The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
As Child and Youth Care workers we are often made aware of the seriousness of the issues our young people are facing and having to work with. So often they are referred to us with a dominating "presenting problem", which may have to do with a particular conflicted relationship, a developmental "stuckness", a behavioural or addiction difficulty. As we focus on one or other of these, we may lose sight of the urgency of our work. We are generally aware of this in terms of developmental "timetables" whereby some developmental progressions may be held up while we work on others, but we may lose sight of two critical issues.
One is that as kids progress from infancy to young adulthood they become elements of more, different, larger, and increasingly complex systems. Moving from the dyadic mother-child system, though family, neighbourhood, school and peer systems, they are subsumed into larger legal, gender, societal and political systems – with all which they must reach an understanding and accommodation. And, in the nature of our work, it is common that they are from time to time preoccupied by one (e.g. school) to the neglect of others. To build knowledge, awareness and competency in their role as members of one of these macrosystems while we are still working at lower order systems is a strong challenge to the way we participate in the planning and pacing of their time with us. (There have been a number of discussions on CYC-NET, for example, as to whether we should lay charges against assaultive youth in our programs while we are working on their difficulties with anger and aggression.)
The other issue which challenges us is that, increasingly, while young people in ordinary situations are staying at home with their parents longer, often into their mid-twenties, we are being funded out of sticking by our clients beyond their eighteenth birthday. So-called "ageing out" is a cruel deadline which too often catches us short of the mark we had hoped to reach. It also raises anxieties in the kids, making them less "accessible" during their final months and weeks with us.
In our practice today we understand that there is no time to waste. In many cases we are fortunate to return youngsters to family and community in good time so that they re-engage with their multiple roles and tasks. For many others there is so much more we would like them to have had the opportunity to know about and talk about.
