PracticeHint  

Children and youth after all
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As child and youth workers we usually enter children’s lives through scary doors – drugs, abuse, aggression, crime, rejection, despair ... and because these are such risky issues we tend to start by arming ourselves with facts and theory to back up and inform whatever interventions we must implement. And it is true that with troubled kids we have to take precautions to avoid their impulses and crises leading to yet more serious problems — for them or others.

It’s a long-standing dilemma of our trade: as agents for social control our programs are expected to protect communities; as agents for child and youth development we are expected to get alongside difficult kids.

How often have young people we work with told us of their resentment when they were treated as "cases" rather than as people — that we see only the problems they present rather than their positives? The truth is, we do have to be alert to the risks when we take responsibility for youth who may be suicidal or depressed or addicted or filled with hate. We do have to understand dangers and triggers of such youngsters.

But our encounter with them must never be framed or restricted by these concerns, otherwise we will, in fact, see them just as "cases".

The central principle of our work is that by meeting these youngsters as people we can create new possibilities. We begin to reverse and transcend the cycle of neglect and abuse and the consequences which such experiences elicit in young people. We offer them responses which they haven’t earned, because that is how they would have learned to trust and achieve and relate had things had been better.

So we don’t come at them primarily with text-books, suspicion, treatments and restrictions; we come with company, activities, respect and apples.

They are kids after all.