Listen to this"I am working here to care for the children not to discipline them."
"Children
need discipline; it is through discipline that they will respect the
adults."
While 'unsophisticated' statements such as these are rarely heard today,
they speak of the age-old conflict between the soft hearts" and hard
hats" approaches to child care work. We often struggle with what seems
to be an either/or choice between 'caring' for children and 'containing'
children with structure and discipline.
Soft hearts
Many people, when asked why they became involved in child care, speak of
the joys of working with children and of wanting to give children the
love and care they never received while at home. Some speak of a
'comfortableness' and a warmth with children, while yet others may see
their work as fulfilling a calling. Implicit in many of these responses
is a sense of wanting to 'save' or 'rescue' the children. Without
wishing to delve too deeply into motives, the 'save the children' notion
has far-reaching implications for the child care workers' expectations
of their work and perhaps more importantly of their expectations of the
children, for example, of the way in which a child 'respects', 'thanks'
or 'appreciates' the adult for the love and care that they have
received.
The very title 'child care worker' emphasises the 'soft hearts' image of our work this is what you want to do, this is what the children need, so this is what you will do.
Hard hats
And then along comes someone who tells you that before you can even
begin to care, you need to contain and discipline the child, and that an
overarching principle of your service is to provide 'structure' for the
child because, without this structure, care remains formless and falls
on barren ground.
We don't see structure and care as mutually exclusive ideas, but for the purposes of the present argument we are going to treat them as separate and opposed principles.
Defining terms
How would we define care? Care could be seen as nurturance, the
emotional attachment we feel for another person, the desire to protect
another from harm, the feeling one has for another person, the desire to
meet the needs of another who for one reason or another has not been
fortunate enough to have been cared for as we have and, to put it
simply, a love for someone.
More could be said, but care is essentially an inter-personal phenomenon. It arises, though, from some inner motivations and needs, and one could ask questions like: 'Why do people care?' and 'What needs are met (of both the carer and the person cared for) in the process of caring?'
On the other hand, how would we define structure? Structure involves limit-setting, the containment of the child, creating secure and safe boundaries, and the establishment of routines. Just as in the case of care, all these structural concepts are interpersonal something which takes place between people. There is also an inner structure whether of thought, behaviour or feeling which interacts with whatever forms of outside structure we create.
Self knowledge
Essential for any child care practice involving care or structure is
self knowledge. It is imperative that the links between the child care
worker's thoughts, ideas and feelings on the one hand, and
his or her practice on the other, are coherent and systematic. Any
tenuous link or uncertainty of values will reach the children, and the
care worker will be exposed and vulnerable as the children exploit the
chinks in his or her armour.
Especially without self insight, any messianic idea of 'saving' the children is potentially disastrous, as the children will ensure that you will not save them and the resulting sense of failure can be devastating for the worker.
It is assumed that child care workers know what they are doing, but equally important is the question as to why they are doing it.
Child care settings have the enigmatic potential of becoming the stage upon which are acted the inner longings, unmet needs and desires of child care workers with the adults as dramatist and director, and the children the actors who rehearse and rehearse, but who never quite become what the director desires for them.
Your own principles of structure and caring must be married within, so that you are aware of the 'hooks' which might otherwise ultimately defeat you.
But for many, the conflict between these two viewpoints remains: Is our work based on simple caring, or should it depend on well developed structure?
A
unifying model
Think of a jungle gym, metal pipes forming the skeletal structure, with
volumes of air filling the spaces between. Let us suggest that the metal
pipes form the structure, and that the caring is how we fill and use the
spaces in between.
For a new child care worker the value of structure becomes evident when s/he sees that homework times, bedtimes and mealtimes (structures) have a value beyond being mere irritating routine, and that structure has value precisely because it creates routine the regularity of certain events including those in which the child care worker responds consistently and predictably. This somehow creates a 'jungle gym' type of structure, one which is stable enough for children to anticipate, to rely on and clamber through, gaining confidence all the way the only problem with this analogy is that it presupposes the primacy of the metal (the structure), but without those pipes there will not be the safe spaces to fill, to climb through, to stand up in Without the structure there is no place for caring to take place; but without caring, all that remains are the cold and ungiving metal bars.
Mutual relationship
In summary, we suggest that if you enter child care in order to 'save'
the children with the expectation that you will be 'respected' by the
children because of your 'sacrifices' and your caring, you will be in
for a hard time. On the other hand, if you follow a strict set of rules
and rigid routines without caring, then your work with the children will
be grim and sterile to the ultimate disappointment of you both.
We need to join structure and care in a mutual relationship, mediated by the child care worker's inner convictions, flexibility and self knowledge.
