INDEX OF QUOTES
 |
Erich Fromm argued that effective love was based
on four elements, knowledge, respect, responsibility and care. This was very
much the pattern which was followed at Tyn-y-Pwll.* The
staff first of all got to know the young people and, equally importantly,
tried to help the young people to know them. Secondly they tried to develop
mutual feelings of respect. Thirdly, they provided opportunities for all group
members to assume responsibility for each other and finally, they demonstrated
their care and concern for all the young people in the group. It is a sad reflection on our society that young children can love spontaneously and without awkward reservations during the first two or three years of their lives but then, in most cases, they find they are rapidly forced to repress or limit their natural feelings and, by the time they reach adolescence, they are either extremely suspicious about the whole concept of love or they see it solely as a once and for all relationship directed towards marriage. Unfortunately, the very immaturity of this view reduces the likelihood of continued happiness. Tyn-y-Pwll tried to provide an environment where they could be angry or sad, happy or aggressive and yet never, at anytime, feel that they were in danger of being rejected. The ability to love people quickly and effectively can be acquired by those workers who have first developed sufficient maturity so that they do not have to put their own needs first, do not respond over-subjectively to aggression and rejection, and most important of all, have learned to empathise with a disturbed child without over-identifying with them. It was the staff’s view that residential workers had to provide adequate and credible adult identification models for the children who had not found it possible, for one reason or another, to use their own parents as such models. Given a warm accepting environment and a structure which is sufficiently flexible to allow young people to see when they are wrong without imposing fears of reprisal. Combined with a group of adults who wholeheartedly believe in the concept of love whilst at the same time accepting their own deficiencies, they believed that all but the most disturbed of children, would be helped in a relatively short space of time. They felt, on the basis of their experiences, that short term intensive residential experiences, followed by careful rehabilitation into the home environment, could be an effective answer for many young people. * Tyn-y-Pwll ("House in the Hollow") was a stone farmhouse in North Wales which served more than 300 young people as a short-term residential centre between 1971 and 1977 |
 |
|
|