Listen to this
We have many people who have written about our work with young people and families and I will describe a few of the seminal thinkers who have shaped the CYC profession.
Fritz Redl is a foundational writer about working with the youth who he called “Children Who Hate” in the early 1950’s. Redl astutely wrote that it is easy to prescribe treatment ideas and what he called the medicine needed to help troubled young people. The problem is that as the helper tries to unpack the bag carrying these remedies, the young person either kicks over the bag or runs out of the room. Child and Youth Care practitioners use the life space to deliver this needed relief, where other office-based professionals have been unsuccessful. The skills needed to deliver the treatment are the professional arena where CYCs operate.
In the 1960’s Albert Treischman, along with James Whittaker and Larry Brendtro expanded this idea with a formulation of The Other 23 Hours which defined the boundaries of life space work where CYC skills are happening. They used behavioral methods and training strategies to alter the negative dynamics that needed to be addressed. The use of behavioral theory to practice in the life space was the main approach for at least twenty more years in our field.
Families became a more specific focus during the 1970’s and family systems theory became a useful framework for helping families while life space concepts fit easily into family support practice.
Starting in the 1980’s, Brian Gannon in South Africa began to write about the need to think developmentally when trying to change young people, describing both moral thinking levels as well as thinking stage development in childhood and adolescence. He wrote very descriptive accounts of working with the youth in his care which explained developmental thinking in practical ways.
In the 1990’s, Susan Leaf, a Canadian CYC, wrote an article The Journey from Control to Connection, which challenged the predominance of behavioral approaches in our field. She forcefully defended the use of relational ideas and criticized external control programs for lacking long term change results. Her ideas were not easily accepted at the time, but over the next decade there was a major shift in thinking to accept her conclusions.
Thom Garfat began to expand on relational concepts in the later 1990’s and he proposed a concept called “the inter-personal in-between” in the early 2000’s. Garfat and others continue to write about relational CYC theory and this is now a major focus in life space practice.
Jim Anglin described his research into effective CYC approaches in the early 2000’s where he found that successful CYC practice involved the CYC practitioner connecting with the pain experienced by the young people in our programs.
We have developed as a profession through these formulations so that we now describe CYC practice as relational and developmental. The shift in focus requires the skilled CYC practitioner to use little external control, have empathy skills informed by developmental ideas and humility, curiosity and respect, and strive to achieve a balance of agency with the person being helped.
I hope that this short and personally owned description of what we do, and how we try to do it, will be helpful.
