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20 OCTOBER 2008
NO 1362
Being and doing
Child Care is about 'being' rather than 'doing.' The health and well-being of a child is based within that child's sense of self in relation to the world around. This is a process that flows from the inside out and not from an approving or disapproving world of culturally contrived contingencies. The so-called 'damaged' children who find their way to professional caregivers have certainly failed in the contingency game but, at a much more profound level, their issues are rooted in their distorted or fragile sense of self and other 'me' and 'non-me.' From this perspective, the experience of self and other is both the process and the outcome. In therapeutic child care it involves a careful and skillful creation of the conditions in which both worker and child are given full permission to 'be' without judgment or agenda. Somewhere along the line, in our compulsion to do something, we have determined that the adult/child relationship must be one in which the former urges the latter toward some pre-determined performance or experience. The Child and Youth Care literature abounds with exhortations to use the self and use the relationship in furthering the progress of therapy. But what Self? ... What Relationship? ... And whose project are we talking about? At its essence, I believe that the child care relationship is something to be experienced and not something to be used.
It is not my intention to throw the baby out with the bath water. I firmly believe that it is the task of any therapist to encourage the client to change and it is certainly the task of the adult to support and encourage the child in the process of learning about self and other. But the grist for the learning mill must surely contain the inner experience of the child and the external ingredients must surely contain the shared self of the adult. When these parts are missing or deficient, the leaming process is shallow, externally focused and performance oriented.
Creating higher levels of competence in the contingency game may look good to the control-seeking adult, but the additional damage of separating the self from the world may be irreparable. The rationalization that the child will "internalize the experience" is both dangerous and absurd – unless you are training a linebacker to hit without reference to the pain.
Again, in making this case, I am not suggesting that the commonly understood principles of learning theory have no place in the repertoire of child rearing or treatment practices. The challenge to the child care practitioner is to determine where that place should be and in what context it should be embedded. Unfortunately, the technology of behaviour modification (or behaviour management) is seen to "work," and represents the non-psychiatric practitioner's only answer to psychopharmacology-that also "works." So long as we continue to seek the rewards for changing kids and our research colleagues continue to need identifiable "outcomes", these two methods will continue to represent the "state of the art."
From my perspective, professional child care is not about "normalization": As children we are all `damaged' in some way through our experience with our parents. The idea that critical issues and deficits arising from the first three years of life can be rectified by surrounding the child with a "normal" family within a "normal" community is clearly ridiculous. However committed we are to the 'niceness' of such arrangements, it is unlikely that even the most "specialized" foster family will move far beyond the systemic issues of accommodating to the new member. By the same token I am completely unable to isolate or identify those influences of the "normal" community that will somehow ameliorate the "not quite normal" behaviours and experiences of the damaged child. More often than not the normal world will speak back in a manner that is anything but helpful. For the most part, the deeply rooted issues of self will never be addressed. This, after all, is why the child has become a candidate for special help or attention.
GERRY FEWSTER
Fewster, G. (1991). A postscript from the edge.
Journal of Child and Youth Care, 5, 2. pp. 66-67.
