Because rows can be hurtful, we usually do our best to avoid them. But there's sometimes a secret purpose to our rowing which isn't so bad and which gets overlooked...
"I taught David Buckland for the first time today and he was terrible!" Louise tells me. "Confrontational. Loud. Unco-operative. I didn't know what to make of it. We'd never come across each other before and this was our first lesson!" Louise is a senior teacher who knows all about difficult students and the challenges they throw down at the beginning of a school year. Crestfallen, she wanders off into the September sunshine. "Ah well!"
I think no more about it but, shortly afterwards, meet another teacher, Ibrahim, who happens to tell me about his first lesson of the year with another student, Jade.
"She was all over the place," he says, "refusing to do anything, throwing things about, stopping other people from working and then getting stroppy with me when I spoke to her!" He smiles but is clearly rattled. "I've already given her a detention and it was only our first lesson!"
He's an experienced and highly effective teacher. The next day, I bump into him again.
"Today was much better!" he says. "She apologised for her behaviour yesterday and was fine all through the lesson. We're friends now!"
I'm left wondering about the extent to which conflict like this can be a kind of attachment process for some young people. Ordinary, slow, gradual, cautious, cumulative attachment is, perhaps, too tantalising, too uncertain, so they try a much more direct method - confrontation - which doesn't look like attachment at all (quite the opposite) but which actually has the effect of speeding up the attachment process. At the end of their first lessons, both these students have been able to stay behind and have a personal conversation with their teacher before any of the other students in the class have had that opportunity. Both can perhaps feel safer now, knowing that they've established a relationship - albeit a confrontational one - with their new teacher.
We talk scornfully about young people ‘just needing attention' as if that was the worst thing in the world and quite beyond our comprehension. But we all need attention. It's more helpful to think of young people needing attention as young people needing attachment and the way attachments are made is rarely straightforward. Rows often start about the smallest things but are usually about much more important issues:
"Who ate the last slice of bread?"
"Why? Are you saying it was me? That's typical, you're always accusing me!"
"Maybe that's because you never seem to care about the rest of us!"
"So? Why should I care about you when you don't care about me?"
Of course rows can be hurtful but rows can also move relationships on when they're stuck. When we row, important things get said. Making up can feel wonderful because, weirdly, it's as if the row has brought us closer together. Of course, rows aren't the solution to all our problems at home or at school. It's just that rows may not always be what they seem.
