CCW: You left direct child care practice at the end of 1988. Originally you had committed to remain as principal at St Michaels in Cape Town for seven years; you stayed for nine. VH: Seven years seemed a good chunk of time in the lives of the children at the home. Also from the point of view of my own family, it was a clear period in our lives at the end of which my daughter would finish her schooling and be ready to move on. But just at the end of those seven years, the home was going through something of a crisis, both financially and as a result of a marked diversion of perceptions between the Management Committee and the practice level, and one just had to see that through; it would have been wrong to break the continuity just when important redefinition of our task and structures was necessary. In a sense one gets hooked into a child care programme in this way, and it’s not easy to say exactly when is the best time to leave. In the event I stayed on for another two years. CCW: Not an easy two years, knowing you were disengaging? VH: One of the things I had been quite fierce about in all my years at St Michaels was to try to maintain a clear picture of who I was in child care. I had managed this well for those first seven years, but after that I was needing to escape the "Mrs St Michaels" image, constantly being introduced to people not as Vivien but as the principal of St Michaels. One always has the double responsibility of being true to oneself yet knowing that one reflects the organisation: for example, if I wanted to attend a political rally, I would feel right about it but what might it mean in terms of my capacity as principal of an institution? It was only when I was abroad that I could see how to let go and start working towards just being "me" again. CCW: So principals struggle with personal time and space Issues Just like child care workers. St Michaels is well known for its good staff support structures. Where did you get your support from as a principal? VH: In many ways it was self-generating You know, when I first went to St Michaels there was a whole month when I saw no member of my Managing Committee except one who had previously been the social worker. I’m not saying necessarily that they were neglectful; probably they were just grateful to know someone was there fielding whatever was flying around, and presumably from some source they had the reassurance that things were OK. That first experience led me to moderate my expectations of support from that quarter, so I had to find it elsewhere. Initially I found it from colleagues, people at NACCW courses who were experiencing what I was experiencing. At the time, incidentally, the NACCW was working more on child care worker issues and there was not yet a principals’ group. In a sense I wasn’t sure to what extent Management Committees wanted to hear the whole truth about what we were really dealing with, but with colleagues, with the door firmly shut, one could discuss things with some authenticity and honesty. CCW: What is this ‘truth’ which Committees might not want to know? VH: Certainly the frightening stuff we are confronted with which doesn’t fit into the sometimes idealised or romanticised ideas of children’s homes. Also the uncertainty experienced by principals while the Committee thinks you are well in control. In reality there isn’t a set of hard and fast rules. One is constantly responding to the moment, never knowing what the next moment will bring — and often flying by the seat of your pants. Then again, I think that in child care we are sometimes too free with the term "The Committee". Of course you do need someone who knows about drains, about roofing about money, and I believe that all who serve on committees do so with the best social integrity. But I was constantly at odds with myself about how much to tell Committees. There was always the fear that they would sensationalise, oversimplify, even be frightened of or simply not understand some of the tough things that happened. At the same time, for all of its academic content, child care is essentially a human experience, and I believed that whoever committee members were, they could get alongside such human experience. But in practice around the country this is not always true. For example, we work with extremely difficult youngsters: were Ito report some particularly difficult incident, I should hate to be ordered by the Committee to send the child concerned away, against the feelings of staff who did understand and were still willing to work with the behaviour. As it happened, when we had problems with the Committee, I was accused of not having given them full information. Over the last two years, though, all of us, staff and committee, worked very hard at building up a cohesive group, and it was wonderful to see staff, committee and children come to know and accept each other, without any phoney restraints or embarrassments. But it was very hard work. So much depends on who you chance to have on your committee, and a disproportionate amount of work has to be applied to the committee, keeping them informed, keeping them inspired, keeping the vision. I hesitate to use the word ‘educate’ the committee, because after all they are not there to do the child care work, but they do need to share the vision — and this includes the storms as well as the sunshine. CCW: Committees have great power, though, to make decisions which affect the lives of staff and children. VH: I think we had difficulties with this over very fundamental issues. When I came into child care the whole thrust in South Africa was towards the cottage system. Inevitably committees came to share the strong perception that we should be providing substitute family-like experiences for the children. Given the type of child we were working with, and perhaps more importantly the ages of the children, we were more convinced about the content of our programme — for both the youngsters and their families —than the rather superficial structure which was being encouraged. First they were "poor kids", then they were "bad kids", and we often had to get past this to the actual work we were doing. CCW: The rewards? VH: There were the rewards! Certainly no work that I’ve ever done had the rewards that were intrinsic to child care. There was nothing like coming through a rough patch with somebody knowing you had weathered the storm with them — and even if there had been just one of us alongside of that child in their difficulty, because of the team approach, everybody rejoiced in that success (and we’d all go off to tea to celebrate!) just as everyone would have been disappointed if it was a failure. CCW: St Michaels often accepted children who not been accepted into psychiatric facilities at the hospitals. How did you feel about this? VH: I always felt that the continuum of services showed a bad hiccup at that stage, for then the law had to come into effect and the youngster had to be removed from parental custody in order to receive help from St Michaels. There was no flow. A worse aspect was that the kids would arrive in the children’s home with the feeling that Ward D12 at Groote Schuur Hospital couldn’t help me, I could walk out of Lentegeur, and the staff at the children’s home were left with a lot of building up as well as containing before we started work. I think the staff were under a lot of pressure, too, since this was the end of the line for these kids; from here it would mean more custodial and punitive programmes if we failed. To answer the question whether we resented psychiatric wards not accepting kids we were then expected to handle, I would say only because they seemed to have more money to pay staff than we did! Also, the serious lack of facilities for young children. We began to learn a lot about how to work with these referrals, but it was always terrifying for staff to have the feeling they were living with a time bomb as they were with these youngsters all the time, putting them to bed, waking them, eating with them. Our staff design being what it was, there was no respite. We didn’t go off duty at 5 pm. Of course I must add they we received considerable support from the hospital system with the weekly case meetings. Sometimes there were five people present, sometimes fifteen — maybe even the cook who wanted to talk about being threatened with a milk bottle. CCW: The team became a great source of strength at St Michaels. VH: The more conscientious were about supporting those at the rock-face, the child care workers, the more they were able in turn to support the senior staff. Eventually there were times when fairly junior staff felt free to be supportive of me when they had seen me in a difficult encounter — be it with Committee or Department or kids — and I think that came to be the most important source of support, that ultimately it was the team. And further, as the children grew, the sense of team came to include them as well. CCW: Where do you see children going who have been through a children’s program like St Michaels? VH: We had shared with all other children’s homes the ideal that youngsters should be with us for a limited time before going home, and we put a lot into our family programme. In fact we had worked on a two-and-a-half year plan. But as we came to admit more and more adolescent girls, this became less realistic: these kids were not going home. They were right in the middle of rejecting their families anyway, and they were not going into foster care, so we were keeping them longer - and I think continuing to do valuable work. When I spend time with those girls today, as young twenty or twenty-one year olds, I recognise much that we gave them then. For one thing, they have a real insight into their situation and other people’s situations, fairly unsentimental, fairly pragmatic. This was a result of the straight talking which took place at St Michaels. There had been no doubt as to what we could offer and what was expected of them, and this became the substance of our work with them. More than this, they have the ability to recognise the need to deal with issues in their lives and not to avoid them. This is true even though they are not all that OK, even in a still rather vulnerable state, but they seem to have been given the skills to tackle tasks and crises and relationship problems and career issues. Most important I see these skills being used in the normal marketplace, and I think they will take them into their lives and their families. And I think this all comes from our insistence that they face things, that they are responsible for themselves and for one another. An important ‘measure ‘in our programme was moving youngsters from seeing staff as staff to seeing staff as people and then to seeing staff as friends. So they were taught to relate to adults, and what better skill to take away with them? If we had continued to act only as staff, by continuing with our external control, by not allowing us to show us where they were, by insisting on lady-like external behaviour, I am sure they would not have become the kind of adults they are. They would have continued to see others as people to manipulate. CCW: How did staff manage with this much more challenging approach? VH: Central was an understanding of child development. Not just an academic understanding, but a human grasp of what it is to be a nine-year-old or a sixteen-year-old. I am not talking about permissiveness; I would never describe myself as permissive. But there is a vast difference between an adult doing something and a troubled seventeen-year-old doing the same thing, and this needed to be part of our attitude to children. Certainly children could say what they felt —and often they were dead right. A child would complain to me that something was "not fair". I would agree; I would say that life isn’t fair: you are thin and I am fat and I don’t think that’s fair — so children would begin to see us as ordinary people too. CCW: Where do you see child and youth care going in the future? VH:
I talked earlier about the countrywide trend to cottage-style homes
which was all the rage when I first started at St Michaels. And, of
course, the move towards de-institutionalisation. "Villages" were
springing up all over, and I remember going out with great envy to the
opening of Annie Starck Village. It all looked so different from what we
had to work with. But years later when I went to the opening of The
Homestead, a shelter for street children, it hit me like a dash of cold
water that this far less attractive place was so much more authentic,
immediate and spontaneous. It was a direct and honest response to a real
situation, and I remember going back to St Michaels feeling that this
place is always going to be just a huge institution — but that what we
were doing here, for kids who weren’t into families at that stage
anyway, was OK. From St Michaels we could look with them at their vision
of what was ahead for our girls and how they could get there. We were
not playing "Happy Families" which in a sense is a stereotyped picture
of what would like for our children, and I’m not sure we had that right.
______
|
INTERVIEW
This
feature: (1989) The Child Care Worker Vol.7 No.4