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Listen to thisAfter all our discussions about this special issue, it seems unforgivable that I, of all people, should have procrastinated my way past the deadline for the submission of manuscripts. With all the support that you have so generously given to me over the years, I have been painfully aware of letting you down, both as an editorial colleague and as a friend. In spite of this compelling reason to produce, I have continued to resist the prospect of articulating my current “interests” in the field of Child and Youth Care. Obviously unwilling to examine the reasons for my own lethargy, I can only hope that this belated letter will, in some way, serve to maintain the relationship that we have shared for so many years.
On reflection, it seems that my interest in the field of Child and Youth Care has been steadily declining for at least two years. The publication of “Charlotte” in the Journal of Child and Youth Care provided a brief resurgence of enthusiasm but I quickly came to see this contribution as no more than an irrelevant pebble tossed into an escalating torrent of unresponsive strategies and ideologies. Standing on the bank, sometimes in a state of numbness and sometimes in horror and helplessness, I have continued to watch the waters of this profession flow by. Even within my own agency, I have stood by as the new prescriptions for change have slowly strangled the innocence and vulnerability of youthful practitioners who have become caught up in the confused and, in my judgment, misdirected ideologies of governments, professions, and associated special interest groups. It seems that the profession that, by its very size, could have called for a different tune and become part of the insidious cacophony. At first I convinced myself that die original values had been lost in the frenzy. I now understand that such values were never really held.
Having sought your indulgence for the catharsis, I now feel some sense of obligation to identify some of the values and beliefs that I had hoped would be nurtured within the profession of Child and Youth Care. At one time they seemed to be as acceptable as motherhood; now they appear radical.
From my perspective, professional child care is not about changing the behaviour of kids. In my experience most children are referred as the symptoms of adult dis-ease. The expectation is that the “cure” will allow the affected adults to get on with their routinized lives. If you really believe that kids will be happier by being strategically coerced into conformity and social success, take a look at all the conforming and successful hoards dragging around the pre-Christmas shopping malls in their search for happiness and meaning.
Socially maintained esteem, based upon competence and acceptability, is the personal treadmill of a society that is burning out on a grand scale. Don’t let our medical colleagues deceive you; we are becoming sicker each year along with the environment through which we are all inextricably related. And yet we continue to see ourselves “responding” to an increasingly toxic and hostile world in which we struggle to create new behavioral strategies to deal with an ever increasing array of enemies – pollution, drugs, violence, delinquency, cancer, AIDS, parents, politicians and dictators. Surely the time has come for us to teach ourselves and our children that the solutions lie within each and every one of us and not within our behavioral adaptations or in our desperate efforts to change the world.
But in our “treatment” of children we continue to look for “technologies” that might generate adaptation or competence within existing social order. We deny the inner experience of the child in order to demonstrate how the world will respond to “targeted” behaviours. And we actively encourage a dependency-based view of the Self through contrived strategies of approval for behavioral performances. It is interesting to note how the term “emotionally disturbed” has been replaced by such terms as “behaviourally disturbed” or “behaviourally maladaptive.” In my judgment, this stems from our fear of our own emotions and our pathological reliance upon an archaic science that limits our senses and our reality to that which can be physically seen or manipulated.
From my perspective, it is not sufficient for the behavioral therapists to talk about such “goals” as “personal autonomy,” “efficacy,” or “effectiveness.” Autonomy, efficacy and effectiveness to do what? Presumably to do whatever the individual chooses to do. But on what basis would the individual make such choices? Well, obviously, such decisions will be based upon a knowledge of history and upon prevailing reinforcement conditions. Some autonomy! But what about the popularity of “self-efficacy” within the behaviourist tradition? To this I must ask, “What self?” And the reply must then be, “To the self that has been learned through differential reinforcement.” Some self!
Child Care is about “being” rather than “doing.” The health and well-being of a child is based within that child's sense of self in relation to the world around. This is a process that flows from the inside out and not from an approving or disapproving world of culturally contrived contingencies. The so-called “damaged” children who find their way to professional caregivers have certainly failed in the contingency game but, at a much more profound level, their issues are rooted in their distorted or fragile sense of self and other, “me” and “non-me.” From this perspective, the experience of self and other is both the process and the outcome. In therapeutic child care it involves a careful and skillful creation of the conditions in which both worker and child are given full permission to “be” without judgment or agenda. Somewhere along the line, in our compulsion to do something, we have determined that the adult/child relationship must be one in which the former urges the latter toward some pre-determined performance or experience. The Child and Youth Care literature abounds with exhortations to use the self and use the relationship in furthering the progress of therapy. But what Self? ... What Relationship? ... And whose project are we talking about? At its essence, I believe that the child care relationship is something to be experienced and not something to be used.
It is not my intention to throw the baby out with the bath water. I firmly believe that it is the task of any therapist to encourage the client to change and it is certainly the task of the adult to support and encourage the child in the process of learning about self and other. But the grist for the learning mill must surely contain the inner experience of the child and the external ingredients must surely contain the shared self of the adult. When these parts are missing or deficient, the learning process is shallow, externally focused and performance oriented.
Creating higher levels of competence in the contingency game may look good to the control-seeking adult, but the additional damage of separating the self from the world may be irreparable. The rationalization that the child will “internalize the experience” is both dangerous and absurd – unless you are training a linebacker to hit without reference to the pain.
Again, in making this case, I am not suggesting that the commonly understood principles of learning theory have no place in the repertoire of child rearing or treatment practices. The challenge to the child care practitioner is to determine where that place should be and in what context it should be embedded. Unfortunately, the technology of behaviour modification (or behaviour management) is seen to “work,” and represents the non-psychiatric practitioner’s only answer to psychopharmacology – that also “works.” So long as we continue to seek the rewards for changing kids and our research colleagues continue to need identifiable “outcomes”, these two methods will continue to represent the “state of the art.”
From my perspective, professional child care is not about “normalization.” As children we are all “damaged” in some way through our experience with our parents. The idea that critical issues and deficits arising from the first three years of life can be rectified by surrounding the child with a “normal” family within a “normal” community is clearly ridiculous. However committed we are to the “niceness” of such arrangements, it is unlikely that even the most “specialized” foster family will move far beyond the systemic issues of accommodating to the new member. By the same token I am completely unable to isolate or identify those influences of the “normal” community that will somehow ameliorate the “not quite normal” behaviours and experiences of the damaged child. More often than not the normal world will speak back in a manner that is anything but helpful. For the most part, the deeply rooted issues of self will never be addressed. This, after all, is why the child has become a candidate for special help or attention.
Child care is about attending to the unique experience of the child, regardless of the setting. The ravages of faulty parental “mirroring,” destructive internal messages and self-related mythologies (along with their associated behaviours) do not simply evaporate in a caring environment. The individual work necessary to move through such issues demands serious and committed individual attention. In my opinion, this goes far beyond the quick fix methodologies of in-patient and out-patient programs, or even the community extensions of such professional initiatives. It calls for people with the necessary commitment, sensitivity and skills to integrate their experiences as an adult with the on-going experiences of a child. Unfortunately, such people seem to be few and far between and I personally rejoice whenever I discover that a child has found such a friend... wherever that encounter might take place.
This does not mean that I support the idea of locking children into institutions or long term professional programs. On the contrary, I believe that our professional efforts have long since missed the boat. My hope has always been that professional Child and Youth Care would provide the vehicle through which such people could discover each other and then collectively move out to encourage, educate and teach in all sectors of society.
From my perspective, professional child care is not about outcome oriented treatment. “Goal setting,” “target behaviours,” “developmental plans,” etc. are agendas that simply make no sense in the world of a child who experiences chaos in the contact boundary between self and the world. Of course kids can be drawn into such agendas with the promise of recognition and rewards but the diversions are shallow and short-lived. Over recent years, there has been a movement toward involving the child directly in the process of setting goals and determining the desirable outcomes but, at the risk of seeming redundant, such participation is literally meaningless. “Which of these rewards would you like Johnny?” is the real nature of the questions being asked.
Child care is about healing and, here, the agenda belongs to the child. It is commonly believed that a child has no developmental agenda, that this must be provided by the adult through some form of strategic program or theoretical perspective. And yet, it is the experience of the child – known only to that child – that can identify and unlock blockages. In this, the practitioner simply has no agenda, other than to move with the child's experience. Contrary to prevailing professional attitudes, this stance demands the highest level of sensitivity, skill and personal integrity from the practitioner. It could have been the hallmark of the master Child and Youth Care worker.
Professional development is not a competency based issue. The essence of professional development is not a matter of learning the tricks of the trade. Over the past few years we have glibly developed a number of specialities in which child care practitioners can identify themselves with particular roles or methods of intervention. For the most part, these are based upon the demands of particular programs (schools, community agencies, etc.), or specific societal threats (drugs, violence, sexual abuse, etc.). They are not drawn from the identified or expressed needs of young people and are primarily designed to promote the mythology of the “expert.”
Of course, I’m not suggesting that it’s fine for professional practitioners to be incompetent in what they do. My suggestion is that those of us who call ourselves professionals in the business of human relations must first commit ourselves to the relentless pursuit of “truth"; not the truth of the guru, the textbook or the laboratory, but the truth that is inherent within our own direct experience of self and other. Only when we begin here can we become responsible and discriminating consumers of the other “truths,” and only then can we truly be accountable for ourselves in our work with our clients. Without this foundation, competence has all the depth of a third rate actor in a fourth rate play.
Professional development is about personal development. Since we can only experience others through the experience of the self, it follows that the self-experience of the practitioner must always be the point of departure in the adult-child encounter. In my experience, most professional helpers focus on others (objects labelled as clients, patients, inmates, youth, etc.) in order to divert their attention from their own unresolved issues. In my opinion these “others” have as much wisdom to offer the practitioner and vice-versa. Children, particularly, offer many clues to the unresolved issues of our own fragmented experiences of childhood – how unprofessional!
Thom, you know that I could go on and on brandishing my own beliefs – you've heard most of them before. At the centre of it all is the underlying belief that my perspective runs so counter to what I see in the field that I cannot manage to stay relevant or in touch. I cannot conclude that I am simply a throwback to a bygone age since, as I suggested earlier, this perspective has never really existed within the main body of Child and Youth Care practice. Strangely enough, when I examine the new trends in science, I am led to conclude that what passes for state-of-the-art practice, is a relic of empirical models long since abandoned by the foremost scientific thinkers of our age. On the other hand, I believe that the thoughts expressed here are totally compatible with the emerging models of the “new science.” Thank God that we can continue to be “scientific” without viewing ourselves as the shackled slaves of our genetics, physiologies, brains, or learning histories. Hopefully, we are not too late to prevent the deterministic disasters of a Newtonian universe.
Whatever the merits of my current ideas, I cannot honestly express enthusiastic interest for any particular aspect of contemporary Child and Youth Care. At the broadest contextual level, the field is being decimated by changing ideologies that give the appearance of being in the best interest of children. The widespread dismantling of residential programs and the substitution of specialized forms of foster care effectively robs Child and Youth Care of its most critical learning environment “the residential treatment arena in which the practitioner-learner has to be with children for eight hours a day. Without this experience, the child care worker has little to offer the school and the family that cannot be offered just as well by the other professions. This is the world of the quick fix, the strategic plan and the external “expert.” In this situation the child care worker may continue to find favour on economic grounds, but somewhere along the line the child has lost a knowing friend and the practitioner has lost his or her font of information “the child. In this exchange the foundations of the “new profession” have been destroyed.
None of this is necessarily “wrong.” It may well be that the placement of troubled kids in family settings will prove to be a more acceptable alternative to congregate care of any kind. If, however, as I suspect, the process is being driven by politics, economics and bubble reputations, then many children will be denied access to the adults who can most help them. In either case, Child and Youth Care is left with nowhere to go, other than to accommodate to the new order of enlightenment. For those of use who dreamed of a profession born out of the phenomenology of childhood, the battle, if not the war, may be over.
On an optimistic note I believe that some of the major contributors in our discipline – notably Jim Anglin in Victoria and Karen vanderVen in Pittsburg, are making significant contributions in exploring the “new paradigm.” If they are able to discover ways in which their protégés can learn from a direct and intense involvement in the lives of children, then some hope remains. If they are able to influence this field from their positions, I will happily cling to their coat-tails. Meanwhile, I know from my own experience as an administrator, practitioner, and human being, that the shift to be made is not merely one of ideology and practice – it is truly a different way of being.
This feature: Fewster, Gerry. (1990). A Postscript from the Edge. Journal of Child and Youth Care. Vol. 5 (2), pp.65-70
