Listen to thisThe question of what to do with young people who are struggling to live with the care givers that have been designated as their family, is central to a great deal of the work we do in CYC. There are many reasons for young people to reach the point where their “home” environment doesn’t function. In some cases, the decision about their “family” not working is made by the young person themselves. Often, when this happens, they leave home and begin living with friends, on the street, in squats, or in shelters/transitional living programs. We have referred to these young people who left home of their own volition, runaways or street kids. I would argue that this description speaks volumes about how we think of the agency of young people.
If an adult member of a family decides that family doesn’t work for them, for whatever reason, they are free to go without anyone being able to tell them they cannot. We do not speak of spouses or partners who leave home as runaways. They have the right to leave if the situation becomes untenable for them. But young people are still considered by most of society as the property of adult care givers. They must stay within the “family” home unless given permission by the adults to leave. They must be available for supervision and protection. The external environment of the adult world is considered so hostile to children, that if a child goes missing from home, there is often a near panic about the harm that adults might do to them. And this fear is not entirely unwarranted. As CYC workers we know first-hand the kinds of harm that can come to young people who have left home on their own.
Of course, the kinds of dangers young people who are unhoused face are also shared by adults living on the streets or in shelters. Even adults marginally housed and living in poverty are at risk of daily harm. And yet, we don’t treat adults who have left or were forced out of their homes in the same way we treat young people in similar situations. The motivations for leaving home often share commonalities across both adults and young people. They range from relational deterioration to abuse and neglect.
This is particularly true for adult women fleeing abusive relationships or even dysfunctional marriages. The percentage of women who get divorced only to find themselves unable to manage financially is staggeringly high. The feminization of poverty as we enter the 21st century is an ever-growing trend. In a sense, leaving the proscribed structures of the nuclear family is a dangerous proposition for both women and young people. One might even say that to leave the patriarchal nuclear family home is to risk severe economic and social punishment.
For adults, the breakdown of familial relations between young people and the adult caregivers in the family is a crisis that must be managed. Generally, there are two broad categories of response. One is to make every effort to stabilize the family situation so the young person can return home. If that is not possible, then either an alternative family assigned by the state, or some form of residential program is considered the next best option. In either case, when a young person’s family relations deteriorate to the point they leave or are taken out of the home, the response is an institutional one. That is to say that the state steps in using legally prescribed avenues of care to create new alternatives of care for young people.
To say that the state is a clumsy arbiter of the kinds of complex human dynamics involved in youth-adult relations is an understatement. That said, the fact that the legal machinery of the state is integrally involved in decisions about where and with whom young people will live is less a statement about the state than it is about our profoundly alienated set of social relations. To have created a society with highly limited organic non-institutional networks of care, severely limits our capacity for remediating broken or damaged relations between children and adults. Our sets of social relations are increasingly fragmented and our connections to one another frayed and tenuous. The demands on our time by the working world of capitalist relations leaves less and less room for establishing and maintaining long term stable networks of support.
In CYC we have built our logic of care on the capacity for connection and the development of a subjectivity that conveys openness and availability to the other. Such an approach requires lived engagement beyond the superficial passing through each other lives that we have come to expect as the best we can hope for. A moment here and a moment there between the demands of work and consumption.
The world we live in is antithetical to the CYC approach and yet we know that material lived connection and engagement is what allows for the best environment for the development of human capacity. To take the CYC approach within the logic of the current dominant system is to be thwarted at every turn and yet to persist. We are always facing a system in which the development of care is in every way aligned with the system of capitalist social relations.
In this regard, our current systems of care are fully consonant with the logic of capitalist society. That logic is based on a value system that monetizes all aspects of society. Institutions that care for young people are no different. After all, in our current system of care, workers are paid to care for our children. In paying for care, we shift from the lived accountability of community to an exchange relationship in which each child becomes a cost center, and each worker is accountable to the economic necessities of the institution. The question of connection and commitment between carer and child becomes contingent on the continued employment of the worker and fiscal viability of the institution. The institutional imperative is one of ongoing survival in the marketplace with its demands for evidenced based behavioral outcomes and waves of continually morphing best practices.
Under capitalist systems of care, the demands of care shift from an understanding of young people as refugees from a breakdown in the social fabric, to young people as the subjects of treatment who need to be fixed. Instead of seeing children in care as a symptom of a broader social malaise, children are seen as individual cases of maladjustment and psychopathology. And since we have monetized psychological health, child psychopathology becomes billable to the state or corporate insurance companies. Erased in this, is any sense of accountability we hold as community members for creating a society that has no real capacity for lived relations of care when adult-child relations breakdown.
To monetize care is create young people as data points that are used to justify the continuance of the institutions where they are held. The use of institutions such as residential care, shelters, transitional living programs, inpatient hospital units, and jails to house young people cannot help but perpetuate a view of young people as inmates, patients, clients and other social markers of institutionalization. These are young people who have charts, notes, diagnoses, treatment plans, behavioral regimes, and coordinated case management through which largely well-intentioned adults mark them as available for adult intervention.
They are now part of the fabric of institutional life, subject to the architecture of the program in which they find themselves. They are inducted into the time and rhythm of the program which precedes them and that will remain untouched by their stay. The groups, the meals, the chores, the med times, the recreational activities and so on will take over the young person’s own desired use of time, while refusing with some degree of violence (symbolic or actual) any attempt to reshape the institution to any sense of alternative desire brought into the program from the outside world. This logic extends across beliefs about what is good and bad behavior, appropriate language and dress, and levels of emotional and psychological regulation. No matter what else is done by way of humane and compassionate care by staff within the program, these markers of the institution will be inscribed onto the young person’s body and mind for life and will echo in every decision they will make for better or for worse.
All of this isn’t to say that good things don’t happen within institutional settings. They most certainly do and there are accounts of such positive stories across the literature in our field. I am simply arguing that such good work requires a certain kind of working against the grain. To do truly relational work within the confines of a 21st century institution is an act of subversion and covert or overt defiance. It is in the nature of institutions to create structures and practices that increase order and control. However well intended the mission statement, the institution will tend strongly towards an interpretation that allows for day-to-day practices that reduce chaos and unruly behavior. This is even more true with the ever-increasing introduction of corporate ideology into institutions across the social spectrum. The valorization of hierarchical structures of supervision and fiscal control place more and more power into the hands of non-profit and for-profit CEOs and boards of directors. Professionalization and bureaucratization have accelerated the needs for ever greater oversight and regimentation of CYC workers and supervisors. Calls for ever more state involvement in certification and administrative regulations put the disciplinary gaze on workers instead of on the inherent brutality of the institution itself. All of this is increasingly dehumanizing and fully lacking in any form of relational care.
To have truly relational care would require an alternative set of youth-adult relations built out of existing networks of care. Such an alternative would seek to expand the living resources within the community rather than crating artificial institutional structures. This would require a grassroots building of relationships and a reconfiguration of what it means to care. To do this kind of work, we would need to explore how we can change our lives so as to create space and time to care for one another; to open our lives to one another. Of course, there are already people who are doing this. Those who give shelter and care without seeking to be compensated. Those who don’t seek to become professionals, but instead seek to become human beings. Such a shift would take time and certainly humanizing our institutions would be a step in the right direction. However, the paradox we face in working in the institutions we intend to humanize, is the task of gradually dismantling a system in which we play a key role and which may be an important part of our professional identity. But if we are serious about doing relational CYC, we need to break our work down to the level of living relational connection (with all its messiness) and institutional care is not a place where that can ever come to full fruition. Instead, we need to abandon the institution and open doors to the fresh air of human relations awaiting us in the world outside.
