If you ever had to live in a small country hotel or (gasp!) in an English boarding house – or in your own home for that matter – you would be familiar with the idea of eating table d’hôte which is a fancy word for the "set menu". Table d’hôte means you eat what house eats. You get to the table where you learn (to your joy or despair, depending) that tonight it’s fish and chips. Period. There’s no choice, just what’s on the table. Perhaps tomorrow it will be meat pie and gravy, but again there will be no choice. It’s a set menu.

But when you go out to a restaurant you are served "à la carte", which means that you get to choose from a menu, and for every course there is a choice of several of items. For your main course you may order a grilled steak (medium-rare for even more variation) while your partner may prefer a pasta.

In programs for children and youth the meals we offer are normally (and rightly) table d’hôte and we eat family-style. But what about the services we offer?

In our practice today, we should observe whether our child and youth services are a set menu or à la carte. When we have a larger group of youngsters, or when we ourselves are running out of energy and ideas, we easily lose sight of the individuals and find ourselves grouping them into collective terms like "the kids". When we hear ourselves say "The kids have been difficult today," we are in danger of serving a set meal instead of responding to their individual and separate priorities and requirements.

Good programs develop a "repertoire" of techniques and interventions from which we can select the right approach for each child or youth. Just like the à la carte menu.

A good tip: When we work towards better involvement and understanding of their families we see the children in a richer context, and we have a better picture of where they are living their lives and what will help them to grow and learn in order to manage better. When we see a youngster in three dimensions by knowing the parents and siblings and school and neighbourhood, we know that our "set menu" program is a poor substitute for the range of targeted and appropriate things we can do.

By all means eat table d’hôte — but always practice à la carte.