A STORY
On being the smartest person in the room (3)
Jack Phelan
This final installment will discuss the difficulties we as Child and Youth Care practitioners face when we allow others to define our scope of practice. It is interesting to me that our profession already has several excellent Scope of Practice statements. The Alberta Child and Youth Careassociation has a statement on this which concludes with the statement,
At the core of all effective child and youth care practice is a focus on the therapeutic relationship; the
-
application of theory and research about human growth and development to promote the optimal
-
physical, psycho-social, spiritual, cognitive, and emotional development of young people towards a
-
healthy and productive adulthood; and a focus on strengths and assets rather than pathology.
Yet we regularly ignore this very clear directive and permit other professional groups to direct our work. Social work mandates that the problematic behavior be brought under control, school-based settings want the youth to sit still and face forward, juvenile justice programs want the youth to make amends and be highly supervised, mental health programs need diagnostic categories and medical solutions. All of these goals are typically driven by legislation, but none of them address the tasks and goals of effective Child and Youth Care practice. Our job is to create connections and relational supports in the life space of people, so that they can see the purpose in learning at school, being lawful, functioning adequately, and respecting themselves and the social contract. We can clearly create the result desired by all the other groups, but not by using the strategies and methodologies often advocated by them. When we take on their frameworks and allow them to direct our efforts, we deny the unique contribution that effective CYC practice brings to the team. When other professionals believe that they could do our job, it usually means that we have described what we are doing poorly, or we are not focused on our scope of practice.
There is an example in a previous issue of CYC- OnLine which illustrates my point (see here).
When the Child and Youth Care practitioner reports at a case conference, the report should include developmental information, referenced to theory, as well as descriptions of relational strength with the steps taken to enable safe connections to be established. Strengths and resiliencies, and the life space strategies to support enhancing these, not problems and the external control to reduce them, need to be the main body of our reports. External control is not treatment, even though we are often intimidated into focusing on this because we worry that people will think we are not doing enough to create socially appropriate behavior.
The goal is to see the other professionals around the table saying to you, ”That is very clever, I would not have thought of doing those things, it must take a lot of training to create those strategies”.
I am not sure if this is what is happening now.