MARIE MURRAY HEALTH PLUSTO BE TREATED gently is to be treated with love. It is to be invited into the calmness of another person's regard. It is to be treated with dignity.
To be treated gently is to experience the soothing balm of another person's presence. It is to know that there is time for you. It is to know that someone cares enough about you to treat you carefully: not roughly, carelessly or harshly, but quietly, lightly, softly because you are entitled to be honoured in this way.
To be treated gently is to be treated with delicate respect, and children feel this long before they can articulate its presence or its absence in their lives.
They model gentleness if they receive it and they grieve for it if they do not, even as they do not know for what they grieve.
For harsh treatment brings harshness to the child's spirit and opens the door to all kinds of compensating needs and negative behaviours to enter in to fill the emptiness that roughness creates.
Secure attachment depends upon gentleness in how a child is handled. It is about the tender availability of another - usually, at first, this is the mother.
It is about being held close and given time to develop, feel secure, acquire skills, experience the world as a safe and positively responsive place to be.
The child who is not treated gently, whether physically or psychologically, often becomes angry, at itself and at the world. If this anger is met with further anger, then a harmful spiral ensues.
The pioneering studies by researchers Bandura and Walters in the 1960s into the imitative behaviour of young children show the degree to which children model the behaviour they observe, particularly when they witness aggressive responses in adults. It shows how quickly behaviour can be patterned into the child's repertoire of responses, and how easily aggressive behaviour can be learned.
The conclusions of these researchers hold fast today. We behave as we are treated. We imitate what we observe. Children take as a norm what they encounter and receive.
It determines what they do. The value, importance, regard and worth they have for others and for themselves depends upon how they are treated. Gentleness is learned.
Gentle treatment is a powerful message. Gentleness cradles the babe in arms. It wraps the infant in a blanket of warmth. It soothes the toddler at the end of its activity. Gentleness reassures the child. It says that there is a place for them.
Gentleness is an antidote to the angst of adolescence when self-doubt and uncertainty creep in. It is a cushion on which cares can be flung. It is a protective film surrounding a lifecycle stage that can be sharp with the expectations of others and filled with the terror of not fitting in.
Being gentle in how one speaks to and with young people suits them. It brings out the best in them: their idealism, their energy, their enthusiasm, their wish to make a difference in the world.
Gentleness releases their own extraordinary depths of kindness for other people. Gentleness reassures them about themselves.
If there is one, single, supreme, emotional requirement children have, it is to be treated gently. Those who are treated gently from birth experience the world in a qualitatively different way to those who witness anger. They view the world more positively. They experience the world as a more loving place than those who are treated harshly.
Children are more fragile than we may recognise. They are finely tuned. Their sensibilities are new and delicate. The raucous voice is louder to their ears. The sight of anger is much more frightening to their eyes than adults often understand. The indignity of early harshness can remain with them for the rest of their lives.
Among the intuitive tools of parenting, gentleness is a precious implement. Perhaps this is how the lullaby began: as a soft spontaneous song for babyhood. Children remember the softness in a parent's eyes, a gentle hand upon the head.
They remember cuts being bandaged carefully. They remember words being spoken calmly. They remember the warm timbre of a father's voice and the gentleness of those giant hands fixing a toy for them.
They remember the gentleness of a mother's touch. They remember if there was the capacity for silence in the home.
Children remember many things. Gentleness is one of them. It is a good memory to make for them.
mmurray@irish-times.ie
• Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the Student Counselling Services at University College Dublin