Not often we can fit ten syllables into two words, but a caution this week to the child and youth care worker (perhaps you and me) who may be less than careful with the essence or the being (ontos in Greek) of one of the young people we work with.

Scenario:
Roger (care worker) yells down the stairs: "Stop Keith before he leaves for school!"
His colleague Mike shouts back: "Which Keith? Johnson or VanDijk?"
Roger (care worker): "Keith the bed-wetter. He hasn’t moved his stuff to the laundry."

There you are, for everyone in the house to hear: Keith the bedwetter. And the violence we do to the ontos, the being and essence of Keith, is not so much the crass breach of confidentiality and regard, but the reduction of the person into a unitary and simplistic notion: the bed-wetter.

We have this little guy in our program who is a complex mixture of guts and pain, of trying and failing, of what has happened to him in the past and what he hopes to do with his future ... mix and match your own words to suit the kids you work with. Roger (care worker) might have used a different word — druggie, clown, smoker, epileptic, whatever — and by so doing have taken all the qualities, experience, troubles, hurts and hopes of a person and wrapped them up in a single label — a label of convenience, of judgement, of diagnosis. There’s nowhere much to grow from such a start (end?)

We also do this unconsciously in another way. The young person may become for us the piano player, the goal scorer, the woodworker, the artist ... and again, though seemingly positive, we have reduced the compound and intricate essence of a person into a single tag. Picking one quality is to overlook all of the others and to deny the richness, the diversity. Perhaps it is also to place on kids the unbearable obligation to succeed in the selected ability, and that their sense of being will come to hang on this lone quality.

The children you work with today may be saying to you "Never let what I do be seen as who I am." Yes, it’s just words, but the message is vital: we can notice and comment on and work with and applaud what young people do, but never undervalue who they are. If ever we cease to be in awe of the complexities and the possibilities of each young person we work with, we move ourselves dangerously away from the central principles of our profession.