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"But," said Mike at the team meeting, "I specifically remember our agreeing that in such circumstances we should first bear in mind what the community might feel about that."
Stephanie, team leader for the current term, replied: "Mike! That was three years ago! At that stage we were relatively new to this, and since then we've all grown heaps."
That happens in the Child and Youth Care business. Something that "worked" for us, way back when, might have been appropriate at the time, but it tends to stay on in our repertoire of interventions even if it is no longer appropriate for us.
In our early years in practice we often shared "tricks" for achieving certain goals with difficult groups or individual kids. When we look back honestly we recognise that those "goals" were not always the most worthy: they were often to bring groups under control or to exert pressure on certain youth to do what we thought best for them – often to reduce our own anxiety or help us avoid the tricky tasks.
Today we have grown more mature goals – like giving kids the opportunity to have their say rather than shutting them up, or allowing them to have a shot at solving problems their way instead of prescribing our "better" ideas – but we have kept some of our old tools lying around which we are tempted to use when we are tired or irritable or less inclined to risk. (What might some of these old tools be?)
What old interventions do we have lying around? Let's trade them in for later versions which fit with more integrity into our current practice.
