Unifying principles

In its early days South Africa’s National Association of Child Care Workers adopted a simple set of unifying Principles which read as follows:

Every child admitted into alternative care has a right to expect three things:

1. Knowledge and understanding of his past;
2. Appropriate care, education and treatment in the present;
3. Positive commitment to his future as a mature and independent adult.

A decade and a half ago Brian Gannon composed a set of variations on the theme.

Knowledge and understanding of his past
I need you to know where I am coming from, where I’ve been, the road I’ve travelled. The only “me” that I know is the me that I am now and the me that I have been (and maybe the me that I hope one day to be), and I need to know that this “me” is welcome while I am with you. Maybe I come from the other side of the railway tracks, and probably my life was very different from yours, but I need to know that you accept me all the same. I am bringing a lot of my personal stuff with me, too. Much of it is ugly stuff, painful stuff, from my home and my folks, and I still need to work a lot of it out, so its no good my leaving it at home.

In an important way, my past is my future, too. It’s very likely that I shall go back where I came from, to the same sort of streets where I got into difficulties, to same sort of people with whom I failed. Your part of town is unfamiliar to me, and the people are different. The people back home are my kind of people, and I need to know that I am going to be able to manage back there when I return someday.

So I need you to have some knowledge of my past, and some respect for my past, because its all I’ve got of my own really. But I also need you to have some understanding of my past so that you can help me make sense of it. I need to understand what went wrong. Was it all really my fault? How much will it affect me? You know about these things: you can understand the kind of attitude I’ve developed, to other people, to the world. You can understand my mistrust and my suspicion, my lack of confidence, maybe even my anger and the stupid things I do...

Appropriate care, education and treatment in the present
When I say that I need “care”, I realise I am not too clear about what I mean. Yes, I do need to be reassured that life goes on here, that there’s somewhere to sleep and that there’s food to eat. I have brought some of my own clothes, but I am probably going to need others in time. There have been some rituals in the past which meant “care” for me. I remember my mom used to make me hot cocoa at night, and that was good. But then she also left us kids to get our own breakfast in the morning, and that was alright too.

It makes me feel good when someone cares about what happens to me. I feel good when someone seems pleased to see me when I turn up. But I don’t feel comfortable when people fuss over me, or worse, when people care for me like eggshells. Protect me, please, from the horrors of life, but don’t protect me from the cuts and bruises, because I learn quite a lot from them. I learn quite a lot when I can explore new things, even some scary things, by myself. I think, also, I need to feel that a person cares for me, not an organisation. It doesn’t quite ring true when you say “We care for you here”. But I can understand “I care.”

The education part is something you probably know more about than I do. I’m not just talking about school education, and I suppose that my new school will pick up what I need for school learning. But I realise that back home I missed out on a lot of other things I need to make it in the world, and very likely I learned a lot of wrong ways. I really need you to work out what I still need to know and to teach me “as a grown-up to a child. Sometimes adults seem to get angry with me for not knowing and doing something properly, and the truth is that I never learned how to do it. Sometimes they punish me and say “That will teach you!" but it doesn’t teach me; it leaves me knowing just as little as before. I feel that I learn most when new things happen and when we do things together, when we are making something or trying to solve a problem. Please be present with me in my daily life and teach me like that, the way I missed out at home.

The idea of treatment confuses me, and I have to trust you here. I know that a lot of kids like me are overwhelmed by some stuff, or frozen with fears and hates, and we don’t know how to find our way through all that by ourselves. If I ever need help like that for some serious problems, I hope that you will see that I get it. As I said, I simply have to trust you about that. I also have to trust you to be discreet and spare me the embarrassment that can go with having to see a shrink or something.

Positive commitment to his future as a mature and independent adult
For me there are two main ideas here, and I’d like to start with the second one. Maturity and independence are two things I hope will come to me in time, and I would like you to help me to progress there. It helps me not at all if you keep me immature and dependent throughout my childhood, and then launch me into my adult life expecting me to make it by myself. I hope that when I’m 14 you will be expecting me to do 14-year-old things, and giving me the opportunity to try for myself; when I’m 16, to do 16-year-old things, and so on. That way I am going to be less anxious about the 18-year-old responsibilities when I get there and when I’m going to be on my own anyway. I hope that every day you will be expecting me to be able to do more for myself, to solve more of my problems, to make more of my personal decisions, so that I get increasingly good at those things. But the other idea, the first one, is maybe going to be the most important of all: your positive commitment to me. When I look at other young people in care, it seems to me the one thing they miss most is someone who will stand by them, no matter what. I guess like most kids I’m going to screw up and make mistakes at times “and the worst possible thing for me will be that as a result you will reject me, send me away, “transfer” me. I think most people do succeed in life even though there were tough times in adolescence, because no matter what, they went on being accepted as members of their families. I envy them the security of knowing (in Robert Frost’s haunting words) that “home is the one place, that when you have to go there, they have to take you in"!

This feature: Gannon, B.C. (1989) Some reflections on the principles of the Association. The Child Care Worker Vol.7 No.9, p.12