and reach thousands of daily visitors
14 OCTOBER 2009
NO 1500
Care workers
What kind of worker does it take to carry out activities that are educational, work that is developmentally appropriate, and routines that are the result of group planning rather than merely arbitrary exercises in unproductive, boring, repetitive tasks?
In manv countries, the worker who carries these responsibilities performs them as a professionally designed task for which there is an identified professional training and clear professional status equivalent to the professional status of other human service disciplines. The educateur in France and the barnevernpedagog in Norway would view these responsibilities as part of their regular professional work.
That we largely lack such a definition in the United States need not make it impossible for us to recognize our ability to provide residential work of this same quality here. Indeed, in residential centers across the country, there are American child-care workers who, because of their response to individual young people in residential treatment and the demands of the group in which they live, are in fact transdisciplinarv workers, who develop programs with their groups, provide counseling in the life space, deal with behavioral and management issues through effective use of peer group and counseling interventions, provide care, nurture, and structure as required by growing children, and do the whole with an educational rather than a social control focus.
F.HERBERT BARNES
Barnes, F. H. (1991). From warehouse to greenhouse: Play, work and the routines of daily living in groups as the core of milieu treatment. 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. 129-132.
