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12 DECEMBER 2008
NO 1385
Prime movers – and shakers
One of the reasons we came into this business of child care was that we believed that we could make a difference. Anyone who has been around for a year (or twenty) knows by now that as individuals our impact is limited. Yes, we can get close to people – listen to them, encourage them, show them – but alone we make only small ripples in a big pond. The way we really make a difference is by getting currents moving, by enthusing two or three people nearby who in turn inspire those around them, and thus swell larger group energies which carry individuals along, together, into new experiences, achievements and growth. That's synergy, man!
Just
add people, and stir
Often the best things we do for kids and their families is to prise them
out of their trap of futility and hurt, exchange their sameness for
something different, turn on some lights in the darkness.
We succeed in this generally by adding people to their world – a variety of people:
ordinary people with whom our clients can easily identify and with whom they can share with a degree of comfort (often these are fellow clients, neighbours, school or work colleagues);
special people who play purposeful and programmed educative, recreational and therapeutic roles in their lives;
someone to orchestrate all of this interaction.
This last person, the orchestrator, according to Barnes (1985), is the child care worker as primary practitioner. The worker in this role, he says, is crucial if we are truly to make optimum use of the milieu in which we work.
"It requires more than 'being like parents'. Why is it that we have so linked the child care worker with parenthood, and therefore settled that he or she is not a professional?" Barnes argues for the redefinition of the Child and Youth Care worker as "a professionally responsible person who will manage the curriculum, who will inter-relate the helping processes of both the group and the individual, who will integrate the totality of this experience into the totality of each child, and, lastly, who will be broadly concerned with integrating the child into his own ecological system."
BRIAN GANNON
Gannon, B. (1996). Editorial: Prime movers – and shakers. Child and Youth Care, 14, 11.p.2.
REFERENCE
Barnes, F.H. (1985). The Child Care Worker as Practitioner. The
Child Care Worker, 3, 2.
