and reach thousands of daily visitors
13 June 2008
NO 1309
Family work
'Permit me to illustrate from a group of Italian women who bring their underdeveloped children several times a week to Hull House for sanitary treatment, under the direction of a physician. It has been possible to teach some of these women to feed their children oatmeal instead of tea-soaked bread, but it has been done, not by statement at all but by a series of gay little Sunday morning breakfasts given to a group of them in the Hull House nursery. A nutritious diet was then substituted for an inferior one by a social method.'
– Jane Addams, 1899. A Function of the Social Settlements.
(Reprinted in
Addams, 1992, p. 89)
Jane Addams said that the purpose of the settlement house is to "express the meaning of life in terms of life itself, in forms of activity," and she believed that a settlement works because of reciprocity between its members, even those who are destitute, oppressed, and troublesome.
In 1996, Jerry Beker and I argued that residential care programs in the U.S., based on what we learned about from colleagues in Israel, have few reasons. not to practice reciprocity and a social method with youth residents, even difficult youth.
Here, Thom Garfat and his colleagues argue that we have no reason not to practice reciprocity with the parents and families of these same youth. He furthers the work of Addams by illustrating how it is practiced, even with difficult parents. And so we have come full circle pedagogically: We cannot practice Child and Youth Care in a way that leaves out the parents nor can we simply blame them for child and youth problems. Reciprocity includes everyone.
Just as Addams challenged preconceptions about immigrants and how persons learn, these authors challenge our preconceptions about parents of difficult children and youth: their capacities, interests, values, and lifestyles. Not only is this a challenge to our own preconceptions about their identity.... That challenge is also to preconceptions about our identity. They challenge us to sustain the primacy of person before behaviors and performance. They challenge us to make ethics a priority over method. They challenge us to practice "carework" before intervention. They challenge us to place the interpersonal and contextual before the intrapersonal and individual.
Their explication of care-work is timely, because we are nearing the end of a period of naivete about family work and, it is hoped, the end of a period of dichotomous thinking about families. One choice was to place hope in a range of interventions for families in trouble (e.g., wraparound services, therapy, casework, parent education), but these have not been that successful in either saving money or preventing placement of children outside of the home. Another, earlier choice was to abandon work with the family and to try to save the children. That created new problems between children and families, and it created relationships of hostility and defensiveness between families and care systems.
This dichotomous choice between children and their families was a false, unrealistic choice, and perhaps we may now give it up. Both choices are based on a mistaken hope for the "right" solution and a unitary intervention. Yet the discussions of work with families in these pages makes no false promises of easy success or an easy romanticism about difficult families. What it does promise is a practice of working with families that is consistent with the tradition of Child and Youth Care work, and this book is a good lesson in the pedagogy of that work even for those not interested in family work.
These authors teach us that human development begins with the practices of respect, dignity, and the wholeness of a human life, principles described by Taylor (1989); the Child and Youth Care practice described here begins with this kind of philosophical anthropology of person. There is a basic pedagogical principle here: Like Addams, Garfat argues that parents' dignity is an a priori condition and that direct attempts to change them are disrespectful, violates their dignity, and contradicts the inherent, intrinsic organic wholeness of a person's life.
This is not just a principle of family work; it is a guide to all traditional Child and Youth Care work. Development and growth is a mysterious, asynchronous, nonlinear process and dynamic. All Child and Youth Care work aims to further growth and change, yet its pedagogy is not interventionist and direct. Youthwork practice is indirect, cooperative, collaborative, and invitational.
A further characteristic of this paradox is that the reciprocity described in these pages rests on a creative tension between acknowledging the "otherness" of and in clients while nurturing shared experience and common understandings. This is a rich – although demanding – explication of reciprocity and shared experience as alternatives to conformity and similarity, which are the usual standards.
DOUGLAS MAGNUSON
Magnuson, D. (2003). Preface to: Garfat, T.
(Ed.). A Child and Youth Care Approach to Working with Families.
The Haworth Press. pp.xxi-xxiii.
REFERENCES
Addams, J. (1992). On education. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers.
Beker, J., and Magnuson, D. (1996). Residential education as an option for at-risk youth. NY: The Haworth Press, Inc.
Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the self: The making of the modern identity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.
