Listen to thisIn my last column I asked the question why is it that we, in Child and Youth Care, tend to only trace our past over only about fifty years. I find this odd in that many other professions can trace their history back hundreds and sometimes thousands of years. So, again, I ask the question why do we not trace our field back further than to the days of Redl and Bettleheim and the other boys?
I guess there are a few possibilities. One is that maybe we are not truly a professional but are rather just a job classification. This, I guess, would explain the numerous titles that Garfat and McElwee have identified are used to describe Child and Youth Care workers. It may also be that we are just a specialization within another profession such as social work and therefore can only trace our beginnings back to the time that the specialization broke away from the main body. Maybe there really isn’t something called Child and Youth Care. Maybe it is just an invention of a few people who have self-serving reasons for arguing its existence. These possibilities have been explored in various degrees of detail both in print and in private conversations over the years. I have no intention of rehashing the arguments here.
I do however, want to explore a fourth possibility that I have been thinking about for a number of years now. I recently wrote a chapter for an Irish textbook on the history of Child and Youth Care in North America and when I was researching the “beginnings" I was surprised how few people had written about the early days even if the early days were defined as being since the 1950's. It could be that I am just feeling somewhat cynical about Child and Youth Care these days but it is truly curious that few, if any, of the academics or researchers in the field are writing about our past. This is quite unusual as most professions have their share of historians while Child and Youth Care has only a few people who have even written about the past fifty years. The question I have asked myself since is why is this the case? It may be that we don’t talk about it much because there are things about it that we are not proud of when we look back. Could it be that our roots are based in a past that is something to be ashamed of and as a result disowned?
This is not as far fetched as it may sound. Let me start this debate with a simple statement. There is a long history in North America of people working with children in institutions and yet no profession claims any roots in this part of children's services. Teaching, social work, psychology and nursing have all worked in the children's institutions of the past but none claim their roots in this area. Even Child and Youth Care, where we are proud of our expertise in residential treatment and care, do not claim that our roots are in institutional care. This lack of claim may be due to the very bad publicity institutions have had over the past fifty or so years. It seems to me that if we do have the expertise that we claim we have in residential treatment and care, and that if there were people that worked with kids in the old institutions then there may be a connection between those individuals and our expertise. If that is the case then it is not a stretch to assume that there may be a connection between our profession and the old institutions. If this is the case then we, indeed, do have a past. Unfortunately our past may be connected to a system that has a reputation, not entirely deserved, of being racist, neglectful and abusive.
While I am sure that not everyone would agree with me that this is our past, I am going work on the assumption that it is our past and in the next columns explore some of the systems where children resided in the years before the modern age of Child and Youth Care. After all, as the saying loosely goes, those who do not know their past are doomed to repeat it.
