Listen to thisIn the previous article we looked at modelling what we do – what we might call skills and behaviour modelling. We saw that behaviour modelling helped children and youth by enriching their experience, exposing them to alternative behaviours, and coaching or rehearsing more effective behaviour. By modelling what we do, we offer to children a wider choice of building blocks for their daily lives and relationships. But our behavioural building blocks are just one aspect of our total selves. We add to these our understanding and attitudes, our culture, things of significance, value and meaning, and our characteristic ways of being ... to arrive at the broader picture of who we are.
Stephen Covey, in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, says: What we are communicates far more eloquently than anything we say or do. There are people we trust because we know their character.
While we are modelling skills and behaviours, the kids are also getting the big picture – what kind of people we are – and from this they build their own images of what kind of people they want to be. So we are more than behaviour models to the youngsters we work – we are also role models.
All the time they are growing up, with different degrees of seriousness and concreteness through their developmental stages, children an working at their own identities, at the answer to the huge question “Who am I?" This is a very complex task. Normal children assemble literally millions of concepts and images – by watching, interacting with, comparing and evaluating their experiences of other people their parents, family, close neighbours, peers, teachers, and so on. From this they build a fairly rounded and complete idea of humankind, and where they fit in with everyone else.
Troubled kids usually have two problems in this area:
They don't get enough data on which to build a rounded picture of who they are and who they want to be; and
They often collect a set of negative images, and they often also build an idea of who they don't want to be.
Too little data
If you are lucky enough to grow up in a two-parent family, by the time
you are eighteen you probably have a pretty thorough, three-dimensional
idea of what it is to be a man or a woman. You have seen your parents
and your family in every conceivable context – at their best, at their
worst, and all stations in between. As a result, your role model, and
your sex-role model, is a complex mixture of good and bad, of successful
and not so successful, but all of which is nevertheless acceptable and
which reflects healthy reality.
Even if you have grown up in a single-parent family, it is probable that you have experienced that one parent playing a wide range of parental roles, both the traditional “mother" and “father" roles.
But if you have grown up with parents preoccupied by their own problems, with parents who have come and gone (either physically or emotionally) so that their presence or absence has been more important to you than what they were or what they did, or with parents who have struggled with their own identity and maturity so that they have never presented a clear and consistent picture, by the time you are eighteen you will probably have a ragged and incomplete set of images on which to base your own identity. The resulting adult and sex-role model is often highly stereotyped, either good or bad, acceptable or rejected ... and a very fragile, two-dimensional picture.
Care workers will recognise the common identity knots in which troubled kids are tied: they treasure, idealistically and simplistically, the “good" times and the “good" people in their past and they have not dealt adequately with the “bad" times or “bad" people.
Quality and quantity
The adults who work with such deprived and vulnerable youth, whether as
educators, counsellors or Child and Youth Care workers, have a
responsibility to provide lots of interaction and lots of opportunity
for enriched and corrective experience for identity building.
Erikson (1965) tells us that the integration which takes place during adolescence “is more that the sum of childhood identifications." It is the combination of past relationships, inner energies, accumulated skills and new social opportunities. Thus, we often hear it said that adolescence offers “a second chance" at achieving positive role identity.
But it takes lots of action, lots of opportunities, and lots of talk. Child and youth care workers provide these opportunities. Maier (1987) says: “Accompanying all of these encounters, there is the necessity for continuous reflection about these experiences. The latter requires lots of 'rapping'. Such unending talk serves as a means for thinking, sorting out, ordering, and eventually conceptualizing the invisible, but very real contextual world. It is in these moments, in rap session or an informal chat, where residential workers prove their mettle (their real professional relevance), for their occasional input, questions, and frequently, for their symbolic silent presence as representatives of a joint complex world."
Links to the world
The task of the role model is not to establish some sort of one-to-one
relationship with a young person – or in any way to make them as we are;
it is to be a guide or a signpost for the young person to establish his
or her relationship with society as a whole.
In the popular literature you will find the idea of role models most used in the sense of showing kids how to be within certain worlds: “He or she was my role model in ..." business, black society, sport, the world of women, music, etc. He or she showed me the ropes, the goals, the values, the methods of an area of life. So we, as child care workers, must be able to offer these signposts toward adulthood in general. Maier refers to this process as the children's “migration" from their primary or immediate worlds to secondary or wider worlds, and their role models as those who “accompany" them through this transition.
New world, new roles
Today adult roles are in a state of change. Thirty years ago, for
example, there were clearer pictures about the roles of men and of women
in families and in the world. Today these roles are in flux and are
subsumed under other values, and Child and Youth Care workers often have
the more difficult task of modelling openness and adaptiveness to new
roles – rather than roles themselves.
Sex role modelling takes a lot of thought in single-parent families and in residential homes where there are not always clear mother and father figures, male and female role models.
In one way or another, children are going to need these. I remember talking about this in an institution with an all-male staff. Where do the children find female role models? “Oh, one of the staff-member's wives lives on the property," I was assured.
But role modelling is not a passive, observational thing; it is a participatory and interactive thing. We owe it to the youngsters who live with us to offer them such interactive role modelling opportunities, or else we continue to deprive them. We can also correct wrongly learned and superficial stereotypes. VanderVen (in Foster et al,1981) mentions, for example, institutionalised girls who have learned that seductive mannerisms can help them make their way in the world. These girls need to have male workers available to them who can help them learn appropriate ways of behaving towards men by responding warmly but not in any way that mirrors the child's flirtatious behaviour.
Androgynous styles
But what about the reality of single-sex staff designs? We learn a lot
from single parents, who so often have to be both 'fathers' and
'mothers'. They cannot say to their children “just wait until your
father comes home!" or “Ask your mother to show you how to do that."
So, often, with Child and Youth Care workers, we are called on to play adult roles which are androgynous – both male and female.
We must be careful not to fall into the same sex stereotypes we fear for the youngsters. Of course we will, respectively, be male and female role models of adulthood. But if you are male, children (both male and female) will also look to you for gentleness, compassion and warmth. And if you are female, children (both male and female) will also look to you for authoritativeness, strength and protection.
New functional roles for men and women, at home and at work (more women are in leadership positions, go out to work; more men help with the children, cook) make such androgynous styles easier, and indeed more accurate role models for the world the youngsters will live in.
Intimacy
I am always troubled by child development coursework which ends abruptly
at adolescence – as if that is as far as we need to go in order to work
with children and youth.
The test of adolescence is how well it stands up in young adulthood, and Erikson reminds us that the young adult “emerging from the search for and insistence on identity, is eager and willing to fuse his identity with that of others. He is ready for intimacy, that is, the capacity to commit himself to concrete affiliations and partnerships, and to develop the ethical strength to abide by such commitments, even though they may call for significant sacrifices and compromises." Without present and accessible sex role models, young people (especially those in care) may be left with extreme attitudes to intimacy: too-easy, superficial intimacy or bitter rejection and distancing from intimacy. Neither would get good grades for a successful adolescence.
(Erikson illustrates this compellingly when he dedicates his book Childhood and Society “To our children's children.") We need to ask ourselves more often in our evaluation of our programmes, how well we have helped youngsters to develop a healthy capacity for intimacy.
Occupational models
This task of role modelling does not have to be complex and
'psychological'. It is also very practical. An aspect of identity in our
world is our work status. People say: “I am a nurse" or “I am a taxi
driver." This is an important aspect of identity, and our building of
abilities and recognition of occupational hopes and plans are
significant ways of helping.
But this idea leads us further. “I am a ..." is the opposite of “I am nobody" – a cry often heard from children in care. In modelling who we are, we should articulate more of these “I am ... “ ideas: “I am a child care worker; I am a hockey player; I am a Bon Jovi fan; I am a keen movie-goer ..."
These simple ideas about who we are can easily be converted into identity building blocks for youngsters: “John is a pigeon lover; Monica is a reader; Mark is a real handyman ... “ and from there: “He wants to be a plumber or canoeist or whatever." This also links a child through identity to meaning in the wider world “a goal of role modelling mentioned earlier.
Role modelling is a complex skill. It is not as easy as “just being yourself' “especially with troubled youth.
Because of the role we play, we have to balance our own privacy with the children's need for information. Foster et al (1981) say: “The worker will naturally not want to answer every question about his private life, and the decision where to draw the line will depend on many factors, such as the length and quality of the relationship with the child, the age and maturity of the child, and the apparent motive in asking the question." Ultimately the test is that we are good, average examples of functional adults, and that we share this actively with the children as they build their own pictures of who they are and what they want to be.
References
Erikson, E. 1973. Childhood and Society. Penguin/Hogarth, Harmondsworth
Foster, G. et al. 1981. Child Care Work with Emotionally Disturbed Children. University of Pittsburg Press
Maier, H. 1987. How children and adolescent conceive their world beyond the group care setting. In Developmental Group Care of Children and Youth, Haworth Press, New York
