Hello dear GGIS family,
How could I miss my Monday Letter, even after a full working weekend and an overwhelming response to our Open House!
This week, I want to write about something that we don't speak about enough.
The silent scars children sometimes carry.
Last week, a student sat in my office and cried for almost thirty minutes. Age-wise, he has barely entered his teenage years. But the weight he was carrying felt far beyond his years.
He had come across something happening in his family that he was never meant to carry. He had seen messages on his father's phone to a stranger and had discovered something that left him confused, worried and, most of all, unsure about what he was supposed to do with this information.
He decided to turn to the school principal. Perhaps, in that moment, he simply needed an adult who would listen.
Honestly, I was equally clueless about what the right answer was to his problem.
There was no perfect advice to give him. However, what I could do was sit with him, help him name what he was feeling and remind him that the problems of adults are not problems that children are expected to solve.
And that conversation made me think about how much our children absorb from the world around them.
A child becoming the messenger between two adults. Or simply the loneliness of knowing that something is wrong, while nobody is talking about it.
We sometimes believe that if we don't openly discuss these things in front of our children, they will not know.
But children know.
They notice the change in someone's voice. They notice who stopped sitting with whom. They notice the silence in the car. They notice when a parent is unhappy. They notice when a grandparent is hurt. They notice much more than we imagine.
A lot, lot more.
So tonight, I turn to every adult reading this letter from my desk.
When we become parents, the responsibility is much larger than the title. It is much larger than Mother's Day, Father's Day, birthdays or the beautiful photographs we take together.
It is a commitment to remember that our children are watching us build the emotional world in which they are growing.
This does not mean that families cannot disagree. They will. Adults will make mistakes. Relationships will become complicated. Sometimes marriages will not work. Sometimes living arrangements will have to change.
Life is not always neat.
But even when adults cannot find their way back to each other, perhaps we can still find our way towards protecting the child standing in the middle.
Have the difficult conversation.
Seek help when you need it.
Make changes when the environment is becoming unhealthy.
But please do not make the child carry the conflict.
Children need safety and security before they can confidently build so many of the other things we hope for them: confidence, curiosity, independence, resilience and joy.
Sometimes, the greatest gift we can give a child is not another opportunity, another class or another achievement.
It is a peaceful place to come home to.
Leaving you with that thought tonight as we all continue to learn how to navigate the wonderfully complex, and sometimes difficult, world of human emotions.
And yes, thank you for taking the time to read my letters every week. I genuinely look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.
