Lost Childhood Sculpture No. 3 – Secrets

Don’t underestimate the complexity of children’s emotions

Children are supposed to be open books. They cry when they’re in pain. They laugh when they’re excited. Because they reveal their emotions so freely, we assume that they’re simple and transparent beings. This assumption makes us underestimate the complexity of our children’s minds.

This boy in my Lost Childhood sculpture series has secrets. He seems to be burdened by something, but with his limited vocabulary and underdeveloped cerebral capacity, he’s at a loss. If you cared about this child, you’d sense that he has a lot of things he wishes to say but he doesn’t know how. He carries those secrets into adulthood and gradually, he forgets why he’s sad. Sadness just follows him like a dark cloud. Nothing seems to be able to cheer him up.

That’s depression.

Childhood depression

Depression often begins in childhood and can be diagnosed in early childhood, as early as age three, according to Brain and Behaviour Research Foundation. Before age three, babies and toddlers can suffer from depression without obvious symptoms, because their biological and social developments are still in infancy.

The earliest signs of my depression appeared at the age of two. They were obvious in the photos taken of me from the age of two to ten. I only appeared in a handful of photos as a child, but that was enough to terrify me everytime my family took the album out.

I avoided looking at my childhood photos all my life. They just brought up such fear and despair within me.

The photo I hated the most was our one-and-only “family” photo. I quoted the word family because my father was not in it. He was in the army at the time. I think the photo was taken for him.

I was about two years old. If you’ve read the story of my birth and early childhood, you’d know I was raised by my relatives from age zero to four. I must’ve come home that day for the photo shoot. We were in poverty back then. It must’ve been a huge deal for us to spend money on presentable clothes for the photo.

In the photo, I stood next to my mother, but there was a noticeable gap between us about twenty centimeters. I looked sad, confused and a little terrified. A normal child would cling onto their mother for comfort in a situation like that. But I stood as far as I could from her.

After many years of therapy, I now realise that my childhood photos were irrefutable evidence of the existence of the terror I went through as a child. I hated them because I tried so hard to erase my past and every time these photos appeared, I felt I was losing control of my reality again. The terrifying feeling in the pit of my stomach every time I saw or think about those photos was a physiological response of the records held in my body. The mind can forget, but the body keeps the scores (Dr. Van Der Kolk.)

How can we help our children?

As a person who has survived and recovered from childhood abandonment and abuse, I wish the adults around me had been less judgemental towards me. Adults naturally gravitate towards happy, bubbly and well-behaved children because they think that’s how good kids should be.

I was shunned by my peers and the adults around me as a kid because I was an unhappy kid. No one ever asked why I was unhappy. They just labelled me as a bad kid and not worth their time. I learned to be highly competent and self-sufficient from very young onwards to compensate for the way I was. It worked. All throughout my life, people had relied on me to fix their problems. Fixing people’s problems became my life purpose, and my entire self-worth depended on how useful I was to people around me.

This self-diminishing tendency pushed me deeper into depression, because I could never have a real heart-felt connection with anyone as long as I continued to choose people who valued me only for my competency. It took me a decade and many difficult choices to climb out of depression and rebuild a healthy self-view. Please read my post, It All Started With “I Want A Separation.”

Our children should not have to go through what I went through. So, let’s examine our prejudices towards unhappy or moody children. Why is it so important to us that our children behave a certain way? What would it do to us if we had unhappy children? Do we punish them when they get moody, play up or throw tantrums? You wouldn’t punish your child if they were physically unwell. Why would you punish them if they showed signs of emotional imbalance?

Instead of labelling children as bad or unruly, let’s help them find the right words to name their emotions so they can start to enquire about their inner feelings with you. Trust me, you’ll be enriched by the shared experience with your child. I was. My gender-neutral child, Sam and I have been close friends ever since they were born. I’m a better person because of Sam. Please read my post A Memoir about Love: From My Father to My Child.

Childhood depression is real and should not be ignored or shunned. Let’s discuss, research and embrace the topic.