PracticeHint  

It's not about us ...
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We work with troubled children and youth, but as we move through our 20s and 30s — even (gasp!) our 40s and 50s — we get further and further away from our own adolescent years. The feelings we experienced then, however intense and exciting at the time, become fuzzier. First dates, high school exams and all the other teenage challenges and panics can seem to us now like no big deal. Even if we don't use those actual words, we often mask a "when I was your age" message when we are reassuring or advising kids.

But child and youth care is not about us. It's about them.

If ever we find ourselves getting blasé about their birthdays and milestones, indifferent to teen fads or numbed to adolescent pains, we need to sharpen our memories and our capacity for empathy. A single minute re-minding ourselves of how seriously we took our hair, our clothes, our pimples; how much it hurt when we were overlooked, failing or excluded; how terrified we were by authority, punishments, bullies ... is good exercise for child and youth workers. (But it only gets us part of the way, because for the kids in our programs today their normal adolescent issues are overlaid with other complex experiences of hurt, anger, confusion and despair.)

Certainly, we have to keep a professional grip on our work, but when we also find ourselves moved by the circumstances of the youngsters we work with, we know that we are still in touch with the meat and potatoes of child and youth work. And of course, the closer we stay to our own feelings, the more we may be experienced by the kids as really listening and understanding.

But ultimately it's not about us.