Listen to thisChild and youth care practice, as the name suggests, focuses on children and youth. Caregivers, including parents, kinship and foster caregivers, as well as institutional caregivers, are part and parcel of the field’s focus on children and youth and there is a strong recognition within the field of child and youth care that many challenges experienced by children and youth are really the implications or even the outcomes of challenges experienced by the caregivers. But the field itself does not focus on the care for caregivers per se; it only focuses on the ways in which caregivers impact young people and therefore aims to provide support to caregivers to impact on young people in positive ways. One might argue that in the context of institutional care provision, the concept of supervision does to some degree provide a caregiver care framework applicable to direct care staff, but even if that might be the case in (some, but not all) theories of supervision, most of the time, it certainly does not manifest that way in practice. Supervision is, in most institutional settings and especially in schools, live in treatment settings, youth custody facilities and group homes, an afterthought and much more focused on performance issues and professional development rather than care.
How do we support caregivers? It varies, but in many sectors, notably in child welfare and in child and youth mental health, our support is largely limited to referrals to counselling of varying kinds. In family-based child and youth care practice, we work with caregivers more directly and often engage with them in daily life events such as preparing dinner, going on outings with the children or youth, and playing games as a family. This work is excellent and necessary, but it is not care work for caregivers. It is instead work designed to help caregivers provide moments of joy and relational safety for children and youth. In other words, we work with caregivers as an indirect form of work with children and youth. This work is not about the caregivers; it is about the experiences of children and youth at the hands of their caregivers.
Who does work with caregivers? For the most part, all the human service disciplines do this work. Social workers, nurses, psychologists, medical practitioners, and others are all prepared to work with caregivers, using modalities that are usually office-based, almost always one to one, and generally by appointment. Additional group-based work with caregivers is focused on parenting skills and capacity-building to provide better care (such as Tripple P programs), but such work is not focused on caring for the caregivers. In short, most of the work accessible to caregivers is not care work but professional practices that are disconnected from the everyday life experiences of those caregivers. This is inadequate. We know that many caregivers (parents, sometimes older siblings) are themselves of an age that is not very different from that of the youth we work with. We also know that caregivers, regardless of age, are often still struggling with making sense of adversities in their own lives, including intergenerational trauma, racial trauma, addictions, abuse, neglect, disabilities, and so much more. For the same reasons we generally don’t think that office-based counselling is an adequate answer for the life challenges of young people, such counselling is unlikely to be a meaningful response to the needs of caregivers. And yet, many of our systems, especially child welfare, increasingly rely on familial and kinship caregivers to respond to the needs of young people.
I wonder whether we have simply underestimated the needs of caregivers. So much of our efforts demand of caregivers to think and do like a child and youth work practitioners, but so little of our efforts equip caregivers as persons to be able to do that. Many Plans of Care carefully crafted for young people discharged from institutional settings or case managed within child welfare contexts fall apart on the basis that caregivers were under-equipped to do their part, resulting in blame and judgment. The expectation that they would be able to do their part may have been overly optimistic and somewhat naïve.
Could we imagine a more systematic approach to caregivers across our various care systems? If so, we need to ask who should be providing care to caregivers? It seems to me that care provision to caregivers is not part of the curriculum or training of any of the core professions involved. Social workers, child and youth care practitioners, psychologists or nurses are not explicitly trained for this purpose. In fact, the only care (in the true sense of that term) that is often available to caregivers is care provided through community networks, but even that is culturally specific and largely limited to communities where community care forms part of longstanding cultural traditions, such as some Indigenous communities, some Black communities, and some ethno-cultural communities that have maintained strong community ties in diasporic contexts. For the most part, however, such care provision for caregivers is informal and neither supported nor funded by formal service systems.
What are the unique needs of caregivers for the children and youth child and youth care practitioners often encounter? First, I would suggest, those needs revolve around the concept of autonomy. Many caregivers are expected to work as components of existing systems to ensure child safety and wellness, loaded as these are with racial and normative biases and with surveillance and judgment mechanisms that aim to impose conformity. It is difficult to maintain any sense of personal autonomy under those circumstances, and for caregivers still struggling with their own adversities, it becomes difficult to even own their own adversities and continue their reflective and personal work to mitigate such adversities. Beyond ensuring a sense of Self and autonomy for caregivers, their needs extend also to everyday life events. For many caregivers, the expectation of decision-making based always and exclusively on the needs of the child or youth in their care is unrealistic and potentially damaging. There are in fact moments where caregivers must think of their own needs ahead of those of the child or youth in their care because wounded caregivers can be a risk to the wellbeing of children and youth. Furthermore, caregivers have advocacy needs. Many caregivers are systematically disadvantaged in advocacy contexts resulting from prejudice and stigma associated with their social (and often racial) positioning. Care for caregivers means not only personal care of the person, but also assistance and capacity-building for systemic and case-based advocacy, not dissimilar from what we do with children and youth.
A list of potential needs of caregivers is endless. Of note, however, is that the role of being a caregiver to children and youth from care is a unique role and one that disproportionately is taken on by individuals who themselves need care. Treatment, counselling, and other service programs to which we often refer caregivers under such circumstances are important components of a strategy to strengthen care giving, but they are not enough and rarely sustainable. Caregivers who provide care to children and youth from care often do so under conditions of surveillance, limited resources, often poverty and life instability, and very often unresolved trauma and adversities that extend to the present and shape their futures. It is not infrequent that care provision on the part of such caregivers unfolds also in the context of violence or the threat of violence, especially given the enormous overrepresentation of women as the sole or primary caregivers for the children and youth.
As child and youth care practitioners, our commitment to serving the needs of children and youth is very clear. And yet, are we forgetting that those very children and youth we serve now will be the caregivers of children and youth in the future? Serving children and youth means more than strengthening their sense of Self and their life circumstances. It means thinking about the needs, the desires, and the circumstances of caregivers, young and old, and developing meaningful life-space interventions and care regimes for those caregivers, who often were, not so long ago, the very children and youth to whom we committed our service. I am very interested in thinking through building training and education programs for caregiver care. I do not believe that we have such programs currently, and I think this is a major gap in child and youth services almost everywhere.
