A staff team was divided over the progress being made by one youth – a fifteen-year-old girl, Selma, who preferred to keep to herself and answered any unwanted approaches with abuse and avoidance. A "tough customer," thought most of the team – and her single mother matched her for unapproachability and bitterness.

Merry was a child and youth counselor whose timetable brought her more frequently into contact with Selma. After five or six weeks, she began to make tentative inroads into Selma’s defences, drawing less fire and uncovering the beginnings of mutuality. Selma began at least to look up at her when Merry talked to her, she answered with less irritation, and on one or two occasions had chosen to come and sit near to her in the girl’s rec room. Merry had made room for these small gains and reciprocated with understated acceptance.

It was at the evaluation that the team differed. Merry insisted that there was change and growth in Selma. The rest of the staff, who still experienced the prickly Selma, were not prepared to agree with this more positive appraisal. By majority vote Selma was still seen as uncooperative and anti-social – and several of the staff saw the girl as manipulative and devious since she appeared to be playing one care worker off against the others: clearly she was behaving one way for Merry and another for the other staff.

It is common for children and youth from troubled social backgrounds to generalize from their limited experience with one parent to adults in general. It is probable that Selma’s school teachers might also have fed into her negative image of adults, so that Selma would have come to see adults generally as disapproving and rejecting.

*    *    *

It is a central element in the child and youth work relationship that youngsters are presented with additional and alternative experiences of adults and that these can challenge the old generalizations and hopefully enrich kids' knowledge of adults, thus allowing for more realistic pictures. We cannot expect Selma instantly to revise her attitudes and behaviours towards adults. But what seems to be happening is that Merry is offering the girl a better model to generalize from, and is at least becoming one new potentially significant adult. A budding relationship with one adult is progress, and Merry's staff colleagues should be more concerned about confirming this new process than resenting the fact that it will take time.