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CYC-Online
7 AUGUST 1999
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Bad language for Child and Youth Care work?

I would like to suggest that Child and Youth Care work has an albatross around its neck that has kept us from accurately describing the complex professional tasks that we do. This weight that drags us down is the legacy of psychology and the fact that much of our training and literature has been delivered by psychologists.

Child and youth care practitioners know that the language of psychology, particularly the language of therapy and counselling, creates a barrier to communicating what actually happens in good child care practice. The treatment language that workers are required to speak doesn't resonate with actual experience and has the result of creating non-professional beliefs about what we do in the life space.

I want to challenge Child and Youth Care professionals to look at this issue and create better language to describe what we do, which isn't office therapy or therapeutic alliances, etc.

A story about Al Treischman may illustrate this point more clearly. He spoke about having an intake procedure at the Walker Home which involved several assessment interviews with social workers, psychologists, etc., to decide if a youth was appropriate for the agency. After the interviews were all done, he would take the youth to the staff lounge where he would give him a coin to use to get a soda from the ancient machine there, which took about 10 seconds to produce a soda. He started to count as the coin dropped and if the youth could make it past 6 before he started kicking the machine, he could be successful at Walker Home.

This is an example of using everyday events in a very sophisticated, yet outwardly simple way, to work with our youth and their families. When I asked Al if he ever actually described this test to the other professionals on the intake team he said “no, they wouldn't understand".

We need to start valuing our knowledge of how to use everyday events to create useful energy in youth without believing that it has to be translated into the language of psychology. Language is one of the key places to begin this process.

I would like to invite all of us to start by examining treatment goals (already bad terminology) and getting rid of psychological jargon and idioms that don't ring true to ourselves in how we actually function.

Jack Phelan
Edmonton, Alberta

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