Listen to thisOne problem with having conversations about child and youth care with people in the global north who have been part of the development of this profession for decades is that there often is not much room for critically assessing fundamental assumptions. One such assumption is that given the ongoing challenges experienced by young people, and the ongoing operations of longstanding institutions such as schools and residential care facilities, surely child and youth care remains relevant. What we need is to push harder on our longstanding projects.
And what are those projects? Well, they involve the never-ending efforts to legislate and regulate child and youth care as a profession; they also involve longstanding attempts to accredit child and youth care education based on child and youth care ideas that may or may not be relevant anymore; and they involve certification drives of individual practitioners that are meant to ensure quality standards in professional practices. Beyond that, we spent 20 to 30 years following World War II making the case for residential care specifically and life-space interventions more generally, then the next 20 to 30 years celebrating the expansion of such services in both public and private for-profit spaces with limited to no control or quality assurance system at all, then another 10 years or so making excuses for the horrific things that happened (and continue to happen) in real settings and often at the hands of so-called ‘child and youth workers’, until we got to the last 20 years or so during which residential care has been challenged and often dismissed as harmful and ineffective, and so we got busy making the case that residential care, in whatever context (from treatment to upbringing) remains both necessary and meaningful, but we need better quality assurance systems and a greater valuing of child and youth care as the profession most central in this kind of context.
All this has taken a lot of time and energy. Good people have been part of these discussions, have provided training to practitioners, have contributed to the various advocacy drives for professionalization, and are participating in the accreditation movement for post-secondary CYC programs across Canada. In the meantime, however, the world changed and in many global north jurisdictions, what child and youth care has provided and talked about is no longer at the centre of discussion. Instead, when it comes to funded (and often institutional) services (which represent most employment opportunities for CYCs in the global north), the mantra has shifted from care to outcomes, and the methods have shifted from life-space interventions to evidence-based manualized practices. Even the young people who are constructed as being ‘at risk’ or ‘in need to intervention, treatment, or support’ have changed. It is no longer the teenager with some family problems, engaged in moderately risky behaviours, moody and unpredictable, and occasionally aggressive, violent, or suicidal. How we miss that teenager! We miss them largely because in their absence (they still exist, but they are not the ones who come to our attention anymore), the aesthetic of our practice has been disrupted.
Whereas a photograph of child and youth care practice may at some point have featured an image of a practitioner and a youth doing something or ‘hanging out’ together (playing ball, hiking, or a group discussion), talking to one another, and whereas one might have been able to discern the development of an interpersonal relationship in which perspectives, world views, emotional states, and family experiences all come together in a sort of Zen problem-solving/meditative evolution of new life perspectives converging over time, a photograph of today’s child and youth care practice would be quite different. For one thing, the role of disability has emerged as a central aspect of who child and youth care practitioners are asked to engage. The need, according to virtually every major system from mental health treatment to education to youth criminal justice and child welfare is about protecting normative structures and institutions from the divergences experienced in interactions with young people with disabilities (notably neuro-disabilities such as autism, fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, and brain injuries). Usually, that is expressed as containing or changing the behaviours of the young people through formulaic approaches such as applied behavioural analysis (ABA). ‘Complex special needs’ are the new thing; moody teenagers can be managed through a combination of chemical control, coercive practices ranging from school suspensions to probation, and by simply ignoring them and letting them transition into adult services when the time comes. But responding to complex needs require clinical knowledge, brain sciences, and evidence-based practices performed with fidelity.
Given the rise of complex needs, almost always connected to disability (sometimes addictions constructed as distinct from disability) of some kind, the new practitioner is either a specialized worker-bee implementing evidence-based practices without resistance or critical thought, or an untrained person euphemistically translating treatment into security. Alternatively, the new practitioner is someone able to avoid liabilities emerging from racial mistreatment, controversial positions about equity and inclusion, and/or generally able to make due with compensation structures barely hitting survival thresholds. What is clear, however, is that no major system in the global North is looking ‘to make moments meaningful’, or to ‘engage everyday life events’, or even to practice through a relational lens, notwithstanding the rhetoric now co-opted by every human and even medical service profession about how ‘relationships are everything’. The only thing still missing, but coming soon to this new photograph of our profession are white coats, a statoscope, and a holy book of how to do our work steeped in whiteness and Eurocentric truth regimes.
Here are some stark realities: The settings where child and youth care practitioners have traditionally practiced are not funded (financially supported) to be relational, nor to be trauma-informed. They are not funded for youth participation nor for the operationalization of children’s rights. And they are not funded to help young people make meaning of things, to advance their autonomy, or to promote learning outside of strictly monitored and controlled curricular contexts. They are not funded for operationalizing equity and they are not funded to promote ongoing professional learning and deep (or even shallow) supervision, reflection, and reflexive practice. The rhetoric about all these things is strong and tempting; but it is rhetoric nonetheless. No one is looking for innovation; everyone is looking for doubling down on an age-old, Eurocentric, materialist and instrumental edict – outcomes matter and are largely analyzed in terms of their cost-savings to systems. As a result, we get shorter engagements, avoidance of high-cost services (such as residential care), an increasingly expendable child and youth care workforce that is being replaced by the much more conformist behavioural analyst workforce, and an even greater reliance on the hierarchically ordered expertise ladder, starting with psychiatry and moving its way through evidence-based clinical practices to ultimately roles that are assigned menial tasks of enforcing compliance and conformity. By the time we get to the work that actually involves the young person actively, we have largely downgraded things to educational assistants in schools and career-starters in treatment settings featuring primarily white 22-year olds looking to beef up their resume for the real jobs involving counselling, psychotherapy, and case-based treatment modalities, ideally in high prestige health care settings or in ‘normal schedule’ (not shift schedule) education settings down the road. If the work being aspired to can be done virtually from home (or the cottage) some or most of the time, even better.
From this perspective, the future of child and youth care is bleak indeed. Responding by trying to professionalize child and youth care is an ill-fated illusion. Either we are professionalizing something that is no longer wanted by the systems for whom we are professionalizing the profession, or we are adapting the profession to fit the current wisdom of the field – I am not sure which is worse, but I am certain that professionalization as an end in and of itself is not a good plan. I would say the same about accreditation movements in post-secondary child and youth care education. Standards are either reflective of things no one wants (or funds), or precisely of those things to which our profession evolved in resistance - the objectification of young people, the entrenchment of medical models, the thoughtless disregard for how diverse young people live their lives, and a massive wave of recolonizing the normative expectations of families and communities, complete with all the racism, gendered truths, and able-bodied ideologies deeply embedded within.
And yet, the systems are failing. Notwithstanding state of the art evidence-based approaches, young people are dying while receiving service; they are getting lost, transition to the adult homeless sector, become criminalized and grow up in youth criminal justice settings, or are either suspended or expelled from school (more common if they are racialized) or alternatively, moved through their education without learning a thing (common if their parents or caregivers are equipped, through privilege or material wealth, to ‘advocate’ on behalf of the youth). In many cases, and in particular in Indigenous contexts, they are additionally disconnected (dare I say intentionally?) from their communities, their language, their customs and culture, and their identities in the name of ‘evidence-based treatment’. To be fair, many young people also benefit from the services they receive in various institutions. Child welfare often protects young people from imminent and acute harm. Families are often grateful for the expanded communication and behavioural skills of their children, often gained through ABA therapies. Schools sometimes are able to help young people move from patterns of suspensions to academic success and excellence. Almost all institutions have implemented some form of identity and culture-affirming practices (or at least policies; although they have and are currently also moving toward negating these, and in the USA (and in Alberta) especially, they are moving toward total eradication and even criminalisation of DEI initiatives – Canada, Australia, the UK and others will not be far behind).
Still, what is patently obvious is that no matter how medicalized, how evidence-based, how expertise-driven systems become, the political economy of public services combined with the limitations of one way of knowing, of one ontological and one epistemological position, are apparent and will maintain and even perpetuate a fundamental need for something different for many children, youth, families and their communities. This has always been and will always be the space for child and youth care practice. As the whole of the system, from schools to hospitals to treatment settings to even many community settings are transforming themselves into the psychiatric institution of the 21st century, the fear of those who won’t conform, who cannot be broken, and who reject this approach will ensure that someone will call on child and youth care to work outside of these coercive and carceral bounds. That is when we need to be prepared to show up. Currently, I fear we are not only not prepared, but we are actively working to become less prepared.
So how do we stay relevant in the global north? I have three suggestions:
First, there ought to be fewer child and youth care practitioners. At least for now. Instead of every post-secondary institution working to enroll as many students as possible to balance their financial books, we need to stop flooding the market where there is no need for this workforce. There may be a need for bodies, but not for relational, ‘meeting you where you are at’, ‘hanging in and hanging out’, kind of bodies. The need currently is for security guards, and we don’t want to contribute to that!
Second, stop with the professionalization and accreditation nonsense. You won’t succeed, because no employer, no government, and no economist wants it. Therefore, it won’t happen. More importantly, the only way it could happen is by conforming to the systems as they are, by ensuring that our professionalized workforce can be used to advance the cause of the psychiatric institution, and we definitely don’t want that.
And third, get serious about re-inventing the child and youth care setting. Whether it is land-based practices (which are desperately needed in this era of shallowness and social media-inspired engagements), community-based or neighbourhood collaborations, Afro-futurism, theatre and theatre of the street, even the new-wave space of social media, or any other way of being with youth, their families and their communities, when the system implodes and desperation kicks in because too many young people are left behind, die, or otherwise detract from the merits of the carceral and psychiatrized services we are currently celebrating, we will have to step in with something like what the South Africans call Isibindi, the Zulu word for ‘courage’. We can prepare for the next round of child and youth care practice for traditional settings too. From my perspective, the ‘group home’ in whatever form is not dead; it is just not an institution of child and youth care anymore. Once we reclaim it and get rid of its coercive treatment narrative, we can be relevant in that context once again.
Currently, the global north is undergoing a massive shift in its orientation toward humanity. Democracy, relationships, collectivist actions, humanism, and respect for the land and ecological basis of all life are on their way out (and pretty much gone in some places). We can hop on that bandwagon and adjust who we are to fit better with the new needs of the post-care era. We can rename ourselves either actually or metaphorically to child and youth science or some such thing, and we can help to accelerate our status as pawns in a much larger game. In fact, we can rely on our fundamental hope that the needs of children and youth are seen as important in our society, that we care about them. But at a time when we are told we should mourn the death of a fanatic in the US who preached hate and division but we are pressured to look past the murder of children by the thousands elsewhere given the political inconvenience of naming genocide, why would we think children matter?
Care will always be important. It will always exist informally amongst people and within communities that have thousands of years of care cultures in their genes. And child and youth care will stay relevant, but only if we resist the temptation of giving in to the current winds of sadness. In many global South jurisdictions, child and youth care is more relevant that ever. Somehow, precarious conditions, the threat of violence, the resurgence of culture and identity, poverty, pride, courage, and the need for national soul-making has elevated what child and youth care is about and what it can contribute to the development of communities, nations and the world. In the global North, we are far too limited in our political economic understanding of humanity to see what else might be possible. But things will get worse – thankfully – and then we might turn to the global South and learn something new.
