In this video I respond to a question raised in supervision, recently, about my thoughts about children and young people who light fires. This led to a wide-ranging conversation, a portion of which is shared here. The video is intended to be of most interest to those who interact with children and young people who are recovering from a tough start to life in care and professional roles.

Disclaimer: While great care is taken to ensure that the information in this audio/video is applicable to childhood trauma and based on sound psychological science, it may not suit the individual circumstances of all viewers. If you have any concerns about applicability to your circumstances, please consult a qualified professional near to you.

Transcript:

With kids, I mean, you’ve got, it’s really about separating out what is, what’s a normal interest in fire lighting, or in fire, I guess, and what’s a problematic interest. I mean, I think, you know, probably a lot of, this kind of goes back, I think, to a story that I’ve told before where I put a, I was delivering a workshop to 180 clinical psychologists at the Clinical College Benefit about 13 years ago now, and I put up on the slide a whole bunch of behaviours that we commonly see in children and young people, and I asked them to consider what diagnostic formulations that they would come up with based on, you know, if they had a child who was exhibiting I think I said two thirds or three quarters of those behaviours, and I got all sorts of diagnostic formulations, but no one said no diagnosis. My point was normality and abnormality differentiated by frequency, intensity, and duration, so a lot of behaviours that we, that kids, that a lot of the behaviours of concerns we see in children that we’re concerned about, you see those behaviours in the normal population anyway.

Children, you know, perhaps particularly boys, have a bit of a fascination with bonfires, and playing with fire, and so on, but it’s when it’s, so you’ve, I think what you’ve got to do then is just think about, well, why are they doing it? Is this just a normal interest and fascination that perhaps boys, I’ve had girls who are fire lighters as well, that’s probably a bit of a, I haven’t got data to support it, but that reminds me a little bit of a publication back in 1993, a very long time ago, of a study we did looking into music preference amongst teenagers and suicidality, and what we found is that, and things change all the time, but what we found an interesting effect where girls who had very much a less common interest, music interest, you know, like a particular style of music, at that time it was rock and heavy metal, it was heavy metal music, they were the ones who were more likely to be exhibiting suicidality, point being that girl, you know, to the extent that probably an interest in fire is more common in boys, if girls are messing with fire, they, that would be, I would see that as probably a less common interest, and perhaps a bit more, a bit more interesting than just, you know, dismissing it as normal childhood behaviour as such. The things that I would, so if, but if a behaviour is relatively common, but children and young people, but certain children and young people are quite worried about it, then I think it really, it goes to frequency, intensity and duration, which I’ve talked about, but also the reason, is the reason they’re doing it different. I think fire lighters, probably displaced anger, a lot of anger, and powerlessness, they’re the two, I guess they’re the two, I probably could think of some more reasons, but my first, I guess, protocol would be around anger, displaced anger, so anger and hurt, and feelings of powerlessness, perhaps attention, the attention that it gets, you know, feeling of being invisible, certainly adult offenders, fire lighter offenders, but, you know, not, not being noticed, being, not being important, not feeling important to people.

It’s the sort of behaviour that, that outside of just playing with a, with a bonfire, it’s likely to garner significant concern and attention, so you, in those circumstances, I’d be thinking about what, what sort of, what’s a typical experience of concern and attention. So there’s, yeah, so I’ve added to the tally, I think, you know, definitely anger, which comes out, that can come out through destructiveness, yeah, powerlessness, feeling unimportant, feeling a lack of care and concern, that’s five now. That would be my hypothesis.

So to the extent that, that it might be an uncommon interest in girls, or less common interest in girls, it might be a flag that there’s more going on for that girl. So anyway, the point being that normality and abnormality are differentiated by frequency, intensity and duration, but I would also say you’ve got to consider the reason. Is this just normal interest and exploratory behaviour, or is there something else going on? And as I said, there’s something else going on, would be anger, power, attention, feeling invisible, yeah, lack of care and concern.

So yeah, so in terms of working with children, like young people, I think everyone, you know, would be, there would be plenty of practitioners who would see the fire lighting as the problem. Yeah, well, it is a problem. So amongst the responses to that would be to admonish the young person, to sanction them in some way.

And the problem with that, of course, is that it runs the risk of only exacerbating certain reasons for why they do it. So you end up in that scenario where what are you going to do? Try and scare them straight, which is a common system response, you know, you’re going to go, you’ll end up hurting someone, you’ll end up, you might hurt yourself, you’ll end up going to jail, you know, no, you’ll end up with words that reflect that, you know, people won’t like you or love you, and you’ll be an outsider in society, you know, there’ll be words around that, all of which probably, you know, confirms and exacerbates the underlying stuff that’s giving rise to the behaviour. So I think my view about these things is a lot of the trauma, I was responding to something only this morning, but a lot of the trauma-informed commentary and content out there, in my experience, really says, you know, you’ve got to respond to the underlying reason, which I agree with, but I think you’ve got to do both, you’ve got to respond to the behaviour and the reason for the behaviour.

Otherwise, people will look at you, this was my experience of talking about responding to the reason for the behaviour over a period of time, people just looked at me like I was mad, like I was, because it’s so foreign to not also address the behaviour. So I think young people need to know that the behaviour is not acceptable, but they also need to know that we understand and will respond to the reasons why they’re or they need to experience us understanding and responding to those reasons. And authorities, including referring authorities, including parents and so on, really need to know that we also take the behaviour seriously, otherwise they’ll pull their children out, you know, or they’ll pull the children out, take them somewhere where the therapeutic service is taking the behaviour seriously, and such.