

She adds that they don’t have as much life experience to “diffuse the enormity” of what is going on: “They don’t have the same capacity to see beyond this time. The world has stopped and we can’t tell them when it will start again.”

Add to that the fact that, as she puts it, their hormones are “going bananas” and you begin to see their difficulty.

My effort to imagine this stretches to the support established girlfriends and boyfriends may offer each other online and then shifts to the adolescent who is dying of a crush for a person to whom he or she has never even spoken and now never has an opportunity to see.

All of this is taking place while they’re stuck in their parents’ home.

For some, this is a minor irritation. For others, it’s a danger to their mental health.

Childline have reported a marked increase in contacts and a move to online contact which can be made more discreetly; Childline UK has called the demand since their schools let out, “unprecedented.”

Then, on top of their social isolation and the collapse of all their plans there’s adolescents’ fear that they will fall behind in the Rat Race in which we’ve taught them to believe since earliest childhood.

After drilling Leaving Cert students for oral exams in languages which were to account for 40% of their Irish score and telling them repeatedly that oral fluency mattered more than anything, we flipped a switch on March 19 and gave everyone 100% in these exams.

Not only do kids who don’t do languages enter the points race down 40%, 25% or 20% in one exam, depending on the language and the level, kids who have worked hard at their oral language, making a calculation that this might compensate for a weaker performance on the written paper, are now publicly laughed-at by the Department of Education.

We are a global tech capital. We can hire and fire and often even govern online, are you telling me we couldn’t have found a way to respect these kids’ work with an online interview?

People are telling the kids to put this in perspective. There are things more important than school grades and university places, after all.

“In five years’ time your oral exam won’t mean a lot”, a woman called Caroline told a Leaving Cert student on Joe Duffy’s Liveline.

When he tried to tell her it might, because he might not get his first choice of a college place and that might dictate his career, she cut him off, insisting that his focus on the loss or his orals was “one of the most selfish things that I have heard.” So we’ve suddenly changed the rules, have we?

There is now no competition for Third Level places because this economy can fulfil everyone’s dream?

We’ve changed nothing except our tune.

Speaking from the UK where the State exams have been cancelled — easier to do there than here because provisional university places have been offered based on provisional grades — Emma Maynard puts spotlights on the confusion we’ve engendered in young peoples’ minds with our changing priorities.

After a life-time of assessing them continually and telling them nothing mattered as much as their grades, suddenly we announced, “Guess what, we made it all up.”

I don’t believe this is the time to tell our young people that the effort we encouraged them to put into their working lives — and the pride they take in it — doesn’t matter.

At this time of crisis kids need as much routine and stability as we can give them.

I remember studying as if my life depended on it after my father’s death on April 13 of my Leaving Cert year because my work was something I could control in an out-of-control world.

Our kids will have decades to learn the lessons of this crisis. We will have years to re-design our education system so that kids can learn more quickly to adapt to change.

Right now we need to show our kids we “have their backs” by imagining ourselves into their confusion and giving the Sixth Year some hint of a Leaving Cert date.