How do you say good-bye?

Jean Miller

How many of the children you work with have lost a parent? Both parents? How many have moved through a number of foster homes?

For some children in treatment, relationships with significant adults are formed and ended several times in the course of just a few years. Often, these relationships are terminated abruptly. Too often, there may be no plan to help a child deal with the latest in an ongoing series of losses. The adults may feel guilty; the child, abandoned, angry and perhaps responsible. A child who suffers repeated separations in his life will be more wary when encountering new people who profess to care for him. His capacity to form relationships based on mutual trust, is damaged.

Yet, as child care workers, we must form relationships with children if we are to have an impact on them. To compound the problem, we are sometimes responsible for introducing more losses into these children's lives. Staff changes are inevitable, as people enter and leave the field or move to other programmes. While we are often powerless to help with other separations in the children's lives, we can plan ways to make staff changes within our agencies less painful and more positive – for both children and adults. I would like to share some of the ways we deal with separations at our center. These steps have helped all of us to say “Good-bye".

The staff member who is leaving informs the children at least two weeks before his/her departure. He/she shares new plans at this time and throughout the remaining days.
The staff member may make a paper chain with links corresponding to the number of days remaining, and remove a link each day. For older youths, a calendar could be used.
Other child care workers help interested children plan a going-away party, or make cards and gifts.
Children who wish to tape record messages often find it easier to express their anger, sadness and, yes, affection into a microphone. These are played at the going-away party.
On the final day, adults and children may participate in an exercise to share their feelings. Each person finds a place in the room, and the person leaving goes to each in turn. He/she might share something that will be relevant to that child as a result of having known each member of the group.
Staff members should feel free to talk among themselves and in front of the children about their own feelings. Loss is difficult for all of us.
The termination period includes, especially for young children, frequent repetition of who will be staying in the agency. They may generalise one departure into wholesale abandonment.
Families are informed along with the children. If a case must be transferred to another staff member, the old and new child care workers make home visits together. In this way, families are assured that their new child care worker has the information he/she will need to assist them, and that the change has not been made lightly.

Some of these methods might be appropriate when a child makes a transition back to public school, or changes placement. You and your colleagues will doubtless be able to deal with the “good-bye". Most importantly, do not let those feelings go unacknowledged – and do have a plan.

This feature: Reproduced with permission from Child Care Work in Focus, copyright The Association for Child and Youth Care Practice. (formerly NOCCWA).