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14 JANUARY 2009
NO 1387
The direct care worker
In nonfamilial settings, many persons share in children's lives and progress; however, only the designated primary caregivers, the direct care workers, carry the full obligation for and personal involvement in providing "caring care." These institutionalized caregivers, like the parents or foster parents in a home setting, are the nurturers who provide life's necessities, sustained presence, and intimate care. This nurturance has considerable significance in that the caregivers are the immediate representatives of societal norms and are a child's personal backup in the residential living unit or family and in the world outside. In part, this relationship is so central because "individuals do not learn their coping behaviors or their mores, social drives, or values from the larger society. Children learn a particular culture and a particular moral system only from those people with whom they have close contact and who exhibit that culture in frequent relationship with them" [Washington 1982].
Thus the core care person comprises three basic structural components: the central person for caring and attachment formation, the major norm conductor for primary group life, and the legitimate representative of the norms of the larger context, including those of the immediate setting. Consequently, the care worker is always occupied in building a relationship, setting norms, and maintaining a linkage with society.
While focusing on the role of caregivers, one must emphasize the experience as such, because care has not only to be delivered but to be received; it is not enough simply to deliver the elements of caring without the message of being cared for. Hearing such messages, or experiencing the care offered to them, is particularly difficult for many of the youngsters in group care. They may want it and reject it at the same time, and this push-pull is what makes direct care work so complex.
In addition, care workers are constantly faced with a particular challenge to provide children or youths with the experience of being cared for in the course of the daily activities – in the face of limited time, energy, and skills. Something as routine as requesting a child to put on fresh socks can be expressed as an act of caring; inquiring about a day in school can be experienced as genuine interest rather than as intrusion. Perseverance in the face of repeated rebuffs, and tolerance of one's own less than perfect approaches in expressing concern (with the hope that the message is picked up), lie at the heart of child-care work and constitute one of the human service discipline's most difficult challenges.
That the caring activities of residential workers have not received the degree of scrutiny and support they deserve is not surprising, for such fundamental personal involvement tends to impede organizational requirements [Maier 1985; Parsons 1964; Resnick 1980]. For instance, allowances made for a child's tardiness in being ready for school because the child is temporarily overwhelmed raise concern about the orderliness, uniformity, and managerial efficiencv of the institution. Actually, care and control are interconnected and cannot be divided into separate functions [Harris 1980]. Therefore, the child's tardiness may be viewed as an essential personal variation that will lead eventually to a greater measure of punctuality for this child, but which may also create apparent disorder in the observable scheme of group management, as schedules are disrupted and other residents seek similar exceptions for themselves or attack the beneficiary of this exception. Such conflicting strains need to be understood as a natural part of residential Child and Youth Care work [Maier 1985], in which constant attention must be given to ways of establishing and maintaining a balance between the requirements of nurturing care and what is needed to keep the system functioning. Experience suggests that, in the absence of such attention, system-maintenance priorities tend to become dominant.
HENRY W. MAIER
Maier, H.W.(1991). Developmental Foundations of Child
and Youth Care. In Beker, J. and Eisikovits, Z. (Eds.). Knowledge
Utilization in Residential Child and Youth Care Practice.
Washington D.C. Child Welfare League of America. pp. 28-29.
REFERENCES
Harris, R.J. (1980). A changing service: The case for separating 'care' and 'control' in probation practice. The British Journal of Social Work, 10, 2. pp. 163-184.
Maier, H.W. (1985). Personal care within an organizational service context. In Fulcher, L. and Ainsworth, F. (Eds.). Group Care Practice with Children. New York. Methuen. pp. 21-47.
Parsons, T. (1964). The Social System. New York. The Free Press.
Resnick, H. (1980). A social system view of strain. In Resnick, H. and Patti, R., Change from Within. Philadelphia, PA. Temple University Press. pp. 28-45.
Washington, R.D. (1982). Social development: A focus for practice and education. Social Work, 27, 1. pp. 104-109.
