The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
What characterises the helpful Child and Youth Care intervention is that the young person is enabled to resume, as soon as possible, his or her activity in the life space. The worker, on the sidelines of the game so to speak, may play the role of coach, consultant, encourager or referee (one of Redl’s images of our work) before leading the youth back into the current activity.
The idea is not to disturb the momentum by too much of an interruption. The fact that the young person was already involved in some activity was a positive: there was participation, interaction, learning, satisfaction – whatever the goals or benefits of the activity might have been – and if we have had to intervene because of some difficulty, we want the youth back in the activity quickly. It is always better to offer kids to the possibility of success and satisfaction where this is likely rather than withdrawing them from the very milieu which may promote this.
An important concern, however, is whether we gave the youngster enough to be able to resume the activity. Our on-the-floor judgements are critical in these life-space interventions. Sometimes we are tempted to cheat at this point, for example by pulling rank to get quick compliance ("Don’t you ever let me see you doing that again ... now off with you ..."). At other times our perception of what is needed gets blurred: where we needed only to encourage, we give a lecture; where we needed to demonstrate or teach something, we give only a warning; where a knowing look might suffice we send the youth to his room.
The skill lies in the background knowledge we have of the kid (how he or she is managing current learning and developmental tasks) coupled with our assessment of what has just gone wrong and what is needed at this point – a skill, new knowledge, a resource, confidence ... or just a reminder of something we have previously worked at.
If we feel we have done enough in our intervention, then returning youth to their current activity is will be positive. If we have done too much, we are unnecessarily interrupting their lives. If we have not done enough, we only set them up for further trouble or failure and we compromise their sense of achievement and self-confidence.
