and reach thousands of daily visitors
17 OCTOBER
No 1231
Special considerations in the development process
We cannot determine the time or the force with which the strong needs of identity formation will be revealed. The body and its organs, physical strength and mental ability, motor skills, sexuality, the need to live in a social context – all these and many more will harmoniously coexist only if the youngster is strongly attached to a human group whose way of life he gradually deciphers with the growth of his own ability to understand and participate. We can determine, therefore, according to the way in which we organize the youth's life environment whether his identity-forming process will occur within the overall context of the prevailing culture or whether he will need to seek a way out of his internal disorder through the coordinates of a deviant subculture.
The harmonious existence of the components of identity also depends on the maintenance of a significant degree of continuity from past to future, as well as the availability of "occupations" (roles or "stations" in the community), generally technological and integrally related to the group and its ongoing history, whose demands enable the youth to test his growing abilities, commitment to the community, and, simultaneously, his changing social status.
This is a set of conditions that cannot easily be communicated didactically, if at all; it can be achieved only by turning the entire residential setting into a goal-directed community characterized by a majority commitment to the following:
1. The goal;
2. The order of fundamental priorities;
3. The ethos;
4. Willingness to recognize at least some of the youth's qualities as
assets to himself or herself and to the community;
5. Willingness to enable the young person to experience motor skills,
intellectual skills, and social skills, individually or together with
the community, as she or he chooses, while simultaneously enabling the
individual to be in touch with his or her emotional needs;
6. Willingness to grant the young people a moratorium from the normative
demands placed before youngsters of their age, while not "walking out on
them",
7. Willingness to allow the young residents free access to knowledge
concerning the actions of the community;
8. Willingness to allow the youth to evaluate the results of his actions
through the experience of emotional feedback, power and influence, and
status and prestige; and
9. Willingness to maintain a life pattern analogous to that prevailing
in the mainstream of the prevailing culture.
ZVI LEVY
Levy, Z. (1996). Conceptual foundations of developmentally oriented residential education: A holistic framework for group care that works. Residential Treatment for Children and Youth, 13, 3. 1996. pp. 75-80. New York. Haworth Press.
