and reach thousands of daily visitors
25 MARCH 2009
NO 1417
Residential work
Since children in trouble do not come neatly packaged, neither should our approaches to helping them. Much current wisdom holds that the need for specialized out-of-home care — residential treatment, for example — is minimal at best and that our major energies should be directed to reaching troubled children earlier and in the context of their own families. In part, this attitude reflects two things:
Recent and shocking examples of both personal and institutional abuse of children in some substitute care arrangements.
A long-standing and deep-seated distrust of group care settings as childrearing (or child helping) environments.
Many children who have found their way to group care settings undoubtedly can and should be helped in their own homes. The moves in this direction are unmistakable and include the closing of large institutions that do little more than warehouse children and the recent development of a number of creative and promising home-based services for troubled children and their families. The central assumption of this book, however, is that any intervention strategy — home-based or residential — will succeed according to its ability to affect the total ecology of the child's world: family, peer group, school, neighborhood, and community. While much current debate has quite properly focused on the shortcomings of the isolated child caring institution in meeting the needs of troubled children for either effective treatment or humane care, recent past history has also shown that simply changing the locus of treatment from institution to community or family is not enough. We must also attend to the focus and the purpose of treatment — whether it occurs in a residential center, group home, community agency, or the child's own home.
I believe that group care — in particular, residential treatment — has both a proper place and a purpose in the continuum of child and family services. This potential will be realized only after several basic questions are addressed: (1) Where does residential treatment fit in the total continuum of child and family services? (2) What are the critical elements in a specialized helping environment for troubled children, and what are their various strengths and limitations? (3) How is the temporary group living environment linked with and supportive to the other important systems in the child's life — particularly the family and the public school? My motivation for writing Caring for Troubled Children stemmed from a desire to provide at least partial answers to these basic questions. Although it is not intended as a practice manual, the book hopefully will provide some practical suggestions for all whose mission is the care and treatment of children with special needs.
In the chapters that follow, I attempt to do
two things: first, provide a perspective on residential treatment that
includes some analysis of where we have been, where we are presently,
and where we ought to be headed; second, to suggest some positive
approaches and directions to counter what I consider indiscriminate
condemnation and an unjustly negative view of group care existing in
some quarters today. In essence, I try to deal honestly with some of the
problems confronting residential treatment — for which no easy solutions
exist — as well as to indicate some of the promise of this area of
service, one that we have barely begun to explore. Inevitably, the
results of such an ambitious undertaking are, at times, uneven — partly
because of my own limitations and partly because of the limitations of
our present knowledge and technology in a still very new field.
JAMES WHITTAKER
Whittaker, J.K. (1980). Preface. Caring for Troubled Children. San Francisco, CA. Jossey-Bass. pp. ix-xi.
