One of the things I love about Jack Phelan’s writing is that it typically is not very long. You can review some of his contributions right here on CYC-Net; you’ll notice that most of them are less than one page, and yet, every one of them says something important. Sure, there might be repetition across all his writing, but that simply means that he had some very good ideas and found different ways of expressing them. Jack got to the point fast and his goal was not to belabour a point but to transmit it to the reader in ways that stuck. I think everyone who has read Jack’s work knows where he stood on issues of relational practice, supervision, developmental pathways of CYCs, and more. He had many topics and said something that mattered on each of these.
Contrast that to other writers, including myself. Many of us write pages to make a relatively simple point. Very often, it seems, we want to pre-empt critique of our point by framing it in ways that respond to any possible disagreement. In so doing, we present one epistemological imposition after another, believing ourselves to be protecting our point from all possible attacks. We are creating the ‘super point’, the one that is so deeply embedded in absolute truth and/or intuitive reasoning (common sense) that it is clearly the right point to make. We also often add to this a rationale for why we are making the point, why it is important, and why not engaging with our point may result in substandard practice.
Jack’s approach to child and youth care practice was somewhat un-American. He advocated for an authentic way of being with young people (in his case, that meant mostly teenagers) and he offered at times very direct language as a way of interacting with young people. His stories included some real surprises in terms of how he responded to a particular young person; to many North Americans, such approaches seemed crude and simplistic and absent of the performative aspects of ‘therapeutic’ and ‘evidence-based’ practices. Jack swore and labelled, described behaviours in very simple terms (stupid, dumb) and used that language in face-to-face interactions with youth. This does not meet North American sensibilities. We are trained to avoid labels, to refrain from using language that might appear as invalidating or dismissive. We are trained to be empowering, strength-based, and positive in our approach at all times. And yet, Jack likely had an enormous impact on young people when he worked frontline, and he certainly had an enormous impact on young practitioners he either met along the way, or he formally trained in his classrooms or through professional training events, or even in his sessions at CYC conferences.
I think the difference between Jack’s approach and that of so many others is that he was not a believer in framing things. By this, I mean that Jack did not create abstract ways of understanding behaviour, personality, or even change and growth. Instead, he focused on how we are with young people one moment at a time, and he believed that the best way to be with young people is to take them as seriously as we take ourselves and to avoid using their circumstances and resulting ways of being as objects to decorate the explanatory frameworks we create for who they are. One might have all kinds of opinions about this approach, but let’s contrast it for a moment with the more common approach of framing things in theory, science, evidence, and patterns.
Every time I attend a conference these days, someone will be up there as a keynote speaker with a slide deck featuring at minimum an abstract slide of the brain, a slide showing a linear progression from circumstance to behaviour to consequence, and a slide representing some form of relationship. Built around those three slides are 20 more that provide additional context and information about the patterns of child and youth behaviours that arise in the context of trauma, pain, grief, or loneliness. And then comes the grand conclusion, which, no matter what language is used, essential implores us to be nice to kids, to listen to what they say they need, and to understand that whatever they do is driven by a need to serve their pain or grief. Then we are to respond gently, ensuring that the young person feels heard and is not harmed further. We are to center the child and their needs and respond with consistency and clarity without being directive or imposing.
This is essentially the framing for almost all evidence-based practice currently being advertised and sold as part of the child and youth mental health training industry. This framing seems meaningful and empathetic while also scientifically derived and research-informed. But if we look closer, we might also recognize this framing of relational practices as the one thing we have been trying to avoid. It is a medicalized framing of relational practice that intentionally takes those moments of authenticity, moments that matter, and instead of making them meaningful (as Garfat likes to say), makes them the representation of highly skilled treatment practices. If we just added a white coat to the practice, we could imagine ourselves as doctors.
In current child and youth care settings, both residential settings and community or education settings, the focus is on rendering the work we do appear professional and derived from research, deep knowledge, and science. We are on a quest to prove that what we do provides high-quality care (we really mean treatment) for children and youth who need that. We are increasingly reducing our practices to interventions and cures, and we are framing these in neurological, trauma-based, clinical language. And yet in the end, we arrive at the very same conclusions Jack Phelan arrived at several decades ago, and from which he never deviated. In short, we frame a lot but say very little.
One conclusion I draw from this is that we ought to pay more attention to the humanity of our work, not at the exclusion of the science of our work, but as the desperately needed antidote to the medicalization of everything. Our work is to be human. Sometimes that requires us to get to the heart of the matter, or, in Jack’s words, “the long and short of it” and actually be with young people in authentic and imperfect ways. If they behave stupidly, what stops us from saying ‘ you are being stupid’? Is it really science that stops us? Or is it our secret desire to dehumanize this work and put on a white coat?
A wondering (rather than a conclusion) I draw from this is whether we are losing capacity to think of relational practices through the lens of humanity rather than science. In some ways, this should not be a surprise; we already know that relating to one another is changing shape with the rise of technologies that construct relationships virtually and increasingly through artificial decision-making, prompts, expressions of love and of anger. From emojis to AI-generated poetry, we are substituting the complexities of the relational every day in our lives. At what point will we confuse our framing of relational practice with practicing our humanity in relation to that of the young people we encounter? An emoji may not be sufficient in the moment; at some point, we will have to say something that reflects the moment rather than the science, and young people will want to know that what we say or do is reflective of who we are. If we lose that, then the future of CYC is AI, not practitioners showing up.
