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16 APRIL 2008

NO 1286

Developmental perspective

The following chapters advocate that helping professionalsChild and Youth Care workers, counselors, social workers, nurses, and others – need to relate and to work with children and adolescents as developing beings. Regardless of whether the young people are placed in the group setting due to personal complications, societal stress situations, or both, and whether they are registered in a residential program or for "ordinary" alternative care in a day care, latchkey, or other equivalent part-time setting, they remain youngsters with developmental requirements the same as those of their contemporaries who are in the care of their own families.

The author submits that it is important that we have progressed to the point where we think and speak of "children with difficulties" rather than designating these youngsters as "difficult children." The distinction is more than a semantic exercise. For example, when we encounter the old term, "learning-disabled children," we find that such categorization tends to narrow the child's dimensions, as if the child were a differently developing person to be set apart in our thinking (and perhaps in how we respond to the situation) from other children.

Yet a developmental perspective also requires the recognition and understanding of each individual's status and progression in various spheres of development. Above all, it is paramount for children striving toward mastery to experience solidly the personal involvement and continuous support of the caregivers, a point to which we shall return below. Such support includes acknowledged freedom to struggle on one's own. Developmental progress emerges from the interplay between the individual's developmental readiness and actual functioning amidst ongoing environmental challenge (Maas, 1984). It necessitates ascertaining specifically how each individual is functioning in his or her ongoing life situation – and what each one needs to experience in order to progress. Progression in competent development builds upon a sense of efficacy of that which has been learned,: usually occurring by means of minute accomplishments and only occasionally on the basis of a major breakthrough. When individuals experience their own part in their mastery, they have learned (Bandura, 1977). Then, as in the old truism: what is learned is used.

HENRY W. MAIER

Maier, Henry W. (1987). Introduction: Group Care Utilizing a Developmental Perspective. Developmental Group Care of Children and Youth: Concepts and Practice. New York. The Haworth Press. pp. 1-2.

REFERENCES

Maas, H.S. (1984) People and Contexts. Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Prentice-Hall.

Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84, 2. pp. 191-215.

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