INTERNATIONAL CHILD AND YOUTH CARE NETWORK

10 JANUARY 2001
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The normal healthy development towards maturity within a family is often either missed or distorted in the troubled child and it is up to the worker to help catch up with this. What types of adult are we talking about? A view from the 1960s ...

Adults who work with troubled and difficult young people

None of us is perfect, and those of us who are living and working with such children have also often been much affected by our early upbringing. Sometimes complicated family relationships in our environment have had their natural influences on us. In our type of work, we are constantly reminded of our own experiences and this can be a burden or a help, depending on how we ourselves were able to work through them.

One of us cannot stand a child swearing, while another resents untidiness. He is intellectually fully aware that this may be a passing phase in the child's readjustment, but he is himself not sufficiently free of the problem, emotionally, to avoid becoming disturbed about it. Another adult, well able to cope with the above problems, has difficulty in bearing the strain when a maladjusted child identifies him with some hateful adults in his old background before accepting his sincerity and friendship. Another type of very well-meaning adult struggles hard to keep the child-therapist type of relationship, i.e. not to get personally too much involved, but identifies himself with the child's problems so much that he becomes another mother or father figure and thereby loses control over the situation which needs continuous assessment and readjustment. It is so very easy to be forced by children one loves into a situation which makes therapy impossible. It is up to us as adults to set the pace and not to get our hands forced by the child taking advantage of the softness, sensitivity and vulnerability which we must have if we are to understand maladjusted children. Such an adult needs to have technical skill in many crafts, or other knowledge, or abilities, so that children can look up to him as somebody who knows a good deal about things the child can value, as has been mentioned earlier. The adult must not be afraid to tackle any activities with the child. This act of doing things together, experiencing the child's frustration when things go wrong, guiding him through the disappointments and encouraging his desire to do new things, can all help in the relationship between child and adult. A boy can benefit more when the atmosphere is not loaded with unhealthy emotional tensions, which only add relationship complications to his other problems.

A body starved of nourishment, or wrongly fed, needs at first a light diet for its recovery; the same careful ‘dosing' applies to emotional problems, where proper timing is a vital factor. How difficult it is for an adult to know when approval and toleration have to stop and disapproval and natural consequences of actions to take their place. What a tussle some adults get themselves into when their feeling of loyalty to the child is no longer guided by the clear line of the treatment plan (generally the result of team work) and, instead, they get so much involved in a misunderstood role that they feel they are giving a child and his secrets away when they discuss them with other members of the staff and those finally responsible for the child's treatment. This is because they are afraid that their ‘betrayal' may have consequences which will make them unpopular with the child.

The popularity of adults with children must not be gained by being the one who is ‘easy to get around'. The maladjusted child has at the beginning few standards by which to judge and loves to play one adult against the other, his loyalties being naturally rather slight. It is necessary for the adult doing this type of work to come so much to terms with his personal and professional situation that he can talk to his colleagues about his problem of interpersonal relationships with the children and his other anxieties. In this way, he can find sufficient help to overcome the sphere where he personally is inadequate, with the assistance of those adults in the community who are successful where he is not and vice versa. Before he can achieve this, he needs to come to terms with his own anxieties, to see his limitations as well as his own particular strength and to recognize where he still has, as Bettelheim* puts it, ‘areas of anxieties' which he must overcome, if he is to be of therapeutic help to others.

Finally the reader will see that the adult needed for this type of work must be somebody who must strive to expect of himself such standards of personal behaviour as are to be found in very few of the professions. He must be somebody who has sufficient interests and stimulation outside his work not to need the child as a symbol to replace what he has not found in the way of satisfaction elsewhere. The satisfaction he will gain for himself in this work will come from the outcome of his long and patient endeavours and, here, many members of the medical profession can be an excellent example.

* Bruno Bettelheim: ‘Love is Not Enough' (pub. Free Press, Glencoe, Illinois).

From Lennhoff, F.G. (1966) Exceptional Children: Residential Treatment of Emotionally Disturbed Boys at Shotton Hall.  London: George Allen and Unwin

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