Listen to thisSo, CYC-Online is hitting middle age. I came to the CYC-NET community comparatively recently, when CYC-Online was in its mid thirties. I quickly, almost instinctively, sensed that the network spoke to my own experiences of working with children and youth. Perhaps that shouldn't have come as too much of a surprise. The piece of writing that most influenced my approach to practice was almost certainly Henry Maier's Core of Care, which I still have in an as yet unpublished format as a lecture given back in 1977 at the University of Strathclyde, where I now teach. Leon Fulcher who was teaching at Stirling University at that time gave it to me. And here I am now, sharing a platform with both Henry and Leon.
Becoming part of that wider community of practice, prepared to discuss, contest and lay bare the ideas, dilemmas and uncertainties that frame all of our experiences, has for me been quite liberating. The thrust in this late modern period can be for social and political forces to seek to impose an ever-greater order upon our increasingly complex and diverse world. In Child and Youth Care that can be manifest in ever more elaborate risk assessment tools, pseudo-scientific systems for recruiting staff, all sorts of programmes for addressing what we deem to be the cognitive distortions of youth and increasingly authoritarian responses to youth crime. So it was and is liberating to come into contact with Child and Youth Care practitioners around the globe, all reinforcing the same message that what really counts in working with children and youth is what goes on between them and the staff who work and live with them.
In recent discussion on CYC-NET about the topic of “what children need” Gerry Fewster reminds us that they need a “bond” with someone who considers them to be special, and they need “attunement”, that ability to enter into what Henry Maier calls “rhythmic interaction.” When our attempts to impose a scientific rationality, with their attendant and perhaps inevitable concerns for regulation and making “other” of those who don’t fit within dominant conceptions of what is rational,are exposed as running on empty, the more essentialist and humanistic aspects of our jobs will remain.
Against this backdrop, I want to share a recent experience. I left direct practice a couple of years ago. There’s a process of de-institutionalisation that perhaps inevitably comes with that. It certainly happened with me. At a very simple level, I had to learn not to react with a start every time the 'phone went after 10 o'clock at night. There’s also been some soul searching, that’s come from having the time to reflect back on whether I did make any difference to the lives of children and youth and in my more melancholy moments questioning whether I got things altogether off beam. There’s also a sense of loss of the closeness and rawness of relationships with youth and with colleagues. To combat some of that sense of loss and perhaps to assuage a feeling of guilt that comes from only teaching and writing about social care nowadays, I volunteer on a prison visitor scheme. This involves visiting prisoners who, for a variety of reasons, rarely get visits from family and friends. You check in along with all the other visitors, half an hour before the visit is due to start and hang around the reception area waiting to be processed through to the visiting hall. I knew it was only a matter of time before I came across one of the youth I had worked with. Sure enough, last week, as I was sitting waiting, in walked Lenny.
I had worked with Lenny for a couple of years from when he was 13. He was now 20 and was visiting his brother in the prison. I knew I had enjoyed a good relationship with Lenny and he was delighted to see me. I hadn’t worked with him particularly directly, nor as far as I recall, was I involved in any particularly significant moment or event in his life. But I was aware we had somehow connected. It's that sense of attunement that comes about when you come to understand and like wee bits about one another. The experience of meeting up with Lenny wasn’t entirely straightforward. As is the way with such encounters, it had its fair share of surreal moments. However, both our visits over, we met up again outside and were saying our goodbyes when Lenny put his arms around me and said, quite genuinely, “I'll never forget you.” It was at the same time, an incredibly humbling yet affirmative moment. And, in that one moment, much of the soul-searching about whether I really had made a difference dissipated. I had, and not through anything particular I had said or done, but just through “being with” and connecting. That kind of authentic human encounter is something Child and Youth Care workers across the globe share. It’s the kind of experience that makes you realise why you came into this line of work in the first place and why amidst all the aggravation that can go with it, you stay (or in my case it stays with me). And, irrespective of the efficacy or otherwise of the various treatment programmes we are increasingly exhorted to utilise in our work with youth, we need to hang on to one of the eternal verities in our work; it’s the singer rather than the song that’s most important.
That’s the message that CYC-NET consistently hits home. Happy Birthday! I look forward to us moving into our dotage together.
