Listen to thisA core element of virtually all treatment approaches for children and youth involve the setting of goals. Child and youth care practitioners and sometimes social workers sit with young people, often not long after admission to a residential or day program and discuss with the young person what it is they would like to achieve while in treatment. What kinds of goals do they have? Often, we distinguish between short term goals and longer-term goals, but ultimately, every young person ends up with some kind of care plan that lists a series of goals. There has always been discussion in our fields about who is defining those goals. We have shifted over the years from setting goals for young people to facilitating young people setting their own goals, although there is a remarkable similarity between the goals set by notably diverse young people living life facing very different circumstances in lots of ways, including familial context, past traumas, identity, and more. It makes one wonder how it is possible that such diverse young people elect to work towards such a limited range of different goals. The cynic in me wonders whether we underestimate the extent to which we influence and even determine what those goals are going to be, even if our initial conversation with the young person suggests that we are creating space for them to determine that.
In an era when just about everyone is speaking the language of evidence-based practices and where funders are demanding evidence for the value of what we do as child and youth care practitioners, it seems reasonable to ask some different questions about goals. One example is this one: If you set goals for yourself, are you more likely to achieve them? It seems like a silly question. Intuitively, one might say that if you set yourself a goal about saving money, for example, you probably are more likely to pay attention to what you spend, and therefore you are more likely to save money. But evidence is not about intuition; it is about outcomes. Will you in fact have more money at the time you specified as being the time when you will have more money? Well, that depends on several factors, and the evidence we presume to be in place if your goal is to save money is not at all as straightforward as it might initially appear. For example, we know almost nothing about what variables might affect how likely goals we set for ourselves are achieved. Does age matter? Gender? Support? Identity? Social factors? The cost of failure? The benefits of achieving the goal? The extent of agency and self-efficacy? One might contemplate the effect of virtually endless variables on the likelihood that the goals we set for ourselves are actually furthered because we set those goals. But interestingly, we don’t contemplate any of these factors and instead, we have just made the setting of goals a core element of our treatment approaches without the slightest effort to curate evidence that this is meaningful in the context of every young person upon whom we impose this paradigm.
Another angle from which to examine the centrality of goal setting in our services relates to risk. What happens when we set goals for ourselves and fail to achieve them? Is the impact for such failure the same for everyone? For example, if I set my self a goal to learn another language, but then realize after a year or so that I am not making any progress on this goal and therefore I abandon it, what are the consequences to me? If a young person living in a treatment setting sets a goal of returning to live at home within one year after starting treatment, and one year later the prospects of returning home are slim, what are the consequences to the young person? Does the nature of the goal make a difference in how we are impacted by failing to achieve our goals? Do trivial goals we fail to achieve have less of an impact on us compared to very significant goals? Who gets to decide what is a trivial goal and what is a significant goal? What information might have to be considered in making such a decision? Consider, for example, the two scenarios I presented above. Your intuitive response to whether failing to achieve my goal of learning another language has the same impact as a young person failing to achieve their goal to return home within a year might have been ‘of course not’. Perhaps you thought that because you assume that it is not very important for me to learn another language, but it is clearly critically important for the young person to return home. But what if I told you that the language that I wanted to learn was what connects me to my heritage, my identity, my extended family and the lands on which I grew up, and it is that absence of connection that has created massive emotional trauma for me for years. The young person wanting to return to live at home, on the other hand, was thinking about home as the place (perhaps one of many foster homes they had previously lived in) they lived in just before being admitted to the treatment setting, and in fact, they had only lived there for a couple of weeks and had no deep connections with anyone there. Whose failure to achieve their goal seems more important, or consequential, now? Does the nature of a goal tell us anything about its importance outside of the context in which this goal is set?
It strikes me as interesting that we ask young people to set goals for themselves at a time when the conditions of achieving goals are notably poor. Admission to treatment is rarely a moment when young people feel a great sense of empowerment. It rarely is a moment when young people feel a strong sense of agency. In fact, it is almost always a moment when the world of a young person, however they construct that world for themselves, seems especially adverse, alienating, and disconnected. Treatment, by definition, is a framing of that world as one in which something is not quite right and change needs to happen in order for things to be made right. It is an admission of the ultimate failure: Whatever has been happening is not good, and you are here so that what happens later is better. I think many young people would translate this sentence to sound like this: You have failed to do what is good; you are here to learn how to do what is better. Let’s think through the possible implications of this.
Imagine a racialized young person entering treatment somewhere because conflict at home is such that a temporary separation for treatment purposes is necessary. For the young person, the conflict may be related to a wide range of adverse experiences resulting from invalidations and challenges to their racial identity. And we may well be aware that this may be the case, and we make every effort to avoid blaming the young person for the conflicts at home. We might even openly acknowledge the racism they might have experienced at school or in the community and be clear that these experiences reflect other people doing something wrong. Nevertheless, we then proceed to sit down with the young person to set goals, simply because our approach to treatment requires us to do so. Since the treatment plan is to return home eventually, and since the reason for treatment is conflict at home, those goals inevitably will be connected to behavioural change that would likely mitigate future conflict at home. In other words, the treatment goals for a young person concerned about the challenges to their racial identity are now demanding of that young person to develop strategies that aim for submission and coping skills for their own oppression. And we measure the success of that treatment (further reinforcing the efficacy of this treatment approach) by the degree to which the young person can accept their own oppression. By the end of the treatment, the young person can return to live at home because they achieved the goals they set for mitigating conflict at home. This scenario will measure as a successful treatment outcome and a confirmation of the importance of goal setting, despite the outcome being one of managed and clinically supported oppression.
Why should young people have goals and strive to achieve those? What role do goals actually play in the lives of diverse young people? And what role does the failure or the success in achieving goals play in the lives of young people? Who benefits from young people achieving their goals and who suffers when they don’t? And perhaps most importantly, what is the alternative to setting goals?
Well, I think the alternative to setting goals as part of treatment processes is to consider the difference between goals and purpose. In Western contexts, we often equate these terms. Goals give us purpose. Without goals, we are just living life every day in the absence of something incentivizing growth and development. Using these words underline the capitalist nature of our thinking. We set goals ultimately to increase productivity, and we become reliant on productivity to experience purpose. In virtually every other knowledge system, purpose is quite distinct from goals, and connecting to purpose can never be captured by achieving goals. In fact, quite the opposite is true: if we need goals, it’s because we are afraid to contemplate purpose. We do not accept purpose as something that could ever be achieved. We need goals to continuously move the finish line, to set aim for new and expanded purpose. In other words, we use goals as a means to abandon purpose. Setting goals is an act of failure, because the moment and the space of the achievement of goals results in the immediate requirement to abandon that moment and that space to pursue further goals. In short, setting goals means being at war with the peace we experience when we find purpose.
All of this means that goal setting as the core element of treatment for children and youth may be a much more complex phenomenon than we are prepared to acknowledge. Somewhat hypocritically, we have accepted this concept of goal setting without evidence at the same time that we demand evidence-based practice as the foundation for treatment. We use our most superficial intuition to buy into the goal setting concept; one does not have to work very hard to begin to understand that in so doing, we are reinforcing the very knowledge and structures that are often at the root of the challenges experienced by children and youth - a lack of purpose, a lack of connection and confidence in that purpose, and a lack of peaceful joy in experiencing that purpose without the pressure to abandon it as part of one’s treatment.
