Getting Familiar

We have been moving recently “to a new home. Well, so far it is really to a “new house”. The “new home” part will only come later, after the environment becomes more familiar and we become adjusted to it all. But that, I am realizing, will take some time.

There was nothing wrong with our old home except it had become a little larger than we wanted at this stage of our lives – so this decision to move was quite voluntary, a decision made for the best of reasons, one we walked into with our eyes wide open.

And yet, I am noticing things – like how we still call the old place “home” even though we eat, sleep, laugh and live in the new place. Or how the unfamiliar night sounds can cause anxiety – “What was that? Did the roof just fall in?” That kind of thing. And I notice how I bump into things that “aren’t supposed to be there”, or how I sometimes find myself “walking in the wrong direction.”

Now before you go thinking I have fallen off of the brain tree, let me point out that when you come out of the new kitchen, the living room is to the left – in the old house it was to the right, so sometimes I still turn right out of habit and smack into the cupboard that “isn’t supposed to be there”.

So, here I am, a grown adult, supposedly fully functioning, having anxious moments, bumping into things, turning the wrong way – disoriented, I guess I could say.

I can’t help but relate this to the experiences of young people moving into new programs or into new schools and having to adjust. Especially when that was something they didn’t really want to do.

But each day, the new becomes more familiar, the bumping decreases and I find myself more relaxed. Partially this comes about, I think, because I am able to explore at will. Hear a strange sound; go look for the cause. Walk the wrong way; go have a better look around the place.

I wonder how often young people in new environments might benefit from a similar freedom. I wonder if they get that freedom.

I can just imagine the young person in a new school saying to her teacher, “Excuse me Mrs. Mikov. I just heard a strange sound in the corridor so I am going to go see what it is. Back in a minute.” Somehow I don’t think that is going to play out very well.

Or a young person found in an unexpected, perhaps even forbidden, area of the new program, explaining when challenged, “Oh, just checking things out. Trying to get familiar with the new environment, so I don’t get lost in the future, see?”

Nope, I don’t think so. Not likely to go down well.

But it is a thought, isn’t it?

Thom

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New features
From time to time, as we discover month by month on our discussion list, it is helpful for Child and Youth Care people to focus on specific practice areas, and as we have suggested recently, two such areas which can benefit from our attention right now are supervision and activities.

We introduce these this month (see articles by John Digney, Ernie Hilton and Jack Phelan) in the hope that you will be inspired to get out your own notes, articles, experience and practice wisdom and put some thought into sharing these with us.

In our contacts and discussions with Child and Youth Care people around the world, we are conscious that with declining resources and changing care models, both supervision and activities, essential tools in staff and youth development, are depressingly neglected – to the detriment of our field and the young people we work with – and we assure you that both supervision and the use of activities are widely non-existent in programs in North America and Europe as much as in Africa and the East.

In the coming months, help us as a profession to understand the difficulties and to work out ways in which these might be overcome. Let's use our world-wide access to Child and Youth Care workers and programs to stimulate new thinking about these.

As always, write to us.