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21 MAY 2008

NO 1299

Assessment and treatment

A report of any single critical event in the life of a child or group of youngsters becomes illuminated by even more questions. These are not merely idle probing questions; for Redl they are exciting moments of search and searching once more (and ultimately research) (Redl,1966). So much is happening at one time that there can hardly be room for determining exactly whether a response is internal or external, behavioral, affective, or cognitive. The issue whether a behavior is child-or group-centered also fades. Instead, our task becomes to understand children's behavior and to learn what they are expressing rather than under what rubric of classification we should account for their behavior. Redl leaves us breathless in his questioning and excitement over all the possibilities to learn and gain understanding from the children's behavior. It is this enthusiasm about the potential in each assessment that promises an explosion of knowledge and skill attainment. Redl might have equated it to a "scouting" adventure even when looking at so-called routine events. Today, we have become more behavior-specific oriented, as he advocated years ago.

This kind of open-minded assessment leads practitioners away from diagnosis in the more traditional "clinical" sense, which entailed substantiating diagnostic formulations or filling in a grid in the elusive search for causative factors: the why of human behavior. Redl was more interested in and found it more useful to look at how a behavior occurred. Redl's formulation, emphasizing the circumstances of children's behavior, is coming nowadays to fruition in many residential and kindred care settings where the child no longer stands alone as the subject of scrutiny. It is currently thought that children and youth can best be understood as they are assessed for their interactions amidst their life events. For instance, the event of a girl knocking over her glass of milk has to be studied for the happenings around the table, in the dining room, in her own immediate personal life sphere, as well as her personal dexterity.

In the milk-spilling episode we are concerned about the child's ongoing experience rather than her behavior per se. In fact, the designations of a "disruptive child," "misbehaving children," "clumsy" ones, etc., are labels possibly gratifying only to the adults in charge; because they can then exclude themselves and the world around them as agents in the child's misfortune (Redl,1975). Fritz Redl's perspective found full acceptance in the "revolutionary" '60s and '70s and now in contemporary efforts such as staying away from stereotypically labeling a child as a "mentally retarded child" when actually he or she is a child with mental delay. Such a perspective is required to overcome the current questionable practice of describing certain children as "abused children" when actually they are children who have experienced abuse and need what every child requires, only more so.

HENRY W. MAIER

Maier, Henry W. (1991). What's old – what's new: Fritz Redl's teaching reaches into the present. In Morse, William C. (Ed.) Crisis Intervention in Residential Treatment: The Clinical Innovations of Fritz Redl. New York. The Haworth Press. pp. 18-20.

REFERENCES

Redl, F. (1966). When we deal with children. New York. The Free Press. p.17.

Redl, F. (1975). Disruptive behavior in the classroom. School Review, 83. pp. 561-594.

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