Listen to thisWhat I’d like to do for my address today is to look at our profession and our title. Professional titles are meant to tell you what somebody has expertise in. A lawyer has expertise in the law. A teacher has expertise in teaching. A physician has expertise in the physical body. Titles are meant to let people know what you’re good at. So let’s look at our title: “Child Care Worker". That’s our professional title. But only the middle word defines our area of expertise. Children will be children without us. The Child in the Child Care Worker is the Who. The Work is defined by your agency. they’ll tell you what to do. they’ll tell you when to show up and they’ll tell you how many days you work. They tell you when you are off and when you’re on, and what you’re supposed to do when you’re there. The work is defined by the agency. The care is defined by you. This is the area of expertise that gives meaning to our job title, because the child is there and the work is there, defined by others. But we are not child workers. It’s a mistake to say that you’re a child worker “that you work with kids. People who do a lot of things work with kids. People who take kids swimming work with kids. That’s not what we do. We care for kids. That’s quite different. So I’d like to look at what makes caring work.
Usually caring is not seen as work. Caring is supposed to be a joyful experience. Caring is supposed to be something that happens and is often associated with violin music playing. Caring is supposed to flow from us in times of elation. So why do we say that we do Child Care Work?
One of the reasons I am convinced that we’re still not receiving professional recognition, and in some places we’re still having trouble being recognised as even paraprofessionals, is that we’re not doing a very good job of communicating the skill that’s necessary to care for kids. When you see these people that we take care of, you don’t automatically flow with love. And that’s been one of the problems. People have thought that because they were children, that caring for them was something that just came to us. Well it doesn’t just come to us. It’s work, hard work. And that’s why we’re professionals. Because these are the type of kids that ordinarily, if I saw them playing in my backyard, I’d tell them to go play in their own yard. I wouldn’t want them in my yard. I wouldn’t particularly want them playing with my kids. So why do I give my life to taking care of them? Because that’s my profession. That’s what I chose. Also what you chose. So I think that one of the things we need to do to enhance ourselves professionally is to stop saying “I work with kids", and let people know that you care for very troubled youngsters whom nobody else will care for. If somebody else cared, they wouldn’t be in your face. If somebody was willing to have them in their home, they’d be in their home. If Aunt Martha was willing to take them, they’d be with Aunt Martha. If they hadn’t messed up in four foster homes, they would be in a foster home. These kids don’t come easy to care for. That’s why we have them. So let’s look at our caring.
I went to my little desk dictionary and opened it up and found four definitions of “care". One was to handle with care. That’s one of the things we get paid for. To handle these kids with care. Because the fact is that they’re pretty broken up. I like to think of them as something like a treasure, and if you had something like this that’s broken and damaged, you don’t just toss it casually to someone and say “fix it". When something precious is broken and damaged, you carry it carefully, and you ask “Would you please fix this". Those are our kids. Our kids are all broken up. Someone has whacked them silly, either emotionally or physically or otherwise. And we are the ones who have to handle them with care. They look pretty good and sometimes it doesn’t occur to you when you see them on the street corner that they need to be gently carried. They look like they need to be kicked across the street maybe. That’s why they get in so much trouble, because they look like they need a good swift kick. But we know that they need to be carried. Sometimes, of course, it takes three or four of us to carry them, but we do it, and we do it carefully.
The dictionary also said that caring means to like or regard. This is not easy. Give yourselves permission to find this hard. The defensive behaviours that our kids resort to are the very things that make our work work. They’re defending themselves against a world that they expect will hurt them, and it takes a lot of work to look under that and see a child who needs to be cared for. The world can’t see this because most people in the world don’t work in our field. They don’t know how to care, so they give them another kick, or they put them in jail, or they turn them over to the cops, and they don’t see their brokenness and frailty. But we see, and we call them “honey", and that’s care and liking. Another thing that makes it work is that our kids don’t respond very well. Remember “caring" is when the violins are supposed to play, and then I start walking across this stage here and another person walks toward me and we meet in this warm embrace. We could run all day after our kids and never get a warm embrace. They don’t come running toward us; they run away from us. Helen Pearlman made an analogy in an article written for Child Welfare and I loved it. She talked about starving people in some place like Ethiopia and watched the way they dished out food to them. They don’t hand those kids huge barrels of food because they’re so hungry. They give them little cups of food because their stomachs are shrunken, and if you give them too much food, they’ll get sick and die. They can’t take it “not all at once. It’s just like after you've been on a diet and you start eating a sundae and you maybe get a little nauseous, and you can’t believe it yourself, that you can’t finish the whole thing. “What’s happened to my old self? I used to eat three of these and now I can’t finish one". Helen Pearlman says that our kids are like this. They’re starved for affection, and we come to their shrunken emotional selves and try to pour in huge doses of affection, and they can’t take it. That’s why they call us a “mother" after we've called them “honey". They can’t take it. And it’s not because there’s anything wrong with them. But they’re shrunken emotionally and we have to feed them with an eye dropper. A little pat on the back at a time, a little bit of hand-holding at a time. It'll take years, though, before they come back to respond, and that again is why it’s work.
Protection
Another definition of caring is to provide protection. That’s our job
also. That’s why we have people like Paul Smith come to conferences like
this to talk about the assaultive child. But how do you protect the
child who’s out to get you? It’s kind of a funny thing, right? I mean,
the child throws a chair across the room and it’s aimed at your head,
and if you weren’t a child care worker, you’d think about protecting
your own head. Instead, we think about how to protect the child against
their own impulses, against their own violence, against their own
tendencies to lash out at the world that they think hates them. It’s an
interesting concept, and it’s one of the reasons why professional caring
is very different from just good feelings.
we’re supposed to keep our kids safe. That’s also why we have a workshop here today about sex. We work with kids who have been brutalised sexually. They come to our place, and if we don’t watch them in the shower, they’re going to get brutalised again. If we don’t watch them at night, somebody'll be in bed with them and hurt them again. We get paid to protect them. We get paid to make sure that they don’t throw a chair at us, and that we don’t throw a chair at them. And we get paid to make sure that they don’t sleep with us and we don’t sleep with them. And it’s hard work, because normally people don’t react to having a chair thrown at them by worrying about the person who’s throwing the chair. The last thing the dictionary says is that when we care we watch over and worry about. Unfortunately, we always get told not to take our work home with us. Breathes there a mother who goes away on vacation and never gives a thought to her children? It can’t be done. You might tell yourself, “I’m going to leave these kids and I’m not going to think about them all weekend". Never happens. We promise ourselves that we will not bring these kids home with us, but we can’t escape it. Not because we get paid to work, but because we get paid to care. And when you care, you worry. So instead of telling yourself that you’re not being good at your job because you can’t shake it, remember that unfortunately, we bought into it. We bought into caring, and when you care, you lose a little sleep; you lose a little food; you lose a little peace of mind.
All of these are what makes our profession work. So give yourself permission to care and to call it “Child Care Work" because that’s what it is. We get paid to care, and unfortunately for our kids, they wouldn’t get cared for if we didn’t get paid. Especially the kids who are cast away and tossed aside because they have already bombed out with people who will take care of them for free.
Cost
There is another aspect of the cost of caring. It costs to care either
way: well, or poorly. If caring is done badly, it costs the recipient.
If caring is done well, it costs the person who is caring. So somebody
in this little dyad has got to pay for this job. The best example for me
is my car. What happens when you take your car in? You leave it there
all day, you arrange for a ride, you call and make sure it’s done, you
go to pick it up and it’s not done yet. You wait, and you pick it up and
it’s still broken. It costs. It costs me for them to have loused up my
car. It costs me a day of trouble, it costs me time, it costs me all
that mess of going back and forth, it costs me money that I paid and
didn’t get anything back for. So when a job is done badly, the recipient
pays. If the job is done well, it costs the person that’s doing the job,
because you can’t do a job well and have a good time. If you do a job
well, any job really, you have to work hard. You have to pay attention.
You can’t make any mistakes. You have to sweat a little bit. So the way
we care for our kids is going to cost somebody. If we don’t care well
enough, it’s going to cost the kids; and if we care well, it’s going to
cost us. If we’re willing to slip shod around, come into the unit, drink
a little coffee, hum a little music, put our feet up, every so often
say, “Kids, stop that", they’re going to pay, because they are not going
to get cared for and they are not going to get better. If, however, I
come to the unit and I decide I’m really going to care, my stomach knots
up, sweat pours from my brow, and they make me cry and go to the
bathroom to hide. I can’t think of what to do, I have to work longer
because I have to stay even though my shift is up. So, if we’re going to
be true professionals, we’re going to have to give up being careless and
sloppy, and we’re going to have to accept that being a professional is
going to cost us. The other thing is that when we love our kids, it
hurts us. Any of you who are parents or are married or are in love with
somebody know that when somebody that you love hurts, you hurt. Think of
the last time you planned to visit someone in the hospital. Think of the
last time somebody fell down and got a boo-boo and you had to take them
to the doctor and they were crying, and all of a sudden, you hurt too.
In child care, we don’t have any kids that don’t hurt. As soon as they
stop hurting, we send them away. As soon as our kids stop hurting,
they’re better, treatment is over and away they go. We get in a new kid
who hurts. And if we care, and they hurt, we hurt. Freud has used the
word “empathy" which is a German word for feeling into or being one
with. If you’re going to feel into these kids who live with you, you’re
going to hurt. If you’re going to be one with the kids who live with
you, you’re going to hurt.
So, ours is a profession that demands personal involvement. I can bake cookies without hurting. I can even fix my car without hurting. We can’t care for these kids without hurting, and if we don’t hurt, we don’t care. So we have an emotional profession. Beyond getting paid to feel, however, we also get paid to act and to behave in certain kinds of ways. A good child care worker can’t just walk around feeling all day. You have to be able to feel and to be one with, but if you can’t put the kids to bed when it’s time, you'll get fired. And if you can’t anticipate which kid is going to hit you, you’re liable to get hit, and fired too. For us to do our job, we have to act. We have to cook and clean and sew and do the beds and rock them when they’re sick. And all of this for a few hundred a month! And one of the reasons that we get paid what we get paid is that we have not convinced people that what we’re doing is work. It’s not just “do-gooding". I would not do this on my own if I wasn’t getting paid. And most of us wouldn’t. And we have to get the word out. Because this is not something that comes naturally. This is a very hard, demanding job that demands all that we are and all that we have. But nobody is going to give us what we deserve until we convince them.
There are many ways to say “I care". Loving gestures, for example, being kind, being respectful. They all say “I care". Another way to say I care is to know what you’re doing. The caring mother who learns how to be a mother. Professional development which is what the Child Care Worker Association is all about, demands that we move from defining caring as only a feeling, and add to that definition skilled ability and practice. That’s a profession. We've already said that the job demands our feelings. We've said that the job demands our action. It also demands our thinking. We have to do it well. We have to know what we’re doing. Think about what needs to be done, and care about the way we do it. In many ways, we’re still paying for the orphans, you know. we’re paying for that time when there were lots of kids around who didn’t have any parents, and what they needed was a roof and some food and some basic nurturing. But there aren’t any of those left in our programs. we’re still living with the stigma, however, that there are poor orphans in our place and we give them food and shelter and that’s good enough. But it’s not true. Our kids need a lot more than food and shelter, and if we’re looking into the future, it’s going to get worse. Money has dried up. People do not like institutions. People do not like placing children in institutions, and they will only place into child care agencies those kids who cannot be handled any other place, and they’re going to get worse and worse. Think about the kids that are coming in now “the idea of feeding them and clothing them is so removed from their real needs that you don’t even think about it. It’s not where your energy goes. You don’t think about their sneakers. You think about providing them with what they need, and they need care “professional care “and that demands of us our feelings, thoughts and actions.
No profession allows learning on the job. I don’t want my doctor learning on the job! When I’m sick, I want her to have gone to school first. I want her to have gone through a residency. Then, maybe, I want her to touch my body. We have to move toward a professional reputation. We have to move toward education. We have to go to school. We have to visit other agencies and find out what child care is all about. We have to go to conferences like this one today. We have to combine our formal and informal education. Our kids deserve from us all that I expect from my doctor.
What do other professions do? Other professions combine education internships and experience. But in child care we give somebody a set of keys, point to the classroom or the unit, and say, “There they are". We also have to supplement our formal “book" learning by learning from the kids. When you’re sick and you go to the doctor, and he says without even looking at you, “Ah, I see exactly what your problem is", how does he know? He doesn’t. He only knows if I tell him where and how it hurts. I say, “It hurts me here, or here". Our kids tell us where it hurts and how it hurts. We can learn how to take care of them by asking, “Where does it hurt?" and by listening and observing and seeing where they hurt.
We have people’s lives in our hands. We have to break away from the myth that too much learning and education interferes with caring. You know, when we hear people say that you can’t learn how to do this in school, and book learning doesn’t help, don’t believe it. It’s kind of like a mother who only cleans up vomit and never reads Dr Spock. Most good mothers clean up vomit and read Dr Spock. That’s us. We need to care and we need to do whatever is required to learn how to care better.
The other thing about caring has to do with doing whatever is necessary. When you care for kids, you do all that’s required. That means that you lock up at night to protect them. It means that you clean up after them. It means that you clean the house. It also means that you’re going to study and you learn how to take care of the more disturbed. It’s easier to care, by the way, when you understand. If you go on a course, you'll like the work better. I always like my kids better after going to a conference like this. When you hear about them, when you think about them, you like them better. Education and training will enhance your caring. You'll like them better. So there are at least three elements to professional caring: feeling, thinking, doing. Professional caring requires emotional involvement. It requires a willingness to act in whatever capacity is needed. And, it requires a willingness to study and learn, to constantly improve our skills. And this is hard work. To be a professional and involve all three dimensions of our self requires considerable dedication.
We have not communicated this; and because we have not communicated this, we allow agencies that employ us to employ child care workers for little pay, to employ child care workers who have no prior training – after all, they can learn it on the job – and to employ child care workers who may not have the brain power. It is up to us, it is our responsibility, to begin to communicate the kind of skill, knowledge and emotional maturity it takes to properly care for our kids.
In conclusion, I’d like to say that professional skill and knowledge is no longer a luxury. As I’ve said, there are no more sweet young things referred to your agencies. They’re all gone. The other thing is that the eyes of the community are on us. Everybody knows that. You can’t get insurance. we’re being watched. we’re being scrutinised. We can’t just diddlybop around. We have to do what we do and do it well, and we have to communicate what we do and describe what we do to the community. This requires ethics, integrity, morality, and all that which is governed by professional associations. Not just anybody can be a member of a professional association. The doctor with too many malpractice suits against him gets kicked out. A doctor who has never gone to medical school would never get into the professional association to begin with. I really believe that if we have only professional child care workers, we would have no institutional abuse. There just wouldn’t be any. If everybody who worked with our kids were professionals in their caring, there would be no institutional abuse. There would be no newspaper stories. There would be no hurt kids getting hurt again!
So let’s give up our low self-image. We talked about low self-image for the kids all the time. It must be contagious because I think we've caught it. When is the last time that a mother asked her doctor son, “So, when are you going to get a real job?" How many child care men have been asked by somebody, “you’re still working with those kids? Why don’t you get a real job?" We have to turn that around, and we can’t do it by saying “I work with kids" and we can’t do it by accepting myths like formal education isn’t necessary. We need to have a professional identity so that we feel good about what we are doing and so that people stop thinking that we’re different and apart from everybody else that has a job to do and does it well. So let’s care. Let’s learn some things. Let’s join our professional organisations. Let’s begin to pay the price for caring and stop complaining, and let’s communicate the value of our kids and our work to the community. So “Who put the care in Child Care?" It’s not the kids; it’s not the agency. You did. We did. We put the care in Child Care.
