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Just a short piece ...

7 January

NO 1248

Warehouse or greenhouse?

More often than we like to admit, however, what we see when visiting a children's residential center is a group idly sprawled in front of a television set, with the residential staff members by themselves in the cottage office. At worst, they are getting out of the way of the children; at best, they are supplanting active child-care work-joint interaction of staff and children-with the writing of reports or some other tangible, adjunctive activity such as counting laundry or typing menus. Although they are available to the children, staff members in these situations are not a continuing part of their lives.

On further exploration in such a cottage, we are quite likely to find rooms with unpersonalized walls, uniform bedspreads, and few of those indications of real-life experience that one finds with the children and youths in the homes of one's friends and colleagues. Exploring a cottage kitchen may provide an equally barren experience of cabinets largely empty except for instant coffee and paper cups ("staff stuff") and portion-controlled leftovers in the refrigerator. Common rooms frequently exhibit a dearth of supplies. How many cottage living rooms have you seen that have bookshelves with actual books for children, rather than copies of Alice of Old Vincennes, 18 consecutive years of National Geographic, and two sets of the Encyclopedia Americana, editions 1968 and 1974, contributed by board members as tax deductions?

These staff members may be able to handle the white-water times: the shopping trips, the getting ready for school, the Saturday night trip to the movies. But they are totally unequipped to manage the flat-water periods of cottage living. This arrangement may be satisfactory if group living is just the warehousing of children between major activities and clinical appointments, but the purpose of group care is to make being in care a developmentally rewarding experience. Group life must not be a warehouse but a greenhouse for encouraging growth, and the emphasis should be on education rather than on custody.

The treatment center and each living group must be perceived as places for positive social interaction and experiential learning. Then new approaches to developing child-care work can be undertaken so as to use all the elements of the daily living situation as the medium for treatment, as they occur, for the promotion of confidence and the building of competence on the part of each and every young person in the group with whom the worker is involved. Such a normalizing approach creates demand for more sophisticated child-care workers than are required when the focus for residential treatment is curing pathology and workers are regarded as providing custodial care between clinical appointments and therapeutic recreation. As competence-building comes more clearly into perspective, the true importance of activities, of work and play, becomes even more evident. They are the key elements in the structure of milieu treatment.

F.HERBERT BARNES

Barnes, Herbert F. (1991). From warehouse to greenhouse: Play, work and the routines of daily living in groups as the core of milieu treatment. Knowledge Utilization in Residential Child and Youth Care Practice. Beker, J. and Eisikovits, Z. (Eds.). Washington D.C. Child Welfare League of America.

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THE INTERNATIONAL CHILD AND YOUTH CARE NETWORK (CYC-Net)

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