ISSN 1091-4706

Volume 2 Issue 1, Fall 1997

Reconnecting Youth

The Courage to Care

Leon, whom I met in a group home in Queens, New York, rarely said a word. As much as the other kids might taunt or cajole him, it seemed to me that he only opened his mouth to eat or breathe. About three months after I met him, Leon finally did say something to a fellow resident, only to be told to "Shut the — up!" Unfortunately, Leon’s rare attempts to connect with others came in the form of provocative comments that were met with anger from his peers.

Most of my housemates in the residence were "hard to reach." Ruppert was always ready to fight. Whether he was actually violent on any occasion depended on his mood, but you could always feel the potential of a physical confrontation looming. Fred seemed to be listening to you, but was always "scheming" inside, thinking up new and better ways to "get over" on you. Kerry took a more direct approach. He just ignored the house parents when they talked to him. While we all had different ways of expressing it, most of the kids in the residence were enraged, fearful, and slow to trust. We tested the caring adults and peers around us with the worst behavior we could muster, as we reconfirmed for ourselves the futility of trying.

Although these were teens with whom I lived some 20 years ago, the feelings of abandonment and anger we experienced are similarly expressed among youth today. These youth learn early that connection to adults, school, or families can be synonymous with pain, and so they opt out. As Karl Dennis, one of the founders of the wraparound movement, recently said: "If I meet a kid who has been in 49 different placements and is still trusting, I figure that child has a real problem!"

This issue of Reaching Today’s Youth is devoted to exploring the growing body of research and practice that points the way to reconnecting with youth who have been through such experiences:

•  The attachment and affect theories referenced by Marion Boss and Pamela Nickel in their article, "The Biology of Behavior," help explain the difficulty in reconnecting adjudicated youth whose primary early relationships were rocky.

• Lizzie Simon’s courageous story, "Reconnecting Takes Faith," about her own diagnosis with Bipolar Disorder, reconfirms the healing power of people who won’t give up and who don’t shy away from difficult communication.

• Articles by Sheri Searcy Overton, Beverly Johns, and Sandra Christenson and her colleagues provide guidance in structuring environments that encourage friendships, positive connections among peers, and successful bonding with school.

• David Furst, Andrea Criste, and Ambrose Panico illustrate

• how to help young people connect to one another and to their schools and services by empowering them to shape these environments.

• Cathy Kea and Gerald Mallon, respectively, provide avenues for reconnecting African-American families and homosexual students—groups that have historically been disconnected, left out or pushed out of positive school experiences.

• Elaine Walsh and her colleagues, and Ron Nelson and Sarup Mather offer innovative and well-researched methodologies for reconnecting youth—the Measure of Adolescent Potential for Suicide (a diagnostic and therapeutic tool), and a three-step peer group counseling process for elementary-age children—that have been tested with funding from the Department of Education.

• Stevan Kukic and Constance Lehman reflect on strategies for modeling healthy connections by weaving a tighter safety net for young people through effective collaboration across services. Both provide readers with the "why" and the "how to for creating youth-driven collaborations based on established models in Utah and Oregon.

• Lyndal Bullock and Ann Fitzsimmons-Lovett, and Karrie Walters describe "back door" approaches for reconnecting youth. They show how activities like service learning an martial arts can engage and teach young people in ways that the traditional curriculum or services often cannot.

Using the approaches and strategies described in this issue certainly not easy and is made more difficult by reactions from seemingly ungrateful and hostile youth. It was not easy for one of our house parents, for example, to repeatedly seek out opportunities to connect with Leon in the face of his stony silence punctuated by occasional sarcasm. But research indicates it often takes years before our positive interventions take effect and result in changed behavior or attitudes. Hopefully this was the case with Leon. I do know that for me, the "kindness of strangers"—of house parents and teachers—eventually did win out. Luckily, they were more caring than I was resistant. But by the time I had the capacity to say, "thank you, many who had helped me were gone. I hope this and prior issues will help you continue caring about those young people who may not be able to thank you for years to come.

Alan Meredith Blankstein is President of the National Educational Service and one of two Senior Editors of Reaching Today’s Youth, along with Lyndal M. Bullock. Having grown up in a variety of group home and foster care settings in New York City he has been an ardent advocate of young people as presenter; author; and developer of C-SPAN and PBS-ALSS programs involving leaders in education, business, and government