Listen to thisI am thinking lately about this fundamental
ingredient of Child and Youth Care practice. Like most important
concepts, it is more complex than it appears, and we often merely take
it as a given, without spending much time thinking through the
implications embedded in Life Space work.
Practicing our profession in the life space of other people is a clearly
different approach to delivering human services than the office based
approaches of most practitioners. Child and youth care is done most
effectively in the natural places that surround us, not in a neutral or
artificially constructed place. The lack of control of environmental
dynamics and the stress of mutual experience make Life Space work
equivalent to “working without a net”. New practitioners are acutely
aware of the dangers inherent in such places, while skillful, mature
practitioners are aware of the opportunities readily available.
I want to spend this installment discussing new workers' struggles with
this Life Space dynamic, and will use future columns to elaborate on how
life space work becomes a friend, rather than an alligator to be
wrestled to the ground.
Newer Child and Youth Care practitioners are quickly overwhelmed and intimidated by the
onrush of sensory stimulation, inter-personal bumps and clashes, lack of
obvious order and generally sparsely equipped environments that they are
suddenly surrounded by. My belief is that it takes six months for newer
workers to gain enough personal safety to reduce their own anxiety to
manageable levels, and another six months to skillfully manage the tasks
inherent in living well in whatever life space they are working. At the
end of a well supervised and relatively supportive first year of
practice, the newer worker often feels like he/she is starting to win
the battle.
There is a fitting in that is required early on, which new
workers must do, yet there does not seem to be any pat formula or
diagram for them to follow. The cultural and social demands of this Life
Space are both mysterious and in your face, providing little room for
reflection and thoughtful answers. Residential care workers will find
that the first reply to a friendly overture as they join a group of
teens will be “Who the (fill in the locally favorite expletive) are
you?”. Community based Child and Youth Care practitioners, as they stroll innocuously
around the local neighborhood, will get similar questions and suspicious
looks from both young and old. Family support workers, once they get
past the initial barrier of what did we do to deserve you, will get
challenged with questions about how their background or training has any
relevance at all to what the family really needs.
Newer workers respond to these personally challenging and sometimes
perplexing demands by feeling even less safe and competent, retreating
from the life space environment. Newer residential workers can hide in
the office or avoid challenging situations until they have figured out
how to fit in, unfortunately sometimes becoming too similar to the youth
by talking or dressing less like an adult. Community worker can stay In
the storefront, waiting for people to drop in to this more culturally
neutral environment, or only wander the neighborhood with a more
experienced colleague. Newer Child and Youth Care family support workers are often
relieved when families do not seem to be home, or certain more difficult
members are absent, and rely on a prepared agenda to get them through
the home visit.
Life Space work during the initial year of Child and Youth Care practice, is more about
the new worker getting comfortable and overcoming competence fears than
it is about a strategic use of life evens to create change. Yet the time
will come in each worker’s professional development when they could not
imagine any better place to work with people.
