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4 JuLY 2008
NO 1317
Family support work
The CYC approach includes the use of the family's life space and actual shared lived moments to create helpful interventions. The power of using lived experience and strategic, immediate, purposeful reflection on that experience enables CYC family support workers to facilitate shifts that simply do not occur with more passive and indirect methods. The boundaries for the workers are more intimate and less protected by professional distancing strategies such as would be typical in an office-based interview. Boundary definition is a key piece of our work, yet we must see our relationship with the family as equal, not superior. The context must honor the parent as the expert on their family, and the worker is not only not above the family in knowing what needs to be done but is s even in a "one down" position. One father who had been resistant to many attempts at family therapy described finally being willing to work with a CYC worker who "didn't come into his home with a plan already formulated about what he needed to do" (Sullivan, 1995).
The work is less reliant on dialogue and therapeutic reflection and more on experiential, lived moments, often co-experienced by the family and the worker. The CYC approach has been characterized as the process of arranging experiences that challenge the family to revisit old self-defeating patterns and beliefs through the cognitive dissonance that arises as a felt experience of success; competence gets highlighted through purposeful reflection in the moment (Phelan, 1999). Workers support youth and families to feel the experience of being competent by actually doing things that are useful and capturing the moment before it evaporates.
The relationship developed between the family and worker is founded on a sense of safety that grows out of mutuality and a "non-expert" stance by the worker rather than the power relationship that occurs when a person goes to an expert to be healed. The process of CYC family support work is described by Romanko-Woods (1999) quite elegantly as a three-stage model:
Create a safe relationship;
Do the change work; and
Separate and close (Romanko-Woods, 1999).
JACK PHELAN
Phelan, Jack. (2003). Child and Youth Care family
support work. In Garfat, Thom (Ed.). A Child and Youth Care Approach
to Working with Families. New York. The Haworth Press. pp. 69-70.
REFERENCES
Phelan, J. (1999). Experiments with experience. Journal of Child and Youth Care Work, 14. pp. 25-28.
Romanko-Woods, M. (1999). Classroom Lecture Notes. Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Alberta.
Sullivan, J. (1995). Unpublished doctoral dessertation.
University of Virginia, USA.
