CONTENTS

Editorial: Free for a Moment             3
Gerry Fewster 

The Earth is Dying: A Radical Child & Youth Care Perspective             7
Keith Moen, J. Nicole Little and Mike Burnett 

Youth Participation: From Inspiration to Action 14
Ali Raza Khan 

It’s that kind of a sock and I don’t want it             22
Carol Matthews 

To be awake or not to be awake – that is the choice:             24
Bringing presence into child and youth care practice
Debra Palmer 

Brothers and Sisters with Arms    29
Garth Goodwin 

The Missing Link     31
Lorna McPherson 

Parenting: Researchers             39
Leanne Rose Sladde

Parenting: Life’s Lessons             40
Liz Laidlaw 

Training in Restorative Justice: Enhancing collaboration with      42
public school educators
David Osborn 

Ttwilight reflections: Meeting Carla             51
Thom Garfat 

Books: Telling stories 54
Jack Phelan 

Cultural Stories and Metis Self-Creation            55
Cathy Richardson 

In-verse relationships             64
The Journey, Mary Oliver
To Edith, Bertrand Russell
Within every human being
Your song, Reinette van Schalkwyk

On being a child and youth care worker      66
Leanne Rose 

Multi-disciplinary Education: Start Early and Never Stop             70
Carol Stuart 

Cedrick's corner 74 

To tell or not to tell: Bereaved undisclosed children and HIV/AIDS             75
Jennifer Kindy-McPherson 

Practice hint: No such thing             79 

EDITORIAL

The decision to create this journal came after twenty years of reviewing material which led us to the conclusion that ‘relationships’ and ‘direct involvement’ are the core elements of child and youth care that needed to be fleshed out and translated into practice.
If we are serious about the continued development of this profession, such introspection is the key to collective consciousness, critical analysis and responsible action. What a wonderful challenge for any research minded nomad looking for a project, thesis or bestseller. It doesn’t have to take twenty years.

If you take a quick glance at our ‘contents’ page, you may judge this to be an impossible task. But if you sit back and peruse the entire journal from cover to cover you will find that, beneath the word-surface, lies an intricate network of values, assumptions, beliefs, interests and aspirations waiting to be discovered. Editing this issue, for example, I constantly found myself speculating around each contributor’s tacit beliefs about ‘freedom,’ even though the word was seldom used and the concept never defined.

Freedom is one of those terms, like love, justice and morality, that can be used to define almost any favoured condition and adapted to promote any form of self-interest. For example, it is difficult to find any thread of commonality among the visions of Karl Marx, Nelson Mandela, Che Guevara, Adolph Hitler, Mahatma Gandhi and George W. Bush, to say nothing of their diverse and conflicting strategies. But what does freedom mean in the realm of child and youth care, and in what ways are our thoughts and actions influenced by the answer?

From the outset, there’s nothing tacit about the notion of freedom spelled out by Moen, Little and Burnett in their radical version of child and youth care. Their bold assertion that the planet is dying from global consumerism, and that children are being are being systematically prepared to become fodder for the power- and profit-seeking agenda of the multinational corporations, is there for all to see. And I agree with them wholeheartedly. But is this diabolical state of affairs the product of repression, or could it be the unfortunate outcome of the freedom to consume, the freedom to amass wealth and power, and the freedom of association? I’m sure Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld would argue that all of this is preferable to the restrictions imposed by large bureaucratic governments and the tyranny of religious, ideological and political dictatorships.

The ‘Radical Child and Youth Care’ response is to “arm the youth”, not with weapons of mass destruction but with the power to use their collective voice to speak back. And why not? Kids are not our future – the future is theirs. But arms belong to armies, armies go to war, wars require leaders (on an off the battlefield), and leaders are there to “win”. Some of you may remember the foreboding scene from the movie Cabaret in which a group of clean cut, bright eyed young men sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” while a bunch of Nazi henchmen lurk in the background.

The idea that young people should be encouraged to become active in re-shaping this sorry world is also the overt theme in Ali Raza Khan’s model of youth participation in Pakistan. His contention that the ‘mobilization’ of youth energy “will bring about a complete social, economic, cultural and ideological revolution in the country” may well be so, but what would such a revolution actually look like? Given a choice, would the newly enfranchised youth of Pakistan further the americanization of the planet by demanding equal access to skateboards and the latest video games, or would they draw from different values – ones that strengthen our connection to each other and our neglected planet? And who will guide them? … revolutionaries? counter-revolutionaries? religious leaders? humanistic facilitators? marketing agents? personal growth counselors? child and youth care workers?

While my heart stands firmly with Ali Raza Khan and the Mayhem Group, my restless mind responds as a cautious observer. By the time kids are ready to join hands and speak back to the world, they are already entrenched in the values and prescriptions of their respective families, communities and cultures. For the most part, those who have found a place for themselves are unlikely to call for a revolution and those who struggle to find an identity and location are generally preoccupied with their own unmet needs. Does this mean that we would be left with an elite group of idealists supported by an army of freedom fighters? If this is so, then the collective voice of youth is unlikely to be that much different from the collective voice of adults, echoing across the ever-widening chasm between those who have and those who have not.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I am all in favor of bringing the voice of youth forward, particularly if it means shaking the power hierarchy down to its foundations. But freedom of expression and action can never be tied to some preconceived ideal or outcome. We must be prepared to listen and respond, even if that voice supports the status quo or promotes a set of values and prescriptions we find even more abhorrent than those contained within the prevailing morality. But will we, the initiators of youth participation, be satisfied with such outcomes, or will we feel let down by the kids we hoped might change the world? Unless we are prepared to let the chips fall where they may, we might well stand accused of using young people to serve our own agenda, to create what we have failed to accomplish – a more caring, compassionate and connected world.

At the other end of the continuum, Debra Palmer exposes one essential condition for personal freedom – the state of being aware, or “awake”. Her wake-up call is clear and profound: to the degree that we are disconnected from our senses and unaware of what is taking place around us, we blindly recycle the old routines and parrot the old prescriptions, fearful of change and dependent upon those who presume to look after us. Palmer is not out to change the world. Her focus is distinctly personal but the obvious message for child and youth care is that we cannot invite kids to wake-up if we are half- asleep ourselves.

But is this the full story, or is being awake simply the point of departure for a more conscious brand of freedom? If this is the case, then perhaps we should consider where such freedom might lead and what limitations, if any, might need to be imposed for the common good. In other words, our new-found sensitivity may also be used to gain a greater understanding of our nature and carefully reconsider the notion of self-responsibility.

Within the broader picture, there is little doubt that young people who remain cut-off from themselves and unaware of their circumstances will become the pawns of the power-brokers, waiting to be numbed out and dumbed down even further by the assaults of mass media, prescription drugs and corporate education. Increased awareness and social consciousness will certainly create a climate for action even if the vision, in terms of personal and collective freedom, remains unclear. The three articles discussed thus far take us from the global to the personal but their underlying notion of freedom seems remarkably similar and their call for action is clear – wake up and smell the roses … before they die.

As we all know, however, waking-up requires more than an alarm clock. In her “Missing Link” article, Lorna McPherson delves deeper into our nature as she travels through her own childhood in search of the “inhibitors” and “promoters” of growth and change. Her focus is the developmental interpersonal arena where, once again, we find freedom expressed as an individual’s ability to throw off the shackles of external agenda to become the primary author in his or her own life. This is not a blind act of rebellion, although this is usually a significant step along the way; it is a conscious process of sifting through experience to determine what fits and what does not. The angry rebel is no more free than the blind conformist.

What Lorna’s story reveals is that the pathway to personal autonomy can be intricate, laborious and, at times, profoundly painful. Many of us can relate to this through our own life experience, and all who practise child and youth care will recognize the challenges and complexities in the lives of the young people with whom we work. The underlying and undeniable message is that the quest for personal freedom is no stroll in the park; it is an epic personal odyssey that demands courage, caution, clarity, commitment and, above all, compassion. As practitioners, we may share part of that journey with our ‘clients’ but if we use our influence to direct them along a particular route, anesthetize their troubles, or urge them to walk in our footsteps, we cast their freedom to the wind.

In the articles cited thus far, we can identify two related dimensions of freedom: the freedom to be oneself and the freedom to act purposefully on one’s environment. Now there’s nothing in this observation that is unique or specific to child and youth care. But if we dig a little deeper and examine the values and assumptions that link these two elements, the picture becomes more distinctive.

Unlike many that sound the clarion call for freedom, these authors do not throw around terms like “empowerment,” “human rights” and “justice” to articulate their position. Their common stance seems to be that freedom is a developmental process through which individuals become the active and creative agents within their own lives and, thereby, contributors to the well- being of the whole. It is not something that is granted by authority or earned through devotion to an ideal. At a deeper level, this seems to be founded upon an existential belief that, in the full expression of our humanness, we are essentially curious, caring and compassionate beings seeking to connect with our Selves, each Other, and our Planet. In other words, we are relational.

And isn’t this what David Osborne’s paper on restorative justice is all about? In sharp contrast to the adversarial guilt and punishment mentality of the criminal justice system, Osborne’s position is fundamentally about relationships. In his model, the imposition of depersonalized authority and order from ‘above’ (wherever that is), is replaced by the personal face-to-face interaction of people who continue to be actively engaged in the social process. The underlying belief seems to be that when people come together and recognize each other as human beings, rather than as objects to be tagged as ‘victims,’ ‘villains,’ or ‘deviants,’ a very different process emerges – one in which freedom and personal responsibility are integrated within the same equation. In other words, freedom is a shared creation. Sounds like child and youth care to me.

For me, the article that most clearly suggests a distinctive child and youth care perspective on freedom is Cathy Richardson’s heartfelt description of the struggles of the Metis people of Canada. If any issue can evoke the victim-villain mentality it is the repression of ethnic minority groups within a dominant culture. But Cathy does not shake her fist to demand justice and retribution, although she could be excused for doing so. Instead, she delicately introduces us to the Metis people through their stories, their search for identity and dignity, and their long-standing quest for a legitimate place in social mosaic. What she asks for is not atonement or compensation but a simple human response from people who are free to access their own humanity. And this, again, is child and youth care – personal, empathic, compassionate, relational and spiritual.

Of course, this is all speculation on my part, but if my interpretations are valid, then child and youth care does indeed embrace a notion of freedom that might be clearly distinguished from the positions so often advocated by political activists, academic liberals, moral philanthropists and perhaps even social workers, radical or otherwise. The implications seem to be that, if we are to nurture any sense of freedom in others, it can only come from our own sense of being fully awake, aware of our options and responsible for the choices we make. As practitioners our task is not simply to remove the obstacles that seem to stand in the way of our clients, but to draw out the resources that lie within and guide each spirit toward its own unique adventure. The radical nature of our role is not to ensure accountability to some prescribed standard but to promote the more complex and demanding principle of self- responsibility. Beyond this, we can make no claim on the outcomes.  

Gerry Fewster

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