Listen to thisI am sitting at the airport with my friend Leon while he waits for the boarding announcement which will begin his new adventure. He is leaving to start a new job in a new country and a new culture. We sit down to have coffee while we wait and I notice the number on the table. Nineteen. “Look,” I say to him, “it adds up to 10, a perfect 1. New beginnings. The start of a new adventure. The commencement of a voyage.”
His is visibly shaken by what I say. He reacts like I had gently slapped his face. At first I wonder if he is thinking I am weird, referring to numerology like this. But then he talks about how, while he was aware that he was going off to a new adventure, putting it that way has driven it home and he is remembering other times, other experiences, other new beginnings in his life and how they have turned out. He talks for a minute about the connection between this experience and previous times when he has been starting out on a new voyage like this. He notices his physiological and emotional reaction to this connection. He is processing this experience as we sit there.
And as he talks, I am reminded of the young people who come in to our programs and how we ask them, through our actions and statements, to “start something new” with us. To let go of the present and move in to the future. To enter in to a new beginning.
They must be doing the same things as my friend did at that moment. Reflecting back. Remembering. Drawing up their lived experiences of those previous times. Some might be good memories, some might be less so. But they, like all the rest of us, will do what Leon did “connect the present to a previous experience. They will have a tendency to look at the immediate experience in terms of similar ones. This is, after all, part of the process of structuring meaning.
Now, I am not, of course, suggesting that they will be able to do what my friend did “to notice that this is occurring, to separate present from past experiencing, and to approach the present one with open availability for a fresh experience. More likely they will not notice that this is what is happening. They will simply have the experience, the reaction, without noticing that some of their reaction to the present experience is a re-living of a previous one.
So, one of our tasks as Child and Youth Care Workers, might just be to find ways to help them see the connections they are making. To help them understand that what they are experiencing might be, in part, a re-living of old experiences. For it is only in being able to distinguish how the previous experience impacts on the present experience that a person is able to attend to the present experience with clarity and simplicity.
This is not to suggest that all previous experiences have a negative influence on the present one. Indeed, the exact opposite might be true. And this is not to suggest that connecting the present experience to the past is problematic. After all, we learn important lessons in all our experiences, and what we learned in a previous situation may be just what we need in order to make the best of this one.
I am only asking that we remember that all experiences are interpreted in light of our previous experiences, especially when they are similar in some way. So, the next time you are admitting a young person in to your program, or asking her to begin a new experience with you, you might take a moment to ask, “how is this experience similar to other ones you have had?" or, “does this remind you of any other times in your life?" Just like I might ask, “does reading this remind you of other similar experiences?"
Thom
* * *
Because we offer a simple news service on CYC-NET (visit QuickNews on our front page any day) we are in daily touch with a number of news agencies. Accordingly we were keen to follow news of the recent 7th International Child and Youth Care Conference in Victoria. During the four days of Conference we saw in the world's media more than seventy critical and negative news items concerning services for children and families “reporting incidents of neglect, assault, abuse, mismanagement, dismissals, inadequacies, escapes, closures, complaints “and not one word about the international event in Victoria.
I lie. On the 20 August there was a report on the launch of the McCreary Youth Foundation in British Columbia which arose from the work of the BC Consortium for Youth Health. The Consortium held a press conference on the occasion of its own Conference, “Getting Youth on the Agenda: Promise into Practice" on August 20th as part of the 7th International Conference on Child and Youth Care at UVic. And on 26 August there was a report on the Early Childhood Development Virtual University, operating through the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria. Alan Pence explained that the project, working with African families in Uganda, had seen 27 people from 10 different countries sign up for post-graduate studies. “About 12 have been in Victoria this month to meet with some of the funding organizations and attend a conference on child care." On 21 August we did come across an interesting report on the problem of child-to-child abuse. This had arisen at a conference at the University of Victoria ... in Australia.
In short, the world's press heard that huge crop of negative reports, but apart from those two indirect mentions, nothing of our conference.
Opportunity missed.
This is not meant as a criticism of the organisers of Promises into Practice. It is an observation addressed to our whole profession, wherever it finds itself, at conferences, local meetings, training programs ... and in the tens of thousands of daily interactions with children, youth and families where “surely? “we are proud of what we attempt and do. It is a criticism of our inarticulateness on behalf of our profession, in disseminating information about what we do, why we do it and how we do it.
"But our ethics preclude us from giving out information about our clients," we say. Correct. But we don’t have to give names and addresses when we explain to the people of our towns and cities what we do in our programs for children and youth. And statistics are also anonymous: how well do we present the “results" of our work, the numbers of young people who are helped by child and youth services, the percentage of kids who are “doing better" “and the majority whom we manage to keep functional and who get on with their lives.
A couple of months ago a world-famous newspaper ran a week of negative stories about child and youth services in its eponymous city. The “methodology" it adopted was to find a truly distressing story of a youth or family who had suffered in some way through bad service delivery. This led to news of a similar youth or family, and then another ... This “sample selection" ensured a picture of a 100% failure rate. Readers were left with an entirely incomplete picture, for the other side of the story remained untold. Nobody talked of the tragedy of sustained neglect in troubled families, of abused kids, of unrelenting poverty, of years of unmet developmental needs, of the usual sequelae of such experiences “and how difficult it is to decide what to do, let alone to resource and fund what we do, when we engage with these families and receive young people in our programs.
Not for me to propose how we should deal with our collective silence, though contributions to the debate here started would be welcome, either here or in our discussion group. But should we start, do you think, by creating the post of Media Secretary whenever we hold a conference or have an association meeting or start a program or report on our outcomes or make discoveries which would be of interest to families and communities? Or when our profession is misrepresented in incomplete media reports or when more information would clarify and balance such reports. If we have a Media Secretary we would at least have someone to speak when we feel that we have something to say.
BG
