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home journals Child & Youth Care Practice
ISSN 0840-982X VOLUME 19 NUMBER 1CONTENTS Editorial: Staying Engaged – Bent out of Shape 3 Carol Stuart Youth Running From Residential Care: 6 “The Push” and “The Pull” Julie Kerr and Judy Finlay
Something from Nothing
35
Mind Yourself: The
development of an evidence-based 40
A Time To Cry
66 EDITORIAL Staying
engaged – Bent out of shape After this issue, the
“caboose” will disengage. Karl Gompf has indicated that he feels a need
to retire and to turn the caboose over to someone “closer to the field”.
On a train, they can pull the pin and drive away without the caboose, if
desired. But that last car is the “home” to all the crew that support
the operations of the train. It’s where they gather to eat, nap, and
perhaps reflect on the hard work that they do. Several articles in this issue indicate that perhaps we do not. Longaretti & De Civita, (Thinking About Resilience as a Process of Recovery) suggest that resilient children “spring back” after being “bent out of shape” and that schools are a natural location for engaging children at risk through communicating caring, connect- ing, developing competence, challenging children, and taking chances. Many school districts these days adopt a “zero tolerance” approach to children who are “bent out of shape”: Expelling them or isolating them in specialized “behavioural” classrooms rather than engaging them and connecting with them as these authours suggest. Similarly, youth in care are often disengaged from a placement as a result of behaviour that cannot be managed within the placement. In Sitting with Jason, Thom Garfat reflects on the process of engaging in the absence of knowing what else to do. Relationships with difficult children are fickle; they don’t always come with specific guidelines about how to react. Sometimes, somehow, through a genuine connection with a young person we are able to facilitate a shift in his/her approach to life and to the problems of life without really knowing how or what we did. A change in his/her worldview happens in spite of our intentions, or lack thereof, simply because we engage in the rhythm of his/her life. Kerr & Finlay, (Youth Running From Residential Care) offer some concrete recommendations about the importance of youth engagement as a strategy for preventing “AWOL’s”. “Absent without Leave” is military terminology that has made its way into our services to children and youth. The youth who participated in this research clearly perceived that staff were uncertain about what to do and incapable of intervening therapeutically when faced with a youth who was on his/her way out the door without permission. In homes where youth were engaged in determining prevention strategies and identifying consequences, there were strong staff relationships and running away was not a method for dealing with being “bent out of shape”. I wonder whether these were also homes where staff remained connected and engaged with youth as they prepared to leave and after they moved out. Wards of the Crown, a new National Film Board documentary by Andrée Cazabon follows four youth for 10 months as they prepare to “leave home” as wards of the state. Kim Snow’s review of the film is a startling mix of pride in the youth’s ability to communicate and exhortation to profession- als and community alike that “these are our children and we need to act”. Kim is one of those people who stays engaged with youth. She not only knew most of the youth in the film, she knew how they were doing months after the film was finished and they had “left home”. In Angels of the Night, Garth Goodwin describes the special relationship that residential night staff have with youth in care. Night is a vulnerable time, one where youth face their fears and need someone to calm those fears and help them put them aside. This is the special role of the night staff – a position which some of us have filled when necessary – but perhaps not as the labour of love described here. Gay Graham (Attachment Strategies in Residential Care) reviews attachment theory and offers concrete suggestions for developing relationships and promoting attachment among children and youth in residential care – many of whom are “unattached” and “unengaged” with anyone. What does it means to be “unengaged”? Kosgrove & Gafney (Mind Yourself) offer us a definition of resilience that is “resilience-as- adaptation” in contrast to “resilience-as-recovery” described by Longaretti & De Civita in Thinking about resilience as a process of recovery: School-based implications. What difference do these conceptual orientations make to how we set up a program or engage with children and youth? If we adopt the orientation of resilience-as-adaptation then our orientation is to helping the youth develop the necessary competence or knowledge and skills that are required to adapt to the stress (of being bent out of shape). If we adopt the orientation of resilience-as-recovery then we engage both youth and the community that surrounds them, school, peers, family, ourselves in creating an environment that supports and promotes recovery in spite of acting out or difficult behaviors. How often do we “disengage”– pull the pin and dump the caboose – with children who are “bent out of shape”? Too often, if the formal articles in this issue are any indication. Our columnists offer hope (they are optimists, after all) that perhaps this doesn’t happen as often as the articles would seem to indicate. But this is something that we need to examine carefully, both personally and as a profession. All children who need professional care deserve to have the people who work with them, engaged with them. Children and youth deserve an opportunity to engage, to dialogue, and to influence the environments they live in and the decisions that are made about them. Engagement also means that we care about them and about their opinions and therefore we ask, interact, discuss, and sometimes just participate in the silence. Engagement happens on much more than just a verbal or intellectual level; it requires commitment. Commitment can be momentary, bounded by space and time or it can extend beyond the space and the time of the moment – just as the commitment of a parent or a grandparent does. Momentary engagement can act as a therapeutic moment for a child to teach them something new about what it means to be attached, to feel secure. A second chance (as Graham suggests) to form a meaningful attachment which will affect the nature of their engagement in future relationships OR a simple expression of caring or willingness to negotiate that might keep a youth preparing to AWOL at home, rather than exposed to the risks of running away. All children who need
professional care also deserve to receive interventions that are known
to have a high probability of being effective. Professional care-giving
means that we need to learn from the successes (and failures) of others
by reviewing literature on programs that have worked and teasing out the
essential elements of success. As suggested by Kosgrove and Gaffney, a
part of examining the evidence on what has worked in the past is
listening to what youth think has worked. Engaging with youth about the
design of programs and the evaluation of programs will lead us, over
time, to an evidence base that includes not just objective judgments of
professionals and re- searchers but a phenomenological understanding of
what works that reflects the experiences both of those who need
professional care and those who give it.
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