Listen to thisFor many years, those whose job or responsibility it is to support the development of young people have relied on behaviourist principles and interventions to support learning and change. I won’t argue here that arranging external consequences is completely ineffective when it comes to influencing individual choices, learning, or development. As I have said to students in the classes I facilitate, “I love my job, and am internally motivated to do it well, but if they stopped paying me, you all wouldn’t see me anymore.” Rewards, punishments, and reinforcements of all kinds can most certainly offer opportunities for learning and create guardrails along the highway of healthy development. It is my philosophy, however, that when we overly rely on these types of interventions, we begin to create barriers in the formation of relationships (particularly the reinforcement of power dynamics), and, indeed, move farther and farther away from relational practice overall.
It can be difficult to shift away from our reliance on a behaviourist approach. Pavlov did get those dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell, after all. And Skinner did get those rats to repeat a desired behaviour with the right rewards and punishments put in place. There is validity to behaviourist approaches. I think, though, that more than these experiments, the comfort behaviourist approaches offer CYC-P and other caregivers, has created the greatest difficulty in shifting away from a reliance on them.
Operant conditioning as a tool to support learning and change is really quite simple and straightforward to implement. When young person does desirable thing ‘x’ they get desirable thing ‘y.’ When they do bad thing ‘a’ then we present them with punishment ‘b.’ As Phelan (2009) points out, new CYC-Ps are often experiencing self-doubt in relation to their competence and focus much of their energy on doing the safe (or correct) thing. A behaviourist approach, with its clearly identified, black and white responses to complex behaviours and choices, meets the developmental needs of a new worker. There is very little personal challenge as practitioners to reflect, examine context, or consider each individual young person’s needs. We merely observe a behaviour or choice, go down our list of available consequences, and administer them as prescribed. Whether there is change or not, whether development is supported or not, we can report to our supervisor, and document in our logs that we have ‘done our job.’ But if we are engaging in relational practice, have we done our job? And what other tools are in the belt of a relational practitioner aside from our list of rewards and punishments?
One such tool is ‘the purposeful use of activities’ (Freeman, Fulcher, Garfat, Gharabaghi, 2018). When incorporating this characteristic into their practice, practitioners intentionally curate a specific experience for a young person that serves to address an unmet need, support learning, or offers them a chance to reflect on themself and/or those they might share a relationship with (Freeman, Fulcher, Garfat, Gharabaghi, 2018). I think of a young person I worked with who was transitioning into a new school. They were feeling unsafe in that process and verbalizing that they would not ever set foot in this new building. Our team at the time, purposefully planned a game of floor hockey with a staff member the young person knew and trusted, the young person’s principal, and their assigned 1-1 student support staff member. This game took place in the gym of the new school, and after a tour of the building. We all, as a staff team, avoided relying on a sticker chart and a list of punitive consequences, recognized the unmet need for safety, and belonging, and planned some purposeful activities that would meet this need. And it worked.
The story you are about to read is similar to the one I’ve just summarized above. It is about an adolescent teen looking to meet some fairly typical developmental needs (belonging amongst same-age peers, and increasing independence) and one staff team’s commitment to making intentional choices to plan and facilitate activities that would meet these needs, while also encouraging choices that would support healthy development. It is a story about a couple of specific activities, that were used to serve one or two particular purposes, but I encourage you to recognize that any activity can serve any purpose if you are thoughtful and intentional about the way you arrange the experience.
Back and Forth
“Harsh, eh!” My cousin DJ cackled while I coughed and hacked through tear filled and must-have-been-reddening eyes. It was times like this I missed living in Ottawa. Down South, it was so much easier to get a real pipe and some weed that wasn’t so harsh. 10 dollars a gram, too. But I was back up North now. Back home. It was good to be closer to my sister and my cousins, but toking out of a dented Pepsi can with some holes poked in it, well, there were better ways to get stoned.
“Fucking-” I started, but I interrupted myself with another coughing fit.
DJ’s laughter renewed with increased intensity. “Deadly weed, ah,” he stated.
My mouth filled with saliva and I gathered it into a wad to spit out at my feet. I let it fall out of my mouth, more than I spit it out. It froze the second it hit the hard, crunchy ice we were standing on. Some of it clung to my lip and dribbled down my chin. I wiped at my mouth and face with the back of my parka’s sleeve, hocked, and spit again.
DJ smacked me on the back. “You good?”
“It’s good,” I managed to force out through my bone-dry throat after one more spit to clear my mouth. I squeezed my eyes together and rubbed my palms into them to get rid of the last of the tears. “Aaaaaahck,” I said.
“Really could munch out,” DJ stated before he lit his torch lighter and hauled on what was left of the weed sitting in the can-pipe's bowl. “Got any cash on you?” he asked, lungs full of smoke.
I scrunched my nose and furrowed my brow. “Nah,” I told him.
“My neither,” DJ said. “Pay day tomorrow.” He blew the ashes out of the can, kneeled down and zipped the bent up and scorched can into the front pocket of his backpack.
“Could go back to the group home,” I suggested while DJ stood up and threw his backpack around his shoulders again.
“Those Qallunaat don’t care if you come back baked?”
I shrugged at DJ’s question. “Little bit. Long as we don’t act crazy, and Conan or Wesley can’t tell, they won’t be too grouchy. If you want to stay, we’ll have to do program though.”
“What’s program tonight?”
I explained group home language to DJ when I first moved back home, so he knew ‘program’ was some activity or game or something staff planned for us every night after supper. “What day’s it again?” I asked. I’d skipped school every day so far this week. It was always harder to keep track when I did that.
DJ pulled out his phone. I guess skipping school had the same effect on him. “Wednesday,” he said, his face glowing blue from the light of the phone screen.
“Ping pong and popcorn night,” I told him.
“Deadly!” DJ exclaimed while he slid his phone back into the pocket of his jeans. “Got to get revenge on you from last week,” he said with a sharp poke in my chest.
“Not even,” I teased him with a shove into his shoulder.
DJ chuckled as he recovered from a stumble backwards. “They won’t care if I come again this week?”
I scrunched my face again. “Nah. We always got tons of food, and they’re always bugging me to stay in, telling me to invite a friend over.”
“S’go then,” DJ said starting off in the direction of the group home.
We walked in silence with only the sound of the hard ice crunching under our kamiks until we got to the side steps of the big house I lived in with two Qallunaat and two other little kids. I stopped DJ with an arm across his chest when we got to the bottom of the steel-grate stairs and deck around the side of the house. “Leave your backpack,” I told him. “Under the stairs, right there,” I directed him.
DJ scrunched his nose at me. “What the fuck, man?”
“You put the smoke-can in there,” I told him. “Really stinks.”
“Stinks?” he repeated.
I raised my eyebrows. “Francis will smell that before we leave the mudroom. He’ll kick you out.” I was speaking from experience. I had brought a used smoke-can home last month. Francis smelled it before I had my parka hung up on the wall.
“Not even,” DJ told me. “We dumped the weed. It’s good, Hiktok.”
Smelling like weed wasn’t something DJ ever had to worry about at his place. It pissed me off for a second that it was something I had to worry about. Then I thought about Conan and Wesley and how they always wanted to follow me around and copy me. “Doesn’t matter we dumped it, the ash and shit still reeks, man.”
DJ looked at me for a second in silence. I think he was trying to read whether I was fucking with him or not. He realized I wasn’t, shrugged, slid the backpack off his shoulders and chucked it under the deck. “You owe me a gram if someone steals it,” he warned me as we stomped up the stairs. The vibrations of the steel grating echoed into the dark, early evening air as we stopped in front of the locked steel door to get in.
I lifted a fist and knocked hard and fast until I saw that the racket I was making brought Francis out of the office, and around the corner to let us in.
* * *
6:27pm.
I looked up from my phone after making note of the time and slid it back into my pocket.
Karla finished scooping some powdered soap into the dishwasher and slammed it shut. “It’s getting late,” she stated plainly, although I picked up on the insinuation.
“Yeah,” I said. “We might as well pack up the leftovers.”
Neither of us wanted to say it out loud, but it looked like Hiktok wasn’t going to be back for supper, and when he wasn’t home for supper, he wasn’t usually home for curfew either. It was looking like another AWOL incident report, another late night, and probably another day of missed school in the morning.
“I really thought we were on to something the last couple weeks,” I said, bending over at a corner cupboard to start gathering up some plastic dishes for the left-over char chowder.
“Yeah,” Karla agreed. “Me, too.”
I reached deep into the cupboard to find the covers to match the containers I had put on the counter. “Him and DJ were so into it last week. I just thought for sure...”
“Yeah,” Karla agreed again, walking the large serving pot full of the char chowder into the kitchen. “Me too.”
Just then the phone started ringing from the office. Karla’s hands were still full of the oversized pot. “I got it,” I told her, pulling my keys out of my pocket as I headed towards the staff office to answer the phone.
I dropped into the high-backed, worn and wheeled chair at our staff desk, kicked the door closed from there, and picked up the phone.
“Umingmak Group Home,” I tried to say with some zest into the receiver. “Francis speaking.”
“Hello, Francis,” responded a voice. I didn’t have to wonder who the owner of it was.
“Hi, Bernice,” I said.
“I need to talk to Dwayne,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said, “Who?” I knew who.
An audible sigh. “Dwayne, Francis. Hiktok. I need to talk to him.”
“Ohhhhh,” I stretched the word out for effect. “Hiktok. Right.”
“Do we have to do that every time, Francis?”
“I was just confused, Bernice,” I said. I wasn’t. “We never call him that,” I added.
“It’s his real name, Francis.”
“According to who?” I asked. There was a small pause in which Bernice didn’t respond. “Not him,” I added.
Another moment of silence I let hang.
“It’s in all his legal documentation,” Bernice countered with questionable enthusiasm.
“Is this conversation legal documentation, Bernice?”
“It could be,” she told me firmly.
I knew when to quit, and so I did. “Hiktok isn’t here right now. He didn’t come home after school.”
“He didn’t go to school,” Bernice stated.
“He did not,” I agreed. “The school called us. They called Janessa, too. Her and I were talking at lunch.” Janessa was Hiktok’s older sister who lived in town. “She wants Hiktok to call her as soon as he gets home, no matter what time.”
“This is a pattern now,” Bernice identified. “A bad one.”
“It is,” I agreed.
“So, what’s the group home doing about it?”
I was glad for Karla in that moment, and the debriefing of things we had been engaging in together all day. To be frank, it was this question we were preparing for. “Couple of things,” I started, “if the missed school keeps up, we talked with his teachers about work packages being sent home, and the expectation would be he does them before getting any privileges around the house-”
“Privileges?” Bernice cut in.
“Video games.”
“Ok,” Bernice said almost to herself in a way that made me think she was taking notes. I guess this conversation was going to be legal documentation.
“We also noticed, he almost always comes home at supper on Friday nights, and stays in. Fridays we do pizza, bake a dessert, then movie night and popcorn. He usually invites DJ over and aside from a smoke or two, they both stay in until curfew. DJ goes home after that, and Hiktok goes to bed.”
I paused there, but Bernice said nothing.
“So,” I went on, “we figured we’d try to schedule more nights at the house that are appealing to him. Last two weeks, we did ping pong. The first week we just set up the net and messed around, but last week we had a little tournament. Anyway, he was in all night both nights.”
“Ok. And what night are you doing ping pong?”
“Wednesdays,” I said confidently.
“Right,” Bernice said. “So, not going so well tonight then.”
“No,” I conceded.
There was another pause. Bernice was definitely taking notes. “Anything else?”
There was. “Janessa and I talked about her scheduling another day of the week for Hiktok to visit her and the kids for supper and to play cards until curfew. The visits are happening right now, obviously, but not on a schedule and not weekly. We figure, give him another night, every week, with a plan to do something he likes until curfew, and maybe it’ll be another night he’s in bed at a decent hour.”
Silence, for more note taking. “Alright. And what about consequences?” Bernice asked about ‘consequences,’ but she meant ‘punishments.’
“Like...” I let the word hang.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Bernice started, “maybe he doesn’t get his allowance if he keeps going AWOL.”
“Part of allowance is tied to his responsibility to go to school,” I assured her. “And school attendance is part of earning privileges like access to the house PS4. But if Hiktok does his chores and chooses to do extra ones to support the house, he will earn some allowance. It’s not connected to curfew.”
Bernice sighed.
“We’ve talked about consequences, and our philosophy in how we use and talk about them at Umingmak, Bernice.”
“We have,” she said and stayed quiet for a moment. “Behaviourism has been around since Pavlov and Skinner, Francis. It isn’t useless.”
“Not useless,” I agreed. “But they did gather their evidence from dogs and mice.”
“Rats,” Bernice corrected me. “Skinner used rats.”
I conceded the vermin related victory. “Right. Either way, Hiktok has more complex needs than a dog or rat.”
Before Bernice could respond, I heard the vibration of heavy footsteps on the grated steel steps to our porch, followed by loud and rapid banging on the door.
“Hold on,” I exclaimed. “Hiktok just got home!” I placed the receiver on the desk and darted out of the office to let him in.
* * *
“I was wondering if you boys were going to be back in time for the tournament this week,” Francis said to us as we kicked off our kamiks in the porch.
“Had to come back for revenge this week,” DJ told him. “Going to get you and Hiktok this time.”
Francis grinned at us both, but his grin disappeared as he took a breath in through his nose. “Smells like you fellas had a little toke before coming back, too,” he said. “DJ, if you’re going to stay, you both need to go wash the stink off your hands.”
“It’s good, Francis,” DJ assured him. “Chillax.” Then he headed for the bathroom on the main level that we mostly used for guests.
Francis then turned to me. “You know the deal, dude. If DJ being here after you guys toked becomes an issue with Conan and Wesley, he’s gotta go.”
I raised my eyebrows silently and undid my parka to hang it up.
“Glad you came back tonight,” Francis added. “Bernice is on the phone right now; she wants to talk to you.”
I rolled my eyes. “Really grouchy,” I said. “Tell her I’m busy.”
“I can tell her you don’t want to talk to her, man. But I told you before and I’ll say it again, life will be easier if you get along with Bernice.”
Francis was right about one thing; he had definitely said that to me before. “Fine,” I told him, “I’ll talk to her.”
“A wise choice,” he said. “She’s on the phone right now, head to the living room and I’ll lock the door so you can have a quiet space to chat. Oh, and I was talking to Janessa earlier. She said to call her as soon as you get home. She also said if you don’t call, I should text her and she will come over.”
I didn’t respond to that.
“The school called her, too,” Francis added, as if I hadn’t already put that together.
“Nosy teachers,” I said, heading into the living room and dropping onto the puffy leather chair in front of the TV.
Francis didn’t say anything else, but grabbed the portable phone from the office and handed it to me. He left the room and closed the door.
“Yeah,” I said into the receiver.
“Hi, Dwayne,” Bernice said. “How are you?”
“Good,” was all I told her.
“You didn’t go to school today,” she stated, as if I didn’t already know that.
I was only silent in response.
“You know school is an expectation, Dwayne. Everyone expects that you are attending. Me, the group home, your sister.”
“Yeah,” I said.
Bernice was quiet for a minute, waiting for me to add something, I guess. I didn’t add anything though.
“You’ve been asking me for approval to get a cell phone. It’s not going to happen if you aren’t meeting basic expectations.”
“OK,” I said.
Another pause. “OK,” Bernice said back.
“That it?” I asked her. “I have to set up ping pong.”
“Yes, Dwayne. That’s it. I’ll see you next week for our meeting.”
I hung up the phone without saying goodbye and stared at it for a minute. Better get this next part over with, I thought to myself before dialing my sister’s number.
“Hiktok?” her voice asked after one ring.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You’re home early tonight,” she observed.
“Ping pong tonight,” I responded. “Me and DJ wanted to play.”
“Good,” she said. “Your teacher called me again today, didn’t go to school all week so far. Why not?”
“Didn’t feel like it,” I said.
“Not good enough, Hiktok. You can’t live at the group home forever; you need your grade 12. Helps you get a better job, could even go to college.”
“You sound like group home staff,” I told her. “Liked it better when you were warning me about trusting the Qallunaat.”
She laughed. “We always need to be careful of white people. But on school, and with these two exact white people, Francis and Karla, I am on the same page.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Speaking of those white people, we were all talking at lunch today. I was thinking every Tuesday, after school,” she paused for effect at the words ‘after school,’ “you could come over here, help me with supper and bedtime with the kids, then you, me, and John could play cards until you go back to the group home for curfew. John can take you back on the snow machine since it’ll be late.”
“Every Tuesday?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Sound good?”
“Sounds good,” I said, and it actually did sound good.
“Good,” Janessa said with finality. “OK. I need to get these kids in bed. Eekee is wired. School tomorrow,” she added sternly. “And the rest of the week.”
“Yeah, yeah, sis,” I assured her. “Night.”
“Love you.”
“You too,” I told her before hanging up the phone.
I got up and left the living room to bring the phone back to Francis. When I rounded the corner into the kitchen, I found DJ hunched over a huge bowl of char chowder. He was shoveling it into his mouth with a spoon he held in one hand and clutching a big piece of bannock in the other. White, creamy liquid was dripping down his chin, he grinned at me. “Francis is heating you up a bowl,” he told me. “Come. Sit. It’s deadly!”
* * *
10:56pm.
I noted the time in the bottom right corner of the monitor as I was finishing up logs on the office computer. I stopped what I was doing to admire my championship belt that was sitting on the desk to my left. DJ and Hiktok, before the tournament, decided to make a belt out of cardboard.
Umingmak Group Home was now the site of the Arctic Ping Pong Championship, or, the APPC as the belt stated. We had gone from messing around with the net, to an actual tournament, to our own league in the last 3 weeks. DJ and Hiktok had even made plans for a tournament every Monday evening in addition to the Wednesdays we had scheduled. It sounded, too, like they would be inviting another friend or two from class to join in. It was looking like the original purpose that Karla and I had come up with was taking on a life of its own.
A knock on the glass window of the office door interrupted my self-congratulatory train of thought. Hiktok and DJ were standing there now. They had their parkas on, and Hiktok made a pointing gesture at the door, then waved to me.
I jumped out of my chair and shot out of the office. “Where you headed?” I tried to ask casually.
Hiktok and DJ laughed at me.
“Chillax, Francis. Just going for a smoke,” Hiktok told me. “Be right back.”
The two boys left the building through the door in the porch, stomped down the stairs, and walked exactly 3 inches off property. I watched from the window as they had a smoke, chatted about this, that, and the other thing, and, eventually, stomped out their glowing cigarette butts. DJ said one last thing to Hiktok, and Hiktok shook his head before turning back to the house. I pushed open the door to let him in.
“Just staring at us,” he teased me. “Really creepy.”
I laughed. “Just making sure you weren’t taking off again.”
Hiktok scrunched his nose and furrowed his eyebrows. “Getting late,” he said. He kicked off his kamiks, hung up his parka and started marching up the stairs to his bedroom. He poked his head back down the stairs after disappearing. “Wake me up at 7:30 tomorrow, eh,” he said. “I want to take a shower before school.”
References
Phelan, J. (2009). The wounded healer as helper and helped: A child and youth care model. CYC-Online. 121. The wounded healer as helper and helped: A CYC model (cyc-net.org)
Freeman, J., Fulcher, L., Garfat, T., Gharabaghi, K. (2018). Characteristics of a relational child and youth care approach revisited. CYC-Online. 236. 7-45. CYC-Online October 2018 (cyc-net.org)
