Listen to thisIn a class on groupwork the other day we were talking about the leader’s role in maintaining “optimum levels of stress" “too little stress, and the motivation to work at tasks and issues is diluted; too much, and people feel threatened and unwilling to engage in the process. Someone commented that in his residential program the levels of stress seemed to be driven from the outside “by the demands of timetables, appointments, routines. Most others agreed.
What a pity this is, that we should lose the initiative for “climate control" in the very ecosystems our residential facilities are meant to be “however temporary. If we are not going to do something different from the pressured and irrational world “outside”, why bother to use residential options at all?
Any youngster entering a residential place is going to pass through certain stages before re-entering his or her own world “firstly perhaps one of welcome, respite, protection ... then special opportunities to face up to those things which led to admission ... then some strength-building for the move back towards external realities in re-engagement with family and community ... and then hopefully autonomous resumption of life tasks. It is the place as a whole, as much as the individual workers, which has to be responsive, facilitative and challenging through each phase of that process.
Most descriptions of Child and Youth Care work refer to our responsibility for creating and managing a helpful environment “and this means more than just the sum of its parts: the physical plant and the relationships and interactions which happen there. As we try to respond to the many expectations placed on us by our profession, our society and our officials, it is easy for our conception of environment to shrink and become less influential in our thinking, while we rush about keeping up with the appointments and timetables.
Mostly, we need the courage, as much as is necessary, to use our environments. They are intended to be either more or less protective, more or less demanding, more or less supportive, depending on where youngsters are in their journey through our programs. Beedell held that “a residential unit is deliberately separated from the rest of the community in order to give special environmental opportunities and it is a waste of time merely to reproduce in miniature, within the unit, the pressures and sanctions of the world outside, except insofar as these meet individual needs and further the purposes of the unit." (1970, 111-113) Inasmuch as we choose to use residential options, this is as true today as it was when he wrote this thirty years ago.
Would it be true, I wonder, that a good and well-managed environment could, by itself, achieve probably more than half of the work necessary for most kids admitted on to a residential unit? If so, we must be more careful about how we shape it.
The environment we create (the place and the climate and the activity within it) has enormous impact on young people. We should be asking: What messages does our environment send to kids? What messages would we want them to receive “and how can we achieve this? Here we are thinking not only about how the place looks (and what messages that sends) but how it feels to those who, for the time being, are living in it (and what messages that sends).
It could be that the word “community" is a good alternative to the word “environment" as used here. Think, for example, of the impact of the shift system on our work, whereby key workers may be absent for long periods from youngsters who are attached or attaching to them. In that absence, how well does our environment or community “carry" the responsibility for these relationships? Does it maintain and reflect the attitudes and manner of the absent staff member? Does it reflect a comparable communal “personality" “and does it offer an accurate continuity and consonant “relationship" between shifts?
To this extent our environments have a persona, and they are articulate, and we all bear the responsibility for this persona and what is “says" to kids and families. The relationships we build and the interactions we plan must be embedded in this environment and cannot afford to be “split off" from it. Colleague Ernie Hilton wondered in a discussion group recently how parents and social workers see the cigarette butts outside our facilities that are tossed out ... and whose role it is to pick up butts? However good staff are at relationships and interventions, they necessarily share responsibility for all aspects of the environment we build, for the community climate, for the corporate message – not necessarily for picking up butts, or even to see that butts are picked up, but at least to think about the persona of the environment, what we would like it to convey.
We have all walked into residential places and “got the message". Sometimes it has been cold and formal, dominated by offices and notice boards and short on privacy and personal spaces. Other times it has been warm and homelike, cosy and welcoming. But at yet other times it has been more complex and interesting than this: respectful and personal, certainly protective and stimulating ... yet with a sense that this is temporary and not a place to get stuck in, and maybe it’s time to think of graduating from this program ...
What, if anything, does your environment or residential community say to kids? What do you want it to say .. to which kids ... and when? Do you trust it to speak for you when you are off duty? Are you as a team in charge of the climate control, and are you courageous enough to use the residential “ecosystem" when (and for what) it needs to be used? Do you know when to move kids” experience of it from protective to challenging, from helping them to become “inappropriately" dependent to where they must move on for themselves, from prioritising their need to build trust through sensitive relationships ... to making it clear who should pick up the butts?
BG
