Editorial Comments are provided by the writer in their personal capacity and without prior sight of journal content.
Prior to the CYC World Conference in St. John’s in July, I attended a pre-conference summit at Amal Youth and Family Centre entitled “Keeping Relationships at the Centre”. Among the many themes we talked about, one seemed to come up fairly often …
We all know that Child and Youth Care (CYC) is about human connection and presence. It happens in unscripted moments, over a game of soccer, during a chat in a hallway, a shared meal, or in the silence of a difficult moment. Relational practice relies on building trust, intuition, and on authentic connection that is nurtured over time. And yet, more and more we hear about relational spaces quietly being crowded out by an enveloping tide of bureaucratic red tape and bean counting.
Hearing the accounts of delegates at the summit, it seems that practitioners are increasingly finding themselves spending more time documenting their work than actually doing the work. Their primary relationship is no longer with the young person in front of them, but rather with compliance to a bureaucratic beast of risk assessments, compliance and performance indicators that absorbs hours of precious time that could (and should) be spent on building connections and relationships. Are systems helping practitioners spend more time with children and families, or more time proving that they did?
It should come as no surprise that one the first casualties of systems designed to meet budgetary targets and ticked boxes (often under the guise of ‘greater efficiencies’) is relational practice. As our summit keynote, Dr Kiaras Gharabaghi noted, “Relational practice takes time”. But time is rarely money’s best friend. How we navigate this contradiction will go a long way to determining the future identity, and indeed the soul, of our work with young people.
