Listen to thisThis is one of those, “What I did on my holidays” columns. We went across to France. After several years of putting off, we succumbed and went to EuroDisney, figuring that the kids are now old enough to remember and just about tall enough to give my wife and myself the excuse to go on all the rides.
Almost in spite of myself, I was impressed. The scale and efficiency and indeed the quality of the attractions was quite awesome. And the day we went, it poured with rain which meant we hardly had to queue for any of the rides.
It was during our time in Fantasy Land that I began to feel vaguely uneasy. There’s a ride there called. “Small world”. You are taken on a world tour and regaled by hundreds of caricatures of children, all done out in national costume and smiling gleefully. And all the while, the song pumps out, “It’s a small world after all”, relentlessly, as though the needle has got stuck on the record, almost as if convince you that it is indeed a small world after all. Such is the power of the message that it would be easy enough to be taken in by the feel-good factor; but there is some honesty about the Disney Corporation – at least the ride’s located in Fantasy Land.
Because the real world isn’t populated by smiley happy children. In the real world there’s war, poverty, exploitation and the denial of particular cultures and ways of being if they don’t fit in with the kitsch images of big corporations. Childhood is sanitised, romanticised and branded, and its imperfections, complexity and diversity snow-brushed out.
And childhood is imperfect. If any reminder was needed, it was provided by the experience of driving half way across France with three under 10s in the back of a Nissan Micra. And adults are imperfect too. Family holidays aren’t the stress free idyll they’re presented as in the travel programmes. Things get fraught, tempers frayed. There’s conflict. But there’s also resolution and fun and warmth and a whole range of new experiences. And at the end of it all, the fall-outs are forgotten and the enduring memory is of a great holiday.
Big commercial operations like Disney aren’t the only ones to sanitise childhood. Increasingly, too, we try to do it professionally. We brand children to fit in with our own professional images of them. The current dominant image is of their need for protection. Yet some of the practices which flow from that particular representation of children and youth can result in them being cocooned from the realities of life. We've become scared of conflict between adults and children. In my latter years in practice, staff became reluctant to confront youth at the appropriate point, lest they be accused of escalating a situation. And of course, the result was that youth, desperate for some appropriate boundary of adult authority, pushed ever further, until, by the time the confrontation did come, it was far more extreme than it need have been. And by this stage, the prospect of holding on to any sort of authority or dignity on either side, was long compromised.
Now here comes my contribution to recent discussion threads on CYC-NET. It seems to me that when it gets to this point, staff feel the need for some sort of payback such as involving the police and getting the young person charged. But by this stage there’s no point. All the literature on group care tells us that the kind of youth we work with don’t respond to simple cause and effect or to the kind of legal-rational structures of the organisations we work for. And the kind of helplessness which staff feel can lead to youth being rebranded, not as victims, but as villains, who need to be dealt with through youth justice programmes – all to meet their needs you understand!
It seems to me that we need to reconcile the victim and the villain, the good and the bad in all of us, youth and workers. And that involves conflict because we all have our different experiences, and perceptions and values and belief and moods, all of which need to be contested and negotiated. And that can be conflictual, but it’s through that process of negotiation and to-ing and fro-ing that learning and growth takes place and we can come to some meaningful understandings.
The alternative to acknowledging and seeking to use that conflict creatively is to kid ourselves on that we might live in a rational and conflict free world if only we could get the procedures right and everyone assumed appropriate responsibility for their own actions. A worrying consequence of this delusion is that we start to blame the kids when the procedures don’t produce the goods or when, because of the rotten hand life’s dealt them, they don’t live up to our conceptions of rationality or responsibility. Those who don’t fit in with these dominant views are quickly “othered”. This particularly authoritarian way of thinking has contributed to a rise of over 40% in the prison population over the past 6 years in Britain.
I remember in the course of my social work training being taught by a child psychiatrist who advocated the benefits of a good “stairheid brawl” to sort things out and move them on. I was encouraged too by reading about a piece of research in the newspaper showing the benefits of families bickering around the dinner table. It apparently encourages resilience and negotiation skills.
We maybe need to learn from this in Child and Youth Care and think more about how we handle conflict rather than just about how we avoid it. And that’s about us as workers and about the sense we have of ourselves and the sense of ourselves that we’re allowed to have by our employers. If we think that we can come up with the procedure that will remove conflict from the working environment we might as well believe that it is indeed a small world after all.
