Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 31st March 2024
I want to talk a bit this week about test four – facilitating, enabling and supporting connections, friendships, relationships, humanity. Call them what you will, this is something Serviceland really struggles with.
The Boy has been a volunteer at our local food bank for a couple of years now. Last year, Katie one of his personal assistants, noticed how well he got on with Paul, another volunteer. They share a similar off-the-wall sense of humour, have really easy communication, and Katie found that Paul loves to get out in the countryside and walk – as does The Boy. She facilitated them exchanging phone numbers and was there in the background to enable monthly meet-ups for a long walk. I told this story to a group of social workers I was working with last month and without exception, they said they felt uncomfortable. None of them felt they would have done the same and it took about 30 seconds for someone to use the Safeguarding word. I was floored.
When The Girl moved into her own place last year one of the first things I asked her team of supporters to do was to think about enabling her to meet her neighbours. Every time I’ve moved house, I’ve baked something nice and then knocked on the doors of my new neighbours to say hi, introduce myself and get connected. I’m sure lots of people do some version of that, based on their baking/not baking skill set. Again, I was met with people feeling very uncomfortable about whether or not that was ‘allowed’ and the responsibility it meant for them. We had similar conversations about introducing her to the people who run the local corner shop so that she might be able to go there on her own and feed her addiction to Dr Pepper.
We really seem to have got ourselves in a pickle about this and about that word we love… Safeguarding. Bryony Shannon’s two recent blogs unpick this much better than I can (see Safe and Flourishing) and she writes beautifully about what keeps us safe (people not policies and processes) and how putting our focus on simply avoiding risk is a fast track to a pretty miserable life.
If we are thinking about test four, the essence for me is that we create a weird parallel universe for people who draw on social care support, and the web of relationships we have if we also draw on social care. One important point seems to be how we perceive the importance of supporting friendships and more generally of non-paid relationships.
The Boy came to live with us when he was ten, and twenty months later The Girl came the day after her eighth birthday. One of the really noticeable things was neither of them had any friends. Perhaps even more noticeable was the fact that nobody seemed to think this was an issue. I remember The Boy’s 11th birthday party, three months after he came to live with us where the one boy who came was accompanied by a worker in a uniform tabard. I cried.
The Girl had a huge collection of GirlTalk magazines (think Jackie magazine for those of us who grew up in the 70s) and the photo-stories in these magazines, along with her Barbies, were her friends. She spent hours every day ‘chatting’ to them. I’ll never forget her first day at primary school (she moved to a local village primary school from a special school when she was nine). All the children in her new class had been assembled on the mat to meet her, and she did a whole body jumping stim saying, ‘white girls and brown girls and orange girls and black girls. My girls.’ (Note: the colours are referring to hair!). That was the most words I had ever heard her put together and I’ve got a lovely photo, two weeks on of her and five other children on the climbing frame in the playground, happy smiling faces. She went on to gather a lovely network of girls whom she hung out with at school, met in Costa and did gloriously ordinary things with.
There’s also a really odd and incredibly othering back story of some people not being seen as ‘capable’ of being a friend. I distinctly remember that one of The Girl’s expected outcomes when she was at college 4 years ago was focused on improving her communication skills (she doesn’t use many words). I remember commenting that her communication was actually incredibly effective, it just was that she didn’t speak very much. The response from the teacher was that if she wanted to make friends, then she had to learn to speak. Really? Beyond that communication stuff, there was the idea, tacit but still very real that some people just don’t have what it takes to be a friend and I see people thinking that about both my kids. I remember Anna Severwright talking about asking to use some of her personal assistant hours to enable her to meet up with friends and instead being offered a referral to a befriending scheme… because obviously, she wouldn’t have friends of her own.
Sure, not all of us do friendships in the same way. Both my kids like to see people and then quite quickly be able to withdraw to their own space. They love knowing that people are in the house, but they don’t always want to be present with them. Chatting over dinner is not The Girl’s thing, but being invited to share her space and the music she is listening to or creating is her gift. I struggle to keep in touch with people and often fail miserably at the nurturing required to maintain friendships. My dearest friends seem to accept this of me.
The other obvious issue is where people actually get to meet and make friends and develop relationships. Have a think about where your friendships have developed – your oldest friends possibly from school, even primary school. Friends you made at university, in different jobs you’ve had, through hobbies and interests. Friends you’ve made through other friends. The stats for people who draw on social care support (particularly people who have drawn on support since they were very young) is that these won’t be the milestones in life that they go through. People are less likely to have been part of higher education or paid employment, and less likely to have the opportunities to develop hobbies and interests alongside other people who have those same passions. At best, people get to connect with other people who Serviceland think are like them, e.g. they have the same impairments or support needs. I obviously regularly hang out with people with curly hair who wear glasses and who have a long and checkered history with the mental health system.
So, I think we’ve really got some work to do to explore how all of us in the world of health and social care can recognise and embrace the fact that supporting connections and friendships is central to our job. Not an add-on, not an extra. Not something that is a bit hard, a bit risky, but central.
I was in a big event with John O’Brien probably twenty years ago where he was talking about circles of support. A very cross support worker stood up and said, ‘you don’t understand, I work with someone who has no friends. How on earth can I get a circle around him?’ His beautiful, quiet and measured response was, ‘so you have only one job – help him find just one friend and the rest will follow’. Maybe that’s your one job this week for someone you know?
PS. Look out for The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode three next week! I’ll be catching up with the brilliant Sian Lockwood and Angela Catley and talking all about the #WhenIGetOld movement.