Listen to thisNote: for many years, I have used the December issue of CYC-Online as a way of engaging with the holiday season, which is often festive and celebratory. This year, I am not doing that and will refer you instead to my contribution from last December, because the circumstances that led to that contribution have not changed for the better, and this has been a horrific year of global complacency and a retreat into an unapologetic celebration of our unearned privilege with respect to the relative safety, peace, and security most of us enjoy every day. I do not want to engage with a festive season that prioritizes our need for consumption and baseless celebration over our focus and engagement with the intentional and systematic destruction of child innocence and futures.
There has been much criticism of residential care (also known as live-in treatment, group care, congregate care, and by other labels), with at least part of the critique focusing on the institutional nature of such care arrangements. To be fair, a great deal of this criticism, especially when centered in Europe, imagines residential care in the context of the large, cold, sterile environments of Romanian ‘orphanages’ during the Cold War, which have received enormous media and research attention over the past thirty years. I think it is fair to say that this is not what most residential care looks like around the world, and it is certainly not what most of us still believing that residential care can be and often is an excellent option for young people are talking about. I will leave discussions about large scale institutional care arrangements, which still do exist in some parts of the world, for another time. For now, I want to focus on residential care as it manifests across most of the world most of the time – relatively small group care arrangements with six to ten young people, child and youth care practitioners or similar professionals working as staff on rotational schedules, designed for either shorter periods of intensive engagement (sometimes referred to as ‘treatment’) or for the upbringing of young people as an alternative to living in their families of origin.
For many years, such settings have sought to organize themselves as family-like environments, with mixed success. Keen and critical observers have quickly pointed to the limitations of any attempt to make a staffed group environment pretend to be like family; one simply cannot hide the institutional features of staff schedules, staff turnover, group programming, routines and program schedules, and the regulatory context of licensing and bureaucratic oversight. The bottom line, so they argue, is that group care of any kind is institutional care and therefore fundamentally distinct from family-based care. Perhaps early next year, I will write about why this binary narrative about group care as distinct from family-based care is a false narrative, but I am going to put that aside for now. Instead, I want to focus on the idea of family and how it fits with residential care, especially in agencies that operate multiple residential care units. To make the point, I want to focus on a newsletter that is produced monthly by a particular residential care provider called New Path in central Ontario, Canada.
The first thing I want to point out is that I largely agree with the critics: Group care service settings cannot replicate family per se, so long as we understand family to be a place with a specific grouping of individuals who make up the family. In other words, group care settings offer no material manifestation of family. We can, however, think of family less in material ways and more as a process and a culture, with familial characteristics that can and often are much more prevalent and real in group care settings than they are in family-based settings. As a process and a culture, the concept of family provides for several core characteristics: First, it is transparently narrative in nature. This means that those experiencing everyday life together learn to tell stories about that experience in which the characters are familiar to all, come to life through their unique ways of being, and are deeply embedded in the stories and experiences of everyone else. In short, family is a story in which everyone living in the setting can see themselves reflected, either explicitly by being mentioned in the story, or vicariously through their relational connection to other characters being referenced in the stories.
A second characteristic of family as process and culture is that the serious matters of everyday life get translated into informal ways of articulating the everyday happenings of the settings. In residential care settings, people are doing things that are serious and part of evidence-based practices, strategic goals, and agency visions, or that relate to aimed-for program outcomes. And there are multiple spaces in which these serious matters are articulated in professional language. Family as a process and culture provides a degree of transparency about these serious matters by translating them into informal and much more connected language to the everyday experiences of what people, both young people and staff, actually do.
And a third characteristic of family as process and culture is the balance of light-heartedness, the absurdities of our conduct, and the ways in which we exist together in our setting as community. Although just like the material manifestation of family is based on hierarchical arrangements and there are always issues of power (gender, race, ability/disability, etc.) embedded in family, so family as process and culture also does not do away with such hierarchies and power dynamics, but the process and the culture work to constantly challenge and resist static power and structural hierarchies.
It is in the context of these characteristics of family as process and culture that it becomes possible to speak of familial communities. These are communities that are constantly aiming to generate the characteristics of family as process and culture in the everyday functioning of the residential community, which is particularly important in settings where multiple residential units operate in close proximity. There is no pretending that the settings themselves are just like family in the material sense. They are not. But they do provide the familial dynamics of connection, transparency, narrative, and informal familiarity across relationships and physical places.
Although there are many strategies, tools, and methods of generating familial communities, none of which are mutually exclusive, one element of such methods can be a newsletter. The newsletter itself is very specific in its appearance, role, and distribution. New Path, and specifically the residential (or live-in treatment, as it is called in Ontario) settings, have created such a newsletter and have been using it for quite some time now. The newsletter has precisely the features that I think are essential to avoid it from becoming an institutional feature of the setting rather than one that promotes familial communities. For one thing, it is not a professionally produced newsletter, either in appearance or in the way in which information is presented. A good graphic designer could elevate the quality of the newsletter with ease, but in so doing would immediately take away from its role of promoting familial community. The newsletter is not distributed widely; it is really only shared with staff and young people and a few individuals directly connected to the programs. In other words, this is not a tool for the promotion of the programs or the agency, but instead a ritual that contributes to the ways in which the setting narrates itself. Furthermore, the newsletter is produced regularly and typically in largely the same format, such that it has become a predictable and regular feature of the setting.
The newsletter is more informal than formal and provides for translation of serious matters into descriptions of the everyday activities of people. A few low-resolution pictures animate the activities, whether these be pictures of young people’s participation in PRIDE events or staff and young people doing things together. The newsletter also has sections that are lighthearted and contribute nothing to important things, such as a Dad Jokes section that is exactly as ridiculous as it sounds. But it is an important part of the narrative, because several of the long-time staff in the settings are obvious ‘dads’. In other words, although the jokes are not about those staff members, they are intimately connected to the way those staff members are in the world. Finally, the newsletter has a section that introduces newly hired staff members to the community. It does so not by focusing on their professional qualifications, but instead, by providing the new people’s responses to semi-personal questions, such as favourite band, movie, activity, etc. The message is that these are people joining a community rather than a professional, outcome-focused work setting.
It is fair to say that families, in the material sense, generally don’t have newsletters (although increasingly, they have carefully curated and often artificial social media narratives). A newsletter is not a characteristic of material families and generally, is more associated with institutional dynamics. Careful approaches to how one might produce a newsletter (which is quaint to begin with in the age of social media), and what kind of narrative about the community is generated, shift the institutional nature of a newsletter to one that contributes to a familial community that is about connections, trivialities, and serious matters reflected in a translation geared to the everyday experience of living and being in the setting. In other words, it gives a story to the experience in which everyone, staff and young people, see themselves reflected directly or vicariously.
Residential care does need to be confined to an institutional narrative. But it also should not and cannot take on a family, or family-based, identity that is empirically not warranted. But really high-quality residential care settings can construct themselves as familial communities, and the value of young people (and also staff) experiencing themselves in such familial communities, where there is no threat to their material family connections or imaginations, is invaluable. New Path has for many years aimed at having high end professional considerations co-exist with the informality and the joy of simply living every day as a new adventure. This newsletter, which I think other organizations might want to contemplate, is one outcome of reimaging a residential care service as much more than an institutional intervention.
