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Listen to thisBeing developmentally sensitive to the social logic and overall thinking ability of the youth we support is not an intuitive or common sense endeavor. I would like to pose a fairly straightforward and common daily experience to illustrate this simple, yet complex point.
A twelve year old boy is slow to wake up and get ready for school, which is frustrating the Child and Youth Care worker trying to coordinate the morning routine for several youth. As the tension builds and the youth drags his proverbial feet even more, the worker threatens a �logical consequence� of having to punish the youth with an early bedtime if he does not hurry up and get to breakfast. The youth eventually gets so far behind that the Child and Youth Care worker declares that the youth has earned an early bedtime, because it is logical that he needs more sleep in order to get up and out more speedily in the morning. The worker notes this �logical consequence� in the log book so that whoever is working the evening will follow through with this planned punishment.
Developmentally, this boy is in the concrete operational stage of thinking and also has some difficulty with trusting and attaching to adults. He also may have limited ability to accept the causal relationship between his behavior and the responses he receives from adults in his life.
Concrete operational thinkers have a logic that is limited by the need for physical (concrete) examples and experiences as well as a limited time frame, needing relatively immediate reinforcement. This 12 year old will have a hard time connecting an event from the morning with a response in the evening, at least 12 hours later. He may also not like the morning worker, assuming this person enjoys bossing kids around. He is starting to trust and connect with the evening Child and Youth Care worker, who is good at finding common interests to engage with this boy. Also this boy is not yet able to generalize from one example or experience to similar, but different, situations. All of this information about the boy is not merely assumed, but verified by living alongside him and making accurate assessments based on his behavior and conversations.
When the evening Child and Youth Care worker tries to get the boy to voluntarily go to bed early, he will meet with resistance and anger. Developmentally limited, the boy will experience several things � that the evening worker is not really trustworthy, because he is just like the morning worker, that there is no connection between going to bed and getting up in the morning � I was tired then , I�m not tired now, and that the Child and Youth Care staff enjoy punishing kids for no good reason. The �logic� of this intervention is incomprehensible to the boy, and the overall effect of this attempt to make him act more responsibly in the morning is to create even more resistance.
What to do then? First, each Child and Youth Care worker needs to totally handle incidents and not pass them on to someone else for imposition of punishments (or rewards). Relational work is more important than behavioral accountability and attachment ability nurturing is of paramount importance, not to be pushed aside by some belief that all bad behavior must be punished. The limited social logic of the justifiably self-centered youths we support has to be understood and addressed, not ignored because it does not fit adult beliefs about how the world should work. When the person responding to behavior cannot think of a useful response, he should not fall back on punishment, logical to him or not, but allow himself to do nothing rather than create more damage.
