The changing character of residential child care: Caring for troubled
children
James Whittaker
Residential and day treatment programs should focus on growth and
development in the child’s total life sphere rather than on the remediation
of psychiatrically defined syndromes or the extinction of certain
problematical behaviors.
The basic purpose of all child helping should be the teaching of skills
for living. Our goal should be the development of a model of child rearing
which emphasizes the competence and mastery that all children need to
develop in basic life skills and then demonstrates how these skills may be
taught to children with special needs. The illness model of residential
treatment that pervades our case records has not served us well; in fact, a
majority of the children we serve do not suffer from underlying disease
processes, psychoneuroses, or character disorders. We should therefore make
use of assessment procedures that are behaviorally specific and contextually
grounded; that is, directly applicable to the real-life environments the
children encounter in their home communities. We should also proceed on the
assumption that no single format for teaching skills is sufficient; neither
psychotherapy nor behavior modification of itself provides education for
living. We need instead to think about a variety of teaching formats,
including group intervention, behavioral modification, games and activities,
special education, and family work. Such an orientation to total child
growth and development requires us to take three additional steps:
- Demystification of the helping process. Parents and child care workers
are most often the best experts on the children in their care. Both should
be involved as central actors in the helping process; specifically, they
should have access to all information possessed by the clinicians. Too often
parents and parenting persons are kept in the dark regarding clinical
assessments, which themselves are often couched in jargon that confuses more
than clarifies. Assessment should include a look at the child’s total range
of functioning and begin not with clinical presuppositions but with those
areas that are causing parents and child the most pain and strain. Finally,
taking the mystery out of child treatment means saying honestly, "I don’t
know," when the situation warrants.
- Relabeling of program elements. Hobbs (1975a, 1975b) and his
associates have written of the dangers of labeling individual children.
Similarly, program labels help the child define himself. The basic elements
of the child treatment program require a relabeling to reflect a
living/learning rather than an illness/treatment orientation. For example:
“Campus” not “Grounds”
“Student” not “Patient”
“Dormitory” not “Cottage”
“Graduation” not “Discharge”
“Residential”
not “Treatment”
“School” not “Center”
The reason for this semantic change (for which I am indebted to my
colleague Albert E. Trieschman, whose own program – the Walker School – uses
this terminology) is partly political – “education” is more positively
valenced in the society than “treatment.” In addition, however, the new
terms provide a much better set of descriptors for what the program is all
about: teaching the child something about the reasonable limits of his own
behavior and, at the same time, providing him with the opportunity to
acquire competence in a whole range of life skills. The illness/treatment
terminology suggests the presence of some identifiable psychic disease
processes in children – a view that is not supported by the available
evidence.
- Designing learning experiences with an eye toward maximum
“portability.” Adjustment within the program should be seen as the means and
not the end of the helping process. Developing “marketable peer skills”
should mean just that: how to make a friend, join a game, or negotiate with
someone who is bigger and tougher than oneself. The ultimate proving ground
should be the child’s own home, school, and community. As we know from
clinical experience and from the available research, adjustment within the
program is not necessarily a good predictor of how the child will fare on
his return to the community.
References
Hobbs, N. (1975a). The Futures of
Children: Categories, Labels, and Their Consequences. (2 vols.) San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Hobbs, N. (1975b). (Ed.) The Futures of
Children: Categories, Labels, and Their Consequences. (2 vols.) San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Whittaker, J. K. (1960). The Changing Character of
Residential Child Care. Caring for Troubled Children. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass. pp 8-10
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