Rules. I’ve been thinking a lot about these recently. Standard behaviour management guidance for children’s groups says, ‘Agree rules with children, have no more than three, display prominently and enforce with meticulous fairness.’ However, I’m wondering if that is actually the best way forward if we think of our groups as communities and not as classes. I worry that such explicit rules reinforce something, especially for new children joining, that might feel too much like school.
Rules in communities work differently to that – they are held just as strongly but are never codified in such an overt way. Nobody has ever written the strict rules of London, but try striking up a conversation on the tube before 8am and you’ll find there really are some! But then how do you help a new person join, if the rules aren’t explained?
That would be like when as teenagers we played a particularly inventive game called WALLY. No one is sure how the rules developed, but essentially it was a derivative of headers and volleys (a version of football with one goal where you have to work together to score past a lonely goalkeeper with either a header or a volley). In WALLY, any mistake leads to you having to be in goal and every time you let in a goal you received a letter towards the word ‘wally’. If you got them all then some terrible forfeit would have to be meted out.
There were many, many rules, and infractions of any kind resulted in you having to go in goal and risk accruing a letter. And, in one final, delicious twist, the last rule was that you were not allowed to have the rules explained. So new people joining the game would have to work out what they were through a process of trial and error, and by spending most of their time on goal. It seemed funny at the time, trust me.
So what’s the solution? We don’t want our groups to feel regimented, where the rules are drummed in at every opportunity. But equally we don’t want children to have to find their way through trial and error, as this makes our groups difficult for children who have never been to church before and who might struggle at school. So what’s the solution?
I would say that for an average group (less than 20) I wouldn’t display rules. For me, the way this makes a group feel like school is a no-no. So instead I would try to find a few more subtle ways: I’m looking for my older children to be helping the younger ones to fit in with how we do things, I’m going to ask leaders to sit near newbies and help them settle in, but most of all I’m going to think about culture and not having rules but ‘ways we do things’ that reflect good values. Is this enough? To be honest I’m not sure; I need to do a bit more thinking about this! If I get anywhere I’ll let you know.
Sam Donoghue is Head of Children’s and Youth Support for the Diocese of London and a volunteer children’s worker at his home church.