Many children coming into care aren't doing very well at school.
That's if you can get them there.
They struggle to pay attention, which ends up getting them into trouble because they amuse themselves by trying to distract everyone else. You get comments from teachers such as;
"Wayne needs to learn to concentrate"
"Chloe must involve herself more in the lessons"
And so on.
But y'know what? There are lots of types of intelligence, such as the type that gets called "street-smart".
The majority of foster children in my expereince have way more street-smart than academic ability. In fact I'd go as far as to say they have more street-smart than the average child, sometimes even more street smart than the kids at the top of the class.
What is this thing "street-smart"?
Perhaps it's nothing more complicated than sharpened survival skills.
Any skill of any sort improves with practice. Children born into chaotic households have to learn from the get-go how to have their needs met. They come up with strategies to get food, stay safe, find some peace.
If a hungry newborn baby doesn't get fed she'll go back in her mind to what she did the last time she got fed. Maybe she'd settled into exhausted whimpering rather than bawling her lungs out. So next time instead of crying with all her might, she whimpers.
If a baby just a few weeks old is forced to strategise, just think how further advanced she is than other babies whose needs are anticipated and met. Once a brain starts to think strategically there's no stopping it.
If only that street-smart learning weren't often hand-in-hand with attachment disorders and under-developed empathy, you'd have yourself a bunch of young people who could run this country a whole lot better than the current mob in Parliament.
Here's an example, my favourite one actually, of a foster child using street-smart. I've mentioned it before more in connection with happy outcomes, but here it's to illustrate street-smartness in foster kids.
She was a teenager who was absolutely flunking college. Getting her out of bed and into the car was a daily struggle. Bargaining and negotiating - not something I use with the very young - was the only tool I had, and it gradually dawned on me how adroit she was at playing the game.
Her opening gambit:
She would always open with this phrase:
"I'm confused..."
Her core opening gambit:
A bunch of assertions which only had a thin layer of truth, eg:
"I thought you said, and we agreed, that if I got up in time not to be late for college for a whole week I could go home for the weekend. My social worker Carl agreed as well. I thought we was all agreed. But I was late on Tuesday because they changed my timetable so that I started at 9.00 instead of 11.00 but they didn't tell me. So when they phoned to ask you where I was and marked me down as late that wasn't my fault."
Her second-phase tactic:
Wear the listener down:
"Carl said that if I was feeling ill and couldn't go in it would be alright as long as I told you by 9.00 so you could ring college and tell them. So I did that and you had a go because I came down on the sofa and was watching Jeremy Kyle because there was nothing to do in my room. And the downstairs toilet is nearer the living room than my bedroom is to the bathroom in case I was sick. So Carl said last time I saw him that it was normal that you can be too ill to be at college all day but well enough to lie on a sofa, like, if you're still in your dressing gown and under your duvet, that's not cheating, like."
On she would go.
Her plea-bargain;
Finally, her pitch:
"So what I'm saying is, like, that instead of me having to go to college every day for a week so that I can go home Friday night, like, well it's the same thing as if I go home on Friday, yeah, like even if I was late once and missed a day last week, because if I go home this weekend then I thought we'd agreed I would agree go to college every day next week. Which is the same as what you're saying but the other way round."
Her trademark payoff:
"If that makes sense…"
Poor girl didn't want to go to college because she had a body image problem and she got bullied about it.
In my book her education could go on hold while we repaired her heart. But it's your job to do your best to get then to school, to college, to contact; all those things.
Sometimes her street-smart was poignant:
One evening a friend of hers showed up at our house. They were going out for the evening, to McDonalds. The friend had her arm in a sling after falling downstairs. We sympathised. Our girl disappeared upstairs to change into going-out clothes. Came downstairs gingerly half an hour later and asked for bandages; she said she'd turned her ankle over.
Obviously she craved the simple sympathy we'd given her friend and wanted some of that.
We bandaged her ankle and sympathised. That's what you do.
Was she self-aware of her guiles? Her self-taught skills at having her needs met?
I don't think so, not for a moment.
Some people would dismiss these behaviours as low cunning, I don't.
I call them canny.
We all need a bit of canny, and they don't teach canny at school.
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