Operation Pied Piper: Lessons from History on Childhood Trauma and Resilience

The disruption to schooling in the early months of the pandemic led me to 1939, Operation Pied Piper, and the work of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. Under Operation Pied Piper, close to a million children living in cities were separated from their parents and evacuated to safer areas. An evacuation on such a large scale was unprecedented. Britain was preparing for the worst.

On Thursday, August 31st—three days before Britain declared war—evacuation was ordered for the next day. Families prepared their children and—to the best of their ability—supplied them with the required items of clothing and food for the journey.  On Friday, September 1st, children began assembling in their schools, and parents said goodbye. Operation Pied Piper was launched.

It was a huge logistical enterprise. In London alone, there were 1589 assembly points. Trains steamed out of the city’s main terminal stations every nine minutes for nine hours. It involved teachers, rail workers, officials from the local authorities, and 17,000 members of the Women’s Voluntary Service (WVS) who did the practical work of looking after the children and providing refreshments. In the first three days, 1.5 million people were evacuated including 673,000 unaccompanied children from England alone.

My mother—then a young Froebel-trained elementary teacher—was among them. She accompanied her class of five-year-olds from Pimlico—a very deprived area of London, just down the road from Buckingham Palace—to an unknown destination. It was an experience she never forgot. The school record indicates that it was a responsibility she shouldered without complaint.

Parents deposited their children at the assembly points and handed them over to the care of teachers and volunteers. The images are familiar—tearful parents at railway stations waving goodbye to children pinned with labels, boarding trains, carrying a bag and gas mask. The news coverage of the time portrayed the evacuation as a success.

Operation Pied Piper was one of the most radical social engineering projects ever conceived. It was controversial from the start. Yes, the children were successfully evacuated, but the price was a psychic dislocation of unparalleled proportions. What would come of such a large-scale emotional trauma and disruption?

Enter the Psychoanalysts

One significant outcome was a heightened awareness of childhood mental health. Many in the field were alarmed at the separation of children from their homes and families. The psychoanalyst Anna Freud worked with children made homeless, and her Hampstead War Nurseries enabled her to study the impact of loss and separation. She concluded that London children were “less upset by bombing than by evacuation to the country as a protection against it.”

In a series of talks on the BBC, Donald Winnicott spoke directly to parents who agonized over those separations and impossible choices. He also spoke directly to the evacuated teachers and foster parents on whom was placed the enormous responsibility of caring for other people’s children.  Rather than telling them what to do, Winnicott trusted in their ability to provide the care the children needed to grow and survive the trauma of separation. During these talks, and those he gave after the war, he expanded on the concept of “good enough”, reassuring parents, teachers, and foster parents that their best efforts were sufficient. He suggested adults acknowledge their feelings of grief, loss, jealousy, and anxiety, but trust in their ability to provide an environment of emotional stability and consistency adaptive to the needs of the child.

Winnicott, Clare Britton, WW2 and Lessons Learned

During the war, Winnicott was head of psychiatric care for five Oxfordshire hostels for evacuated children who had been found too difficult to place in foster homes. The work he did in conjunction with the psychiatric social worker Clare Britton—whom he later married—helped shape the theoretical framework for which he is known. In their war work together they learned:

• the importance of the “treasured” or “transitional object” in the child’s ability to cope with separation;
• that what some considered a failure (the government’s inability to establish a detailed plan for the evacuation and a prescription formula for the treatment of evacuees) provided an opportunity for those charged with the work to adapt to circumstances and to do what was right rather than what the rules dictated;
• the difference between doing what you are told to do and being attuned to children’s needs;
• that the expectation or demand for certainty, rigid rules, and recipes was a symptom of authority gone wrong;
• that bad behavior in a child can be a sign of mental health; and
• the importance of the culture and environment in doing the work of emotional holding—the provision of essential consistency, flexibility, and support attuned to needs—that enables children to thrive.

Winnicott wrote:

“I learned that the therapy was being done in the institution, by the walls and the roof, by the glass conservatory which provided a target for bricks…The therapy was being done by the cook, by the regularity of the arrival of food on the table, by the warm enough and perhaps warmly coloured bedspreads, by the efforts … to maintain order in spite of shortage of staff and a constant sense of the futility of it all…”.

“It was exciting to be involved with the life of this wartime hostel for evacuation failures,” he wrote. He went on to describe how a delinquent boy would be hastily dropped off at a hostel:

“Perhaps the boy had done no more than burn down a haystack or obstruct a railway line, but these things were frowned on in the phase of the war around Dunkirk and the knife-edge of outcome…”.

(Residential Care as Therapy in Deprivation and Delinquency (1984), p. 221)

That playful observation reminds me of the classic Monty Python sketch, The Mouse Problem, which includes the line from the demented psychiatrist: “I mean, how many of us can honestly say that at one time or another, he hasn’t set fire to some great public building? I know I have.” Obstructing a railway line and burning down a haystack are serious matters, but in a world where the grown-ups are destroying entire cities perhaps they do rather pale.

Winnicotts’ Lessons for the Current Youth Mental Health Crisis

It struck me that many of the ideas and theories that the Winnicotts developed working with the most troubled evacuee children have clear applications for schools and teaching today. The youth mental health crisis that has been brewing for years is now at a boiling point. Our kids are in trouble, and schools are on the front line as first responders. And what on earth is going on with girls?

The CDC report from February 2023 outlined the crisis and gave some alarming statistics.

“While all teens reported increasing mental health challenges, experiences of violence, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors, girls fared worse than boys across nearly all measures.”

“High school should be a time for trailblazing, not trauma. These data show our kids need far more support to cope, hope, and thrive.”

Independent schools reported comparable findings, noting also that high-achievement schools have higher rates of student anxiety and depression. The CDC report suggested that schools could make a difference.

The more I thought about this, the more I began to wonder whether schools are contributing to the crisis in ways beyond the familiar academic pressure cooker.  For all the good faith effort, the caring teachers, and the social-emotional emphasis, what if all these good intentions are causing unintended harm?

One component of this crisis is the skyrocketing number of children and young people (and disproportionately girls) who believe they may be the opposite sex and, in some cases, making radical changes to their bodies. Are they, and we, skipping a step when we identify “gender” as the root cause of their distress?

Is there something better a school could be providing to help children through this vital developmental growth stage? What do the most vulnerable and at-risk children and young people need schools to do?

Are we doing the right thing for students and their families when we don’t disclose a student’s social transition or school affirmation to parents?

What does child development tell us?

The Adolescent Doldrums: “Got to go through it” 

“Can’t go under it, can’t go over it, got to go through it.”

We’re Going on a Bear Hunt,  Michael Rosen 

As the children in Michael Rosen’s now classic book embark on their grand quest to find the bear, they confront all kinds of obstacles with that repeated refrain. The same could be said of the child who must venture into puberty and adolescence so as to arrive at maturity.

Winnicott, along with psychologist Erik Erikson, is an intellectual giant in this field. Both made significant contributions to our understanding of the work of the adolescent—caught between childhood and maturity—struggling with the changes of puberty. There is considerable affinity between their approaches.

Drawing on a nautical metaphor—referring to the belt around the earth near the equator where sailing ships sometimes get stuck in windless waters—Winnicott called this time the doldrums.

“Once the adolescent can tolerate compromise, he or she may discover various ways in which the relentlessness of essential truths can be softened. For instance, there is a solution through identification with parent figures; or there can be a premature maturity in terms of sex; or there can be a shift of emphasis from sex to physical prowess in athletics, or from the bodily functions to intellectual attainment or achievement. In general, adolescents reject these helps, and instead, they have to go through a sort of doldrums area, a phase, in which they feel futile and in which they have not yet found themselves.”

Winnicott names the adult role and outlines the adolescent struggle:

“We have to watch this happening. But a total avoidance of these compromises, especially of the use of identifications and vicarious experience, means that each individual must start from scratch, ignoring all that has been worked out in the past history of our culture. Adolescents can be seen struggling to start again as if they had nothing they could take over from anyone. They can be seen to be forming groups on the basis of minor uniformities and some sort of group adherence that belongs to locality and to age. Young people can be seen searching for a form of identification that does not let them down in their struggle, the struggle to feel real, the struggle to establish a personal identity, not to fit into an assigned role, but to go through whatever has to be gone through. They do not know what they are going to become. They do not know where they are, and they are waiting. Because everything is in abeyance, they feel unreal, and this leads them to do certain things which feel real to them, and which are only too real in the sense that society is affected.”

The real remedy for adolescence, he said, lies in the passage of time and the gradual maturation processes.

“There exists one real cure for adolescence, and only one, and this cannot be of interest to the boy or girl who is in the throes. The cure for adolescence belongs to the passage of time and the gradual maturation processes; these together do in the end result in the emergence of the adult person. This process cannot be hurried or slowed up.”

The Family and Individual Development, By D. W. Winnicott

As adolescents work their way through to maturity, Winnicott suggests that this is a challenge for the adults who care for them and society as a whole. Adolescents have to go through it, and adults have to provide that holding environment to steady the voyage as adolescents figure out how to fill their sails and strike out for their destination. The adolescent—shuttling back and forth between the assertion of independence at one moment and the reversion to child-like at the next, between defiance and dependence—can be a real test of tolerance.

As always, Winnicott wants adults to engage in ways that facilitate growth rather than offer ready answers, imposed solutions, and quick fixes. Erikson contributed another concept.

Erikson and Identity

For Erikson, identity formation is the crucial developmental task of adolescence. The transition from childhood to adulthood is characterized by the physical changes of puberty and the need to establish a coherent identity within a context that is both psychological and social.

Adolescents shift their focus from family to peer groups and beyond in a search for personal identity that involves concerns about appearance, affiliations, style, career, education, relationships, sexuality, values, and political and religious beliefs. It is a time of confusion as adolescents grapple with “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to be?”

Essential to this is a period of exploration and experimentation as individuals cycle through and test out the available options and seek new roles and opportunities. It’s about working the variables in a quest to align beliefs, values, and behavior with a coherent sense of self. It’s a Michael Rosen bear hunt that is full of challenges and choices.

This search is not linear, and it takes time. There’s a lot to explore, and infinite paths to pursue.

Expanding on Erikson’s work, James Marcia called this time a psycho-social moratorium—a temporary break from commitment that provides room for the adolescent to look around and try things out before making definitive choices. Those who commit to an identity before exploring what’s out there may have foreclosed on their options. Identity foreclosure is what happens when an individual ends the hunt too soon, prematurely shuts down the search, and perhaps establishes an identity based on the choices and values of others.

High school and college years are the prime time for these acts of discovery. Exposure to new ideas, potential roles, career choices, lifestyles, and beliefs helps to avoid foreclosure and allows for the individual to work toward a unique constellation of aspirations, choices, values, and beliefs that will constitute the mature identity.

Foreclosure locks down—sets in concrete—what may be a temporary identity that fits for now.

How does the work of Winnicott and Erikson inform the thinking about the trauma of our own time?

Consider their work in the light of the teenager who declares a gender identity.

Given the work of Winnicott and Erikson, as expanded by Marcia and others, on the issues of child development and identity formation, does it make sense to offer instant affirmation and validation through social transition, let alone locking down that identity with irreversible medical interventions? Knowing that the majority of young people desist without intervention—would it not be wiser to offer Winnicott’s acceptance and emotional holding—the provision of essential consistency, flexibility, and support—to enable adolescents to thrive as they continue to do the work of exploration, before making momentous decisions absolute?

Knowing that social transition is not a neutral act, how can schools be sure that first, they do no harm? And how do schools keep up to speed with rapidly emerging evidence from around the world, stay fully informed, and be grounded in reality? Children’s futures are at stake. Would taking on this task be a useful role for associations?

As educators, shouldn’t we be talking about this? In addition to the concern for the well-being of students, shouldn’t school leaders and trustees be considering this from a reputational and risk management perspective? Is it safe to raise these questions?

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Sources:

Erikson, E. H. Identity and the life cycle.

Erikson, E. H. Identity: Youth and Crisis https://wwnorton.com/books/9780393311440

Marcia, J. E. Development and validation of ego-identity status. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 1966

Winnicott, D.W. The Child, the Family, and the Outside World

Winnicott, D.W The Family and Individual Development

NOW READ: Do No Harm: Navigating Gender Identity Ideology in  School

This article was first published by OESIS and Intrepid Ed News, on September 7th, 2013.