INDEX OF QUOTES
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For most people home is a tool for living, and its component parts an extension of individual personality. But what of a children’s home: built by a committee, often furnished and equipped by someone who will not live in it, what must it seem like to the children? … Whatever the answers to these questions however, one is driven back to a fundamental proposition in residential work, which is that we should constantly test our assumptions about what we do and this should include how we live and the nature of our tools for living. What should a children’s home look like? Should it provide children with standards towards which they might look and adopt for themselves in later life? Should it be designed as comfortably and elegantly as possible in order to make it a restful setting in which the staff can work? Should it contain some of those "favourite old armchairs" which are deep and comfortable, in which one can almost hide, and which don’t fall to pieces if you put your feet on them? How can it be an extension of the personality of the people if the people are always changing? How can one involve the children in decision-making about the things about us so that if they have not actually bought them (and children in their own homes don’t) at least they can feel that what is chosen is part of them? What do we know from research or experience, or even simply asking the children what effect the tool for living has upon them? What about it’s size, location and neighbourhood especially as generally speaking these will be vastly different from the size location and neighbourhood from which the children have come and where presumably they did feel at home. It would be impossible to create the setting which precisely met the needs of every child but it would be a very worthwhile exercise to reassure ourselves that the compromises we make go as far as we can in meeting those needs. There must be some research study somewhere which will tell us something about the effect of a number of universal factors on feelings of people who come into an institutional setting not out of choice but out of necessity … There are endless questions. Our purpose here is not to answer them but merely to stimulate people to ask them of themselves and above all to discuss them with each other. In the end we shall be very much stuck with what we have got. A few of us will have the joy of being associated with new buildings and so might be able to put some different ideas into practice. Even with what we are stuck however, our residential practice will be the better if we have taken just this one ingredient or tool of our work and had a look at it—even if we are in no position to change it. |
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