The celebration of silence
“Oh congratulations, she is adorable, and is she a good baby"?”…
This question is literally one of the first things we ask a new parent after bub’s name, weight and ‘is mum doing okay?’. We legit ask IS SHE A GOOD BABY?!
We all know what this question means. We’re asking if the baby is noisy.
THere is literally no other way a newborn can be good or bad. Easy or difficult. We are asking if bub gets off to sleep with little fuss and doesn’t cry “too much”. If she meets these criteria, she is known as a “good baby”. If baby makes a fuss for reasons unknown, can’t be settled easily, cries through the night, cries through the day, she is often described as difficult. If not by bub’s own parents, then by the well-meaning friends and family who share updates with each other.
“She’s utterly gorgeous but she’s a bit difficult”. And so begins the celebration of silence.
Silence is a virtue… is it? Our brain, body and nervous system are always secretly colluding to whether we are safe, to recognise risks in our lives and to prevent us from doing anything too deadly. Very early on, we learn that using our voice can risk our attachment with our primary caregivers. In infancy, our attachment with our primary caregiver is literally how we stay alive, and so this a big ‘no no’ for a body that is trying to keep us safe and sound.
Those who were yelled at, punished, mocked or isolated for using voices (in child appropriate ways, no less) during early childhood received very dominant messaging that using voice is unsafe. Those of us who heard “children should be seen and not heard”, “shhh, the adults are trying to speak”, and “I’m sick of the sounds of you”, “hold your tongue'“ and, everyone’s favourite - “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all”. From our primary caregivers, we learnt that our voices aren’t worthy.
Those of us who were told our voices were too loud, quiet, mumbled, fast, high pitched, low pitched, squeaky, stutter, nervous or “too much”, developed shame around the sound of our voice. Feeding into The Celebration Of Silence, this sense of shame, and feelings of being unworthy and unsafe, can lead children to repress their voice. And (until recent times when we uncovered the concept of Fawning) this was always seen as an improvement. Which led the brain, body and nervous system to feel safe again, which led us to trust in not using our voices.
Then as children become a little older, a little less dependant, they begin to get in trouble for giggling too much, making too much noise in the playground, not being sensible enough, making mouth noises, saying no, answering back, questioning authority. And again, the messaging is reinforced - your voice is wrong.
Once they become teens, they’re mocked. Their perspective, ideals, identities, philosophies. AND THEN! Just like that! We become adults and there’s an expectation that we should be able to speak up, set boundaries, have well thought out, intellectual conversations, ask for help and for what we need, advocate for our children, negotiate, compromise and rationalise with our voices.
On the back end of The Era of The Celebration of Silence, we are meant to no longer be silent. Meant to KNOW how to not be silent! Expected to have a skill in something we believed our grown ups didn’t want us to do. All of a sudden, almost as if it’s part of our ‘welcome to adulthood initiation’, one of our biggest insecurities, something our lived experience taught us was unsafe, unworthy and shameful becomes something we need.
And all of a sudden, as far as our body, brain and nervous system are concerned, our life depends on it.
