An Interview with Psychologist Pam Jarvis
Pam Jarvis, Ph.D. recently retired as an Honorary Visiting Research Fellow at Leeds Trinity University in Leeds, England. Dr. Jarvis specializes in psychological wellbeing in childhood, adolescence, families and education.
Tori Steffen: Hi everybody. Thank you for joining us today for this installment of the Seattle Psychiatrist Interview series. I'm Tori Steffen, a research intern at Seattle Anxiety Specialists. We're a Seattle-based psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy practice specializing in anxiety disorders. I'd like to welcome with us today chartered psychologist Pam Jarvis. Dr. Jarvis is a professor at Leeds Trinity University in Leeds, England. Dr. Jarvis specializes in a multi-disciplinary research perspective, including psychological, biological, social, and historical perspectives. She's written several publications including the book Perspectives on Play, which looks at play-based learning in four to six year olds, and the article Attachment theory, cortisol and care for the under-threes in the twenty-first century: constructing evidence-informed policy. Before we get started today, could you let us know a little bit more about yourself, Dr. Jarvis, and what made you interested in studying attachment and trauma awareness in education?
Pam Jarvis: Okay, so I should correct that. First of all, I'm retired from Leeds Trinity University now.
Tori Steffen: Okay.
Pam Jarvis: And I was a Reader, which is a particularly British term for academics in various, so just to put that on record.
Tori Steffen: Okay.
Pam Jarvis: And you asked how I got started, well that's an awful long time ago because I studied as a young mature student when my own children were very small and they're all in their late thirties now. And I had an idea that I wanted to sign on for a degree because I hadn't done that at the so-called right time. And I was interested in psychology and I ended up working as sort of playgroup volunteer and doing my psychology degree at the same time, so it was just a perfect kind of environment to get interested into that kind of arena. And I followed that through really throughout my career with all the other things I've done.
I've also got quite a strong interest in history, but my major thesis in that was written on a pioneer, a nursery pioneer here in Great Britain, although she was actually born in New York State, I think in America, but she grew up and practiced in London. Margaret McMillan actually grew up in Scotland and practiced in London, so it's been a thread, if you like, all the way through my career that, that is the part of psychology that I was always interested in. I would do other things because I'd be encouraged to do that, but then I'd always come back to it. My PhD was on children in early years education, but it was more focused towards their learning on play-based learning. But emotion played a big part in that too, so really it's been a sort of thread that's gone all the way through whatever I've done.
Tori Steffen: Right. That's great. Yeah, it's nice to have so many different perspectives in your practice. And then I'm sure studying child development with kids of your own might have helped a little bit or given you some knowledge.
Pam Jarvis: Well, yes. Because you had the theoretical and the practical going on at the same time, so yeah.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: In action.
Tori Steffen: All righty. Well, getting down to basics, could you explain for the audience what currently exists in the educational environment for student wellbeing?
Pam Jarvis: Oh, that's a big question. I think it depends on the nation. The Scandinavian nations are much better at this then we are in Britain, and unfortunately you are in the United States. A lot of it revolves around the importance really that the society accords to that period of life and the interest that lawmakers have in early years development. And in my own country it's not much and hardly any, so I think I worked with a lady for quite some time who was a professor of early years child development education at Salem State University in Massachusetts. And the way she described your childcare provision was a patchwork quilt in terms of what was available in various states. Massachusetts did quite well, I think California does reasonably well, but not quite so well.
I'm not an expert on that, but I think where you can make the judgment on Britain in terms of, well, in England, what we do in England, Scotland is slightly better and the politicians are more interested in early years education and in what I'm going to talk about later, adverse childhood experiences, particularly. The politicians at Westminster in England are not interested at all. They have a very much a kind of attitude to, well, how cheaply can you do it?
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: And I think some American states have that kind of attitude when you get a, I don't want to be political here, but when you get a Democratic president, I think you get a bit more interest and when you get a Republican president, you get a bit less interest. And the same thing goes for us that when you get a Labor government, you get more interest. When you get Conservative government, you get less interest. And at the moment, we're under one of the worst Conservative governments we've ever had.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: It's a difficult situation really, but we have hoped that it might get better. Things have turned around before, so I think that we are very dependent in England on the Westminster government, where in America it's the education and it's evolved status now. And it's much more about what state you are living in, but where money's coming from the top, there is a hit on that. Sorry, the trouble with this subject is it so quickly gets into politics.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: We know what good practice is, but it's whether we can provide the lawmakers to actually do it.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah. I think what's important is kind of bringing awareness to just how significant it is to provide the resources for students, so that's what we're going to get into today.
Pam Jarvis: The Scottish government have done particularly well over the last, I suppose five years. And they've moved in a really big way to a very informed practice. But I wrote a chapter for a document that went forward to Scottish Parliament and it was very receptive.
Tori Steffen: Wow.
Pam Jarvis: But not in England, unfortunately.
Tori Steffen: Yeah. Well, hopefully America and England can learn from others that have a good system in place.
Pam Jarvis: The Scandinavians. And I think Scotland did draw a lot of its ideas from Scandinavia, although they have their faults as well, nobody's perfect.
Tori Steffen: Right. All right. Well getting to the topic of attachment theory, could you explain the relevance of attachment theory in education for our listeners?
Pam Jarvis: I mean the relevance for attachment theory for human beings in every walk of life is enormous. Attachment theory has gone through several stages. And the original one with John Bowlby, who was the creator of the term, had lots of faults, but there's a central core in it, which is the internal working model. And what that means is that when the child is born, it will learn from the adults who look after it how human beings act in their relationships. And where a child gets an upbringing or an environment where they feel that their cared for, that they can call for help when they want, when they feel that their needs will be addressed, they become secure and that then will develop an adult who will feel secure in society. I mean, none of us feel secure all the time. I know I've taught this for years and years to many students and a lot of them actually were parents at the time, and they would sort of come up with this idea, “Oh I'm a bad parent because I'm not perfect. I don't make my child secure all the time.”
I might have actually told them off when I shouldn't have done this type of thing. And I think the first thing to say is, none of us are perfect but we can be good enough, effectively. And it's how the child perceives really whether they're loved and whether they will get support. And then as they grow older, they will apply that model to the rest of society. They will apply it to teachers, to peers, they will apply it to romantic relationships. There are things along the way that can happen that will make things better or worse. It's not just all with, this was one of the thoughts of the original Bowlbyian theory because it was everything with the parents and after the three years, well then that's it. And that's not true, but it is important. What can happen if a child gets the message that other people are not kind and I am not lovable. This is the model of both society and themselves that they will go out with that the self is not worthy of love.
And the society is not going to help you if you ask for help, they're not going to be kind to you. And then all else transpires from that. Most of us go out with it's not an either/or. Most of us go out with something that's somewhere on a scale. This is another thing with Bowlby because it was a 1950s theory. It was very either/or, it's not really like that. But if we're just too far away from the not good enough, what we are doing with those children, you are not only creating that model but also creating an internal stress, it's much easier to stress someone who is not secure because they haven't got any help coming, so we are going to get very stressed very quickly. This is the model of the world in your mind, nobody's going to help me and this is all going wrong. Whereas somebody who is more secure is much happier to go to a colleague and say, “I'm running into trouble here, can you help?” And think that, “Yes, they're going to help me.”
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah, that definitely makes sense. How it would have an impact on a child's perspective on if they can reach out for help. And you brought up the stress piece.
Pam Jarvis: Yes.
Tori Steffen: So definitely important and very interesting topic to study, and moving kind of over to trauma. How is the topic of trauma connected to wellbeing in education?
Pam Jarvis: Basically we'll start off with this model of the child of, basically what happened in the 21st century was that there was a lot of work done actually on stress, how stress works within the body. And then this was taken to early years in terms of some children tend to get more stressed more quickly. And what then, because the setting up of the cortisol system is done in the very early years, if that makes sense, so therefore I always cite it to my students like a central heating system that if you've got the thermostat turned up too high, you're going to make the boiler work too hard, so effectively what's going to happen if you continually work the boiler too hard is either it's just going to go poof and die or it's going to blow up. And this is the type of emotion that you've got in these children.
And in education, this does obviously impact on behavior because those children are going to be on a much sort of tighter spring in terms of behavior, they'll do things that seem unreasonable and expect things from adults that seem unreasonable. But the other issue in education is that if you've got these stress patterns running in your head all the time, you are not going to learn as well or as quickly. Because again, the way I describe this to my students is rather like you've got a computer with a finite ability to pay attention to something. And if you are always looking on the horizon for the next bad thing that's going to happen to you, then you don't have that attention or concentration to apply to learning.
Tori Steffen: Wow.
Pam Jarvis: So for children who are at the really far end of this scale, it's a really difficult situation. Now here in the UK, one of the issues that is a problem is poverty because this stresses a family, which stresses the child, which creates arguments, which creates insecure attachment, which creates sort of too high reactivity stress reactions. And then this is how disadvantaged children are then disadvantaged as they go along and along and along because when they start education, they're not really set up to learn. And because of the stress that they're carrying, the adverse childhood experiences, which originates in America around about the two thousands also adds some information to this.
I don't know if you're familiar with that, you could probably do a whole piece on adverse childhood experiences, ACEs. Felitti et al, that actually I think was principally studied in California and it's rather simplistic, but it sets up a series of life events that are likely to give a child high adverse childhood experiences, which creates this excess stress. And yeah, it's all related. That's what my article is about. The one that read from early years international is how we put all this together. The work that Bowlby did in the 1950s, the work that's been done in this century on the cortisol reactions and the adverse childhood experiences idea that has come from Felitti. Which is somewhat problematic because again, it rather oversimplifies, you can't just give someone an ACEs score and kind of walk away and say, “Oh, well, that's it.”
This is always the problem with this. And in school in particular, there was a school or an area I think in Scotland that started actually assessing children for ACEs and putting that on a permanent record, but where it can be used to help children and provide help for the family, it can also be used to stereotype, so teachers could go back to it and say, well, this child hasn't achieved because look at their ACEs score, so basically they stopped doing it because it was causing argument. It's something very, very difficult in education because I think in education often there is this problem, which is if we're going to diagnose something, we need to know how to treat it. And if we're going to diagnose it and not treat it, we maybe are going to cause more harm than good because child will be stereotyped, so this is where we are at the moment.
Tori Steffen: That's a great point. Yeah, there's so many different areas that kind of go into the attachment, and education, and trauma, and the biological perspective that you mentioned, so that's great that you know, were able to take it a step further and kind of fill in some of those gaps by putting all of this information and knowledge together, so it's definitely important to know.
Pam Jarvis: That was the purpose of the article. Yeah, it was effectively a literature review that said, there's this area of theory, there's this area of theory, there's this area of theory, but they all go together to make this picture.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: And then of course you are setting the scene for a lot more research.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, and it just gives us so much more information that's really crucial to providing for those students that have insecure attachments, or trauma, or low stress management, which we're going to get into here soon as well.
Pam Jarvis: I mean, this is something that, what I worked when I was a teacher, principally with children in the secondary phase, junior high and high school, and I ended up basically going to work to train early years professionals here. And the reason I decided to do that, well, there were so many teenagers that I would deal with who I in the end would think, well, most of the problem with you is something that probably happened before you arrive, but now I'm looking at you at 15 and our options are limited, there are options, but they're limited. Whereas if I go and work with people who work with children in early years, that will be training people to understand this so we can do better at the period where we should be doing better and have more impact, if that makes sense.
Tori Steffen: Right. Oh, absolutely. Yeah, it's important to kind of reach these children early because a lot of the development is happening at those very young ages, so that's a great point as well.
Pam Jarvis: There's not nothing we can do at 15, but it's so much better if we did it at three or four.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: Or even before birth if we work with the parents.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Well, why do you think is it beneficial for schools to be more aware around the topics of trauma and attachment?
Pam Jarvis: Well, here in Britain or in England I should say, and in America there's been a sort of fad over the last 10 years for this zero tolerance idea with teenagers that if they do something very small wrong, then you come down on them really hard and sort of make them mind if you like put them in isolation. But the trouble is, if you've got children who are basically on edge all the time, if you apply a zero tolerance regime to that child, you're going to make them much, much worse because the model of themselves they're carrying in their head is, I'm not worthy. And the model of other people they're carrying in their head is they are not going to help me.
All you're doing is justifying both of those beliefs if you're going to apply a zero tolerance technique to them, so where we have trauma-informed practice instead of immediately saying, well, a punishment is going to work here. I think the lady who works in California, sorry, whose name I've forgotten, I always do this in interviews, I should have looked this up, but I've got on her says, do not say what is wrong with you to a child, say what happened to you. They may not know in fact, but that's the question the adult should ask first. If you've got a child who's always creating problems, it's not what's wrong with them, it's what happened to them to make them do that. Obviously all teenagers misbehave at some points and sometimes the reasons aren't very deep, it's just trying their luck because that's the way they are.
But if you are a reasonable teacher or if you are a reasonable school counselor or whatever, you ought to be able to tell the difference. And this is to me where the importance of training comes in. I don't think we need to train teachers to be social workers, but we do need to train them to spot the problems. And I'm honestly not sure about teacher training in the US. I think, again, it is different in different states, but in England, I can tell you for a fact, we don't train teachers like this and it's just not appropriate. They need to be trained in this, in child development effectively.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah, that is a really good point. As you mentioned, maybe teachers aren't exactly social workers, but they do have a large impact on children, on their wellbeing, and it is important for them to have those tools to address issues that come up, so that's a really good one.
Pam Jarvis: Well, they're a first line practitioner, aren't they?
Tori Steffen: Correct.
Pam Jarvis: They're the ones who will flag this up. No one's saying that they have to deal with really difficult cases on their own, but they know enough to flag this up. I mean, all the time I was teaching teenagers because I was a psychologist, obviously I did, but I would go to higher up to various people who would clearly have no idea, and it was so frustrating.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, yeah, that's definitely important to have. I think that just that alone could make a really big difference.
Pam Jarvis: It really could.
Tori Steffen: Yeah. Well, something in your article noted that children who experience ongoing stress from an insecure relationship with adults, they can develop issues with stress management.
Pam Jarvis: Yeah.
Tori Steffen: How might that say a low stress management, how might that show up in an education environment?
Pam Jarvis: It's children who are not focused on learning, sometimes they can act out, but often it's just a kind of just not focused that a teacher can tell this, that the mind is somewhere else. And also a child who's very on the edge, if they get some kind of mild admonishment from a teacher, will just flip out and create a huge amount of difficulty. And then obviously in some regimes, the punishment for that is very harsh. One of the things English schools do is often exclude children for either for a short time or if they really badly offended them permanently. But that doesn't answer our question, it just passes it on. And there's a term here in the UK, I'm not sure if it's familiar to you, which is the exclusion prison pipeline.
Tori Steffen: I haven't heard of that.
Pam Jarvis: Yeah, so the child is effectively back out of education and then they'll turn up in prison sometimes later.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: And still carrying whatever it was that happened when they were three, and nobody's tried to address it or two or whatever.
Tori Steffen: Right, which could create issues down the road that could have been avoided from the start.
Pam Jarvis: Well, the biggest sort of irritation to me is that is so expensive.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: It costs more to keep a child here in secure accommodation, child offenders, than it does to send a child to Eaton where Prince William and Prince Harry went, so what is the sensible thing to do? It's not just about being a woke liberal, it's about common sense.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah, that's a really good point. Well, what can schools do to help students with higher stress and insecure attachment styles?
Pam Jarvis: Well, we need trauma informed environments, so this is staff training so that all teachers are aware when to spot the signs of a child who is highly stressed. And we also need, there's endless arguments in England about exclusions that if a child is dangerous to other children, you can't keep them in the classroom. I mean obviously that's true, but the question is, is where are you then sending them? Are you sending them to an isolation booth and punishing them or are you sending them to an adult who is trained to work with them. And actually get to the bottom of what it is that's bothering them? Often, as I say, they can't say, but it's taking, if you like, I think what the adult has to keep in their mind is this child most likely has a model of themselves that is they're not lovable and they have a model of me that I'm not willing to help them, so it's starting to work on that.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: Wherever it is you are sending them. Teachers can do this too for children exhibiting sort of lower levels of stress, but that needs to run all the way through the school process. And we're really not very good at that in this country.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: With the fact Scotland has made a start on this.
Tori Steffen: Okay, well it's good to hear that somebody out there is confronting the situation and hopefully we can learn from what works, what doesn't, so that we can kind of reap those benefits as well.
Pam Jarvis: What we hear, the problem, I'm sorry, this is becoming a very policy oriented discussion, isn't it? But the thing is, you can't, what we hear is actually putting this kind of policy in place is very expensive, but the argument is that more children are going to come out the other end who are not going to go into prison, who are going to create family lives that are less fraught themselves for their own children. And it's that invisible saving. There was a project actually in the US called Headstart, I don't know if you've heard of this? Where children from projects and their parents were given a lot of help and care, they'd be about my age now in their sixties. And there was disappointment because it hadn't made them sort of hugely academically more able when they got to school than children that hadn't had been in the project.
But as they grew older, they were more likely to form secure partnerships, adult partnerships. Their own children were more likely to be secure, they were more likely to be employed, they were more likely to graduate high school. So all of that, even though it hadn't made them super clever or raised their IQ by a huge amount, that security in their lives had made them, if you like, better citizens, be because they had a good, we keep going back to the internal working model, don't we? Because they had a self-confidence in their own abilities, and they also had the belief that the society was a good place.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: Why would I contribute to a society where I think nobody much likes me, or is going to help me.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, that's definitely important to understand how, it just sounds like it's very significant, the attachment style and the way that the child perceives themselves and others, which makes sense that, that alone can have such a big impact on educational success. And then later in life relationships, so many other areas in life.
Pam Jarvis: And educational success doesn't just mean high grades and going to an Ivy League university.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: It means getting to the end of education, graduating, and maybe doing a very ordinary job, but that security to do that, to stick at it. And attachment is really, if you like, the melting pot for all this.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: That early part of life where we learn who we are and how other people will react to us, our expectation of ourselves and others.
Tori Steffen: Absolutely. Well, if students are experiencing anxiety or other mental health issues, are schools able to provide any type of therapy or even just recommend that the caregivers seek out therapy?
Pam Jarvis: Well, again, in England, and in America, I presume it again, depends on the states. In England, no, we are in terrible trouble with this. We've got huge amounts of teenage mental breakdown, which isn't only to do with the home, it's to do with social media, and to do with the experiences they went through in lockdown and COVID. Our mental health service is massively, massively overloaded. But really we could, as I say, train other professionals in the children's workforce to be able to do some of the work, but we don't.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: Every so often the prime minister, whoever it is this week, says, “Oh, well we are going to put more money into the mental health service.” But my kind of reaction to that is, well, that's like pushing somebody off a cliff because we've got so many families living in poverty here and sending an ambulance in the bottom. Why don't we help families at the beginning, so we don't have so many kids with mental health problems in the end?
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: We can't really do much about social media or there are things we could do, and I have written about that. And again, we could do a lot more about family poverty, a lot more.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, yeah.
Pam Jarvis: We can't make all families secure.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: But we can raise the chances, and we just don't bother.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah, why not start from the beginning versus trying to fix issues later down the road when it's going to be, you have limited options as how to help these individuals.
Pam Jarvis: And their bigger issues.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, and they already have that ingrained insecure attachment. Yeah, I think it would be more beneficial from the beginning, see what you can do to intervene there versus later on.
Pam Jarvis: I mean, I haven't actually specifically written about this, but I mean logically, if you are insecurely attached, the type of trolling and bullying you get on social media is going to have a much bigger effect on you and so on.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, yeah, because you just have less tools maybe to deal with that kind of stress.
Pam Jarvis: Yeah.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: Well that's the thing with stress, isn't it? The actual term stress was taken from engineering, I believe originally and if you've got a bridge that's built with stress metal, you put a train on it that's too heavy and it goes pow, same thing for human beings.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, I like the analogy.
Pam Jarvis: If this is already cracked and you put a heavy load on it will give way.
Tori Steffen: Yep. Yeah, that's a perfect analogy for kind of what you can expect from students. Well, what can families do on their own to help children develop a secure attachment? And if they are able to develop that secure attachment, do you think that, that would lead to a higher wellbeing in a school environment?
Pam Jarvis: We have to recognize how hard it is for families to start with, I think, because I would hate to input family blaming because there are so many stresses on families now. But all things being equal, what the child needs in the first three years is a group of bonded adults. Bowlby said it just had to be the mother, this is not true. That's been shown again and again and again.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: What children need is a circle of adults, it could be three, five, but who take care of them and are bonded to them and what they will, who are emotionally available to them who have a focus on them. And what tends to happen is they create a main attachment and then these subsidiary attachments, so therefore it doesn't really matter. Your daily round could be to be with mom on one day, with dad on another day, with granny one on one day, granny two on the other day. That's fine, as long as that's familiar and you are bonded to those people. And out of that a main attachment will come, but the other people are acceptable substitutes. The big problem that you have with children is if they're sent particularly to daycare where the staff keep changing and then they don't have an adult in that environment who they have that bond with.
And there are ways, personally, and this is just my personal preference, I would prefer that families were at least given the option for parental and kin care within the first three years. But if there's a lady down the road who's a really experienced child minder and you're paying her to take care of the child and she's wonderful with the child, what's the problem with that? She just becomes another one of that bonded circle. Barbara Tizard who worked with Bowlby, I think she's still alive, but she'd be quite old by now. She said, well look, the way that children were cared for in the early industrial period in Britain, because women did have to go out to work when they worked in the field, obviously the children could often tail along behind them, but there was a tradition in England of paying one woman in an extended family to care for all the children, so it could be a sister, a cousin, it could even be a grandmother.
But this created, although they might have been poor or sometimes the kids didn't get enough attention, there would be a group, a kin group of children, and a bonded adult, so really, in many ways that's better than sending a child to faceless daycare. It's a really low, here across the UK and in America childcare is, the parents pay for it. If you're lucky, I think in America you are going to get a creche attached to your job, that doesn't happen in the UK, so parents pay for the daycare that they can afford, so if you've got parents in poverty, often they're paying the lowest price for daycare and that daycare is paying the practitioners the lowest possible money. And those practitioners are, they're moving in and out of those roles all the time because they're so badly paid and they'll get a better job. It really is setting up a child that, if you like, disadvantage leads to disadvantage, leads to disadvantage.
Our prime minister for 60, 30, I can't remember, about 45 days, wasn't it Liz Truss, she was children's minister of 10 years previously, and she was asked, would you send your child to this type of daycare? And she said, “Well, children do get care, obviously I'm not looking after them all the time.” And it came down to the fact she had a nanny. Well fine, they can bond with the nanny. With attachment, what I think this is something that's often missed, the disadvantage often breeds disadvantage all the way along the line because it's about how you fund your family.
Tori Steffen: Yeah.
Pam Jarvis: And that is often in direct sort of opposition to good attachment in that first three years.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah, you can see how it could be a domino effect of sorts and it's going to have an impact on the development of the child, and especially around trauma and attachment, so yeah those are important things to think about when you're choosing care for your children. And a really great point about the bonding with a number of adults, I envision just the parents, but it really makes sense to have a larger group of adults that children can bond with.
Pam Jarvis: Well, granny's are often very helpful in this respect, but as you know, society's getting poorer, then often the grandparents are having to go to work.
Tori Steffen: Right.
Pam Jarvis: It's quite worrying, I think what is happening in the current situation where we have rising fuel prices, rising inflation, and it's making families poorer and poorer. And at the bottom of all this, children are suffering.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I can definitely see how that would have an impact. And let's say everything goes right and a child does develop that secure attachment. Do you think that a secure attachment leads to wellbeing in school for that child? They can accomplish it a little easier.
Pam Jarvis: I think they have the best chance of being the best that they can be. If you send them to a really bad school, well then nobody is emotionally indestructible. You can't bank on it, but you've given them the best chance, I think.
Tori Steffen: Yeah. Yeah, I would agree. I think you're setting them up for success in a way. Yeah, just providing a good development, so I definitely agree with that.
Pam Jarvis: It's kind of how we see success and success in a life, well it doesn't necessarily mean you went to the best university or you had the highest paying job.
Tori Steffen: Yeah, very true.
Pam Jarvis: It's being comfortable to be yourself and you've got your best chance of that if you feel that people like you and that they will help you.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah, just having a healthy perspective on the world, on yourself will have a big impact on what you choose to do in your life, no matter what it may be. All right. Well, Dr. Jarvis, do you have any final words of advice for our listeners or anything else you'd like to share with us today?
Pam Jarvis: Yeah, I think we have to see children as much more important in neoliberal societies like the UK and the US than we do. They are almost pushed under the wheels of the economy and profit. And we exist in order to make money and to make profit. And in that culture, the children are the ones who suffer the most. I think particularly, we... Actually, today we've had a news article about a private company that we're responsible actually for looking after children in residential care who gave them the most appalling service because their motive was profit. Rather than the quality of the care for children. And I think we are in danger of pushing children under these wheels and just not worrying about the emotional setup we are building for their future, but the only future that any of us have is our children. And I think this is something that we just don't think about enough.
Tori Steffen: Yep. Very good points there. Yeah, like you mentioned, it's important to just start early so that you're not spending, you have to create all these policies and put things in place for later down the line as far as social workers and wellbeing. It just makes more sense to put the emphasis on child wellbeing during development. It's going to do your children a favor and just kind of well roundly help everything else along the way.
Pam Jarvis: The economy is for people, people are not for the economy. And I think that's especially relevant to childhood because of the development that they need and the human things that we have to give them to allow them to develop healthily. We pay a lot of attention to physical health, because we can see it. But we don't pay enough attention to emotional health.
Tori Steffen: Yes.
Pam Jarvis: And then very quickly, it's coming up to too late. You're going to have to do an awful lot of work to reclaim that child where if you've done it properly first off, then it wouldn't have been so difficult.
Tori Steffen: Right. Yeah. Well, hopefully parents and teachers out there can kind of develop those tools and skills to help these young kids develop in a healthy way, so thank you so much for sharing all your knowledge today with us, Dr. Jarvis. I've definitely learned a lot and I'm guessing our listeners did as well, so thank you so much.
Pam Jarvis: Thank you.
Tori Steffen: Thank you so much, and thanks everybody for tuning in and we'll see you next time.
Please note: The views expressed by the interviewee are for educational and informational purposes only, are not meant to diagnose or treat any condition, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Seattle Anxiety Specialists, PLLC.
Editor: Jennifer (Ghahari) Smith, Ph.D.