Listen to thisA man and a woman are talking at a party. She sips her drink, asks, “What do you do?”
“Work with youth.”
“That’s wonderful, must be hard work?”
“Yes, it challenging but I really enjoy it.”
“So where do you work?”
“On the street, in the house, the park, school, a hike ..."
“Do you work for an agency or organization of some kind?”
“Yes, a group home.”
“What’s the approach? I’m a social work student and it would be interesting.”
The worker smiles, says, “We try to show up everyday. And we encourage the youth to do the same thing.”
“That’s it?”
“Pretty much. We try to be present, open and available to listen and understand. We also try to be energetically engaged.”
“You need a degree for that?”
“Well it helps if you are curious and eager to learn about self and other. But the learning never stops really.”
“So anybody who is curious and wants to learn can do it?”
“No not really, that’s just a good place to start. You have to like youth, enjoy being in the thick of it, and try to understand your own story”
“That helps you know what it is like for them right?”
“No, it helps you know what it was like for you and should make you curious about their experience.”
“Are there specific outcomes you are expected to achieve?”
“Every day.”
“Like what?”
“Eat lunch, solve a problem, spend a quiet moment together, fix a flat tire, read to one another, share a feeling, and help others complete a task?”
“You’re playing with me,” she says as if she just caught on that maybe he was pulling her leg.
“No, not really, those are very important events in the lives of young people who have not had an opportunity to be with caring adults”.
“Can you make a living at that?”
“It’s difficult, but it’s a good life.”
Unlike the worker above, I sometimes I think we still focus too much on program and our profession in defining ourselves. We identify ourselves by the program we work in and as Child and Youth Care workers, or whatever our title is, often in comparison to other programs and professions. While this is an important part of our development, maybe we are ready to move ahead to a new way of identifying ourselves: by articulating what we actually do.
In conversations with the public and introductions during workshops or meetings, workers often speak of the program they work at or the program they used with kids. It is as if their identity is tied more to the program rather than the work they do. Henry Maier, noted Child and Youth Care teacher and author, used to ask people to introduce them selves by saying something they did with children and youth. He, like other wise leaders, did not want us to get caught-up, or boxed-in, in our professionalism and programs. Our work was to grow, learn and develop with children and youth. He preferred that we spend more time on developing a rich menu of activities geared to the developmental readiness and capacity of youth to participate, and that we did this care, sensitivity, dependability and predictability, and rhythmic interaction. Space, place, time and engagement all came before program in his world of genuine practice. He had little patience for people who boasted about their programs but could not say much about what they did in their daily interactions. Karen VanderVen has challenged us for years to stay focused on activity and not use the step or level or other mechanical systems that keep us from getting engaged in the multitude of activities available to us.
I found this all reaffirming. As a young man I had felt from my first day as a Child and Youth Care worker that what I did was important: sweeping floors, playing kickball, breaking up fights, hikes, painting, lunch, and reading to each other were all an important part of what I did with children and youth. Where else can you play and get paid for it, we used to joke, even after a tough day.
This was good, hard work. It wasn’t for everybody but for those who saw what could be done it was the best work around. Later of course from reading Henry and many others and attending conferences I learned how sophisticated it was and how the relationship between theory and practice could play out every day in every interaction if I knew how to see it. I used to like to say my job was to relate with youth and to try to weave as much care, learning and counseling as possible into every daily interaction.
These thoughts came to me when I was reading a chapter on Vaclav Havel in a book titled Post National Identity. Havel was the man who led the Velvet Revolution from his prison cell. Together with many colleagues who kept getting the word out through the underground, insisting on free speech, the Czechs eventually expelled the Soviet Union from their country. A tank is turned on its side in Wenceslas Square as a symbol of non violent resistance. I was there with my son and brother-in-law shortly after the revolution. A few days later we went to pound chips from the Berlin Wall.
Maybe if we focus on defining the universal nature of our caring interactions in daily interactions we could overpower the mechanistic, quick fix, outcome and evidence focus approaches that have for the most part attempted to undermine the importance of care work.
