So many young people arrive in our programs with feelings of pessimism and fixed ideas of their own worthlessness or guilt. Some of those you will work with today have started their day with these expectations of the worst and a sense of their own powerlessness.

Mosak talked of the "personal mythology" which troubled children collect around them, and on which they base much of their behaviour. Examples are:

• overgeneralisation ("There is no fairness in the world");
• false or impossible goals ("I must please everyone if I am going to feel loved");
• misconceptions of life and its demands ("life is so very hard for me");
• denial of one’s basic worth ("I’m basically stupid, so why would anyone what anything to do with me?");
• faulty values ("Get to the top, regardless of who gets hurt in the process") ... (Corey, 1986)

Most adults respond to these messages with superficial reassurance. "Of course you’re not stupid," they say, or "Yes, life is fair." But in our involvement in the life space of hurt and angry kids, child and youth care workers take these beliefs and feelings seriously. Verbal contradictions are seldom of help.

In our way of being with them, we allow children and youth really to experience fairness, worth, acceptance, empowerment, values ... They tell us that nobody ever listens to them. We listen to them. Their negative feeling of insignificance is thus challenged. They tell us they are unlikeable. We like them. They are thrown back onto a re-evaluation of their personal value. They tell us they are useless. We find opportunities for them to demonstrate their own abilities. They feel less useless.

Beedell taught that "acceptance then is a general attitude taken up by the unit and the people in it. It is not expressed in a vacuum or necessarily verbally, but by what people do." Our involvement and interventions today are not to be measured by how good we think they are; the true test is how the kids experience them.

Beedell, C. (1970). Residential life with children. London: Routledge, p.25
Corey, G. (1986) Theory and practice of counselling and psychotherapy. California: Brooks/Cole, p.57