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6 AUGUST 2010
NO 1612
Holding
Holding provision in one respect is a minimal requirement. A residential unit has to provide for all its children that which friendly and reliable neighbours would provide. This enables children at least to maintain their personal identity in an unfamiliar situation; in some ways this is a kind of emergency ‘integrity’ provision. It is also directly comforting and helpful in that it enables children to face and deal with some of the inevitable pain, anxiety, perhaps guilty relief, or just plain uncertainty that accompanies leaving one environment for a new one and which may often be intensified, or sometimes modified, by similar separations and joinings in the past. In encouraging children to enjoy life it confirms and strengthens whatever good experience they have had. Clare Winnicott (1964) puts this well: ‘children need from residential workers real experiences of good care, comfort and control'.
We can usefully discuss how such real experiences can be provided by analysing here, and in the next two chapters the components of residential provision.
But first three difficulties in discussion must be mentioned:
Exactly how any of this provision is made must depend on the circumstances of the moment and the adult’s sensitivity to particular individuals, to the depth of children’s feelings, to their apparent confidence or lack of it, to their capacity to wait for a while (often limited under stress). So one cannot give prescriptions, only general guides to what workers should be sensitive to.
Timing is always important, not only from moment to moment in dealing with an upset or excitement, but also in relation to different phases in the child’s stay and to particular incidents and what may follow from them hours, days, or even months later.
It is always difficult, in a residential unit, to separate out what happens because of the general climate of the place and what happens because an individual worker takes a particular initiative. Ultimately most experiences (good or bad) in the unit spring from the actions of individual people. But they are very often affected by the expectations current in the unit. In much that follows opportunities deriving primarily from social climate or from personal initiative cannot always be clearly separated. All that can be said is that both sources must be borne in mind and the reader may usefully consider from time to time how provision operates through climate and through individuals.
CHRISTOPHER BEEDELL
Beedell, C. (1970). Residential Life with Children. London. Routledge and Kegan Paul. pp. 21-23.
REFERENCE
Winnicott, C. (1964). Casework and the residential treatment
of children. Child Care and Social Work, 28-39. Hitchin, Herts.
Codicote Press.
