Closing the gap

D.W.S. Austin

Things don't change. Austin writes 25 years ago in the yearbook of the British Residential Child Care Association on crossing the barriers of time, social class and personality into the world of the child as one of the difficulties in the child care worker-child relationship. The need to make true two-way identifications is a foundation of positive child care.

I think that the first thing we should remember when we look at a youngster in care is that he represents a disaster. Something has gone wrong, very wrong.

When speaking with people who know nothing of the work, I often get the impression that they regard entry into care as a sort of panacea for all ills, bodily and psychological that may afflict the youngster: in he walks, dirty, undernourished, defiant, unloved, unwanted, asocial; six months later out he comes, a brand new personality. What these people do not realise is that when a youngster arrives at the point when he has to come into care, has to be severed from his family and from his background, disaster has already struck. Coming into care may be the answer to his problems; on the other hand, it may not. It is healthy that we should realise this. Too often we are ashamed to admit that we are doing nothing for a particular child beyond feeding him and clothing him. It is better to be grateful for what we manage to do for those whom we do help.

Barriers
One of the greatest problems in dealing with these youngsters, whether they be delinquent or not, is crossing the barrier into their world. It must be remembered that a basic reason for their coming into care is economic. It is rare to find a middle-class child in care, not because such children are less delinquent than their working class brothers, nor because their parents are necessarily any 'better' or love them any more, but simply because they come from a stratum of society which enjoys the support of a permanent and sufficient income, so essential to stable family life, and the lack of which mercilessly exploits any weakness there may be in the family structure.

The atmosphere of all children's homes, be they small group homes or institutional, is basically rooted in those middle-class ideals which form the trunk of a nation's social life, and which may be summed up by saying that appearances are more important than reality, clean faces more important than sound minds. It is at once the only possible outlook to have, and yet it is also completely opposed to the ideals of most of the children who come into care, and especially to the ideals of the delinquent youngster, who is not only anti-middle-class “a healthy enough attitude for a working-class child “but is anti-social. What do we do?

Rights
As a start it must be remembered that the child is a human being and he is not to be treated as a number or as a person without rights. For better or for worse he has a certain personality and nothing is to be gained by trying to change that personality from without, only from within. He must want to be changed; he cannot be forced to change. For this reason the atmosphere in the institution must be co-operative, not authoritarian or manipulative. In the final analysis the youngster is helped only if he chooses to be helped. I still remember with something of a shock that in England in the 1960's the youngster may not be present when the final decision is made as to his employment. I was told he 'would not know what he wanted', 'would only be confused' and so on. Perhaps, perhaps not, but in either case I think it wrong for a youngster not to be consulted, not to be present at a decision on his own future.

The way the youngster is changed is of course to present him with a pattern of living, a mode of life, which is so attractive that, despite himself, he is tempted. This pattern of life, which necessitates a sense of identification with those who are presenting it, is the path, the only path, by which he can reorganise himself. Dr. Bettelheim, a leading American authority, has this to say:

"In helping to bring order into the child's personality we rely mainly on his desire to get along in a world that provides him with ample satisfaction of all, or almost all, of his needs and not only the ones that are commonly accepted by adults as legitimate. We feel that before anything else a child has to be utterly convinced that “contrary to past experiences “this world can be a pleasant one, before he can feel any impulse to get along in it. Once such a desire has sprung up and has really become a part of his personality then, and only then, can we expect him to accept and to come to terms with the less pleasant aspects of life."

But this alone does not solve the problem. There remains the question, the question that should at all times be present in everyone's minds; Where is the child going? What future are we planning for him? For the delinquent youngster, being taken into care is not an answer to his problems, but only an initial step towards what might be an answer. Obviously our aim should not be what it sometimes becomes, a steady progress from foster-home to institution to industrial school to reformatory to prison. Obviously our aim should be to reintegrate the youngster into society so that he can lead a normal life. The question remains, and it is a vital one. What society?

Reality
I have heard too many child care officers talk glibly about college and university when the youngster cannot even get good marks at his secondary modern school. Too often it is forgotten that the child belongs to his background, which in this case usually means the slums of some large city. We may hope to change his attitude to it, but we cannot change the background itself. Most youngsters, when they leave care, return to their old haunts. To fill them with false pretensions is to prepare them for a fall even worse than the first; to give them insight into their realistic possibilities is to fill them with hope.

If a youngster is to be realistic about his place in the world then it is essential that the link with his past be maintained. Nothing is more stupid than to attempt to break this bond. A children's home should not be a goldfish bowl. A youngster's parents are his parents, and no matter how bad they may be for him in the opinion of the child care staff, they are still the only ones he has. As Keith Lucas has pointed out, too many social workers see themselves as championing the child against his parents, against his background, against life. For the child his parents are the most important people in his life, and we should never forget this. He may have run away from them, his father may have beaten him, his mother may have deserted him, but they remain his parents. How strong this tie can be in even the most unlikely circumstances may be shown by a case in which I am involved at the moment. The subject is a college undergraduate. Recently, from being an apparently stable person, he began to exhibit all the symptoms of major disturbance. Eventually he came to me for counselling. He had, he said, to go to Germany. This was a surprising statement in view of the fact that he was already heavily in debt, and to go to Germany in the summer might prove a financial disaster and thus cause his withdrawal from college. Slowly I arrived at the truth. I found out that he is illegitimate and is living with his mother and stepfather. Quite suddenly, for no reason that he could give me, he had conceived a strong desire to see his real father. He had eventually approached his mother, who had told him that she had known his father for a mere four months in Germany at the end of the last war, and that he had disappeared. Thus, not only was he illegitimate, but his father had not even known him, was not even aware of his existence. Nevertheless, nothing will now content this young man but that he go to Germany in search of his father.

Child care workers
To my mind the key person in the jigsaw is not the Children's Officer, nor the Child Care Officers, nor the Superintendents, least of all the chairman of the Children's Committee, but the residential child care worker. It is he or she who must represent the youngster's link with reality. Because of the nature of residential care, and because of the overloaded caseloads of most Child Care Officers, the houseparent becomes the only person with whom the youngster can possibly identify and, if you remember, we have stated that this process of identification is a pre-essential to the child's reorganising his personality in the right direction. But there remain certain factors which are basic to the realisation of this process.

Firstly, the houseparent must be permanent. When I was in Naples it was some eighteen months before the youngsters accepted me, and in case it should be thought that this was because they were Italian, let me state that in my eighteen months in England I do not think that the children accepted me at all. Identification is impossible where the houseparents change every few months, not only because the houseparents themselves do not settle down, but because the children are aware of this and sense the transitoriness of their position. Nor, of course, can it take place where the children are changed around. I cannot stress this factor of permanency too strongly. At one place where I worked the turnover of staff during one year reached the astonishing proportions of 60 per cent. The effect on the children can be imagined. Maas has reported that children seem to be able to overcome the effects of one separation, but not of several. Too many children in care never have a chance to form a relationship with anyone.

Secondly, the houseparents must be supported by an adequate and permanent staff. The supporting staff are obviously not as important as the houseparent himself, but equally obviously if the houseparent has to spend all his or her time training and relating to new staff every few months the children in his care are going to suffer.

I would say that these are the two factors essential to the youngster's identifying with the houseparent.

Understanding
There remains the problem of the houseparent's identification with the child. With delinquent youngsters especially, love is not enough. To bridge the gap, understanding is required, and there are I think certain prerequisites to this understanding:

The institution, home, or whatever, should be in the area from which the youngster comes, or at least close to it.
The houseparents should have a thorough understanding and knowledge of the background from which the youngster comes. This is of course difficult unless he lives there.
The houseparent should receive training regarding the type of youngster he is likely to be called upon to deal with. This is no substitute for experience, which in this sort of work is often the best kind of training, but it is a help.
There should be constant contact with the parents, with the neighbourhood. Once again this is only possible if the institution is geographically situated in the vicinity of the child's family.

I realise that I have skimmed over a very large subject, but despite the many points I have missed I hope that something of what I am trying to say has come across. If I were to have to put my argument in one pithy sentence, I would say that the direction in which any youth service should move is towards integrating the youngster into his society, that the prerequisite for this is identification with the houseparent on the part of the youngster, and finally that this is impossible without a similar identification on the part of the houseparent and the child care service as a whole with the child.

References

Bettelheim, Bruno, Love is not enough. Free Press, 1950.

Lucas, Keith, Programs and Problems in Child Care. Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science, 355, September, 1964.

Maas and Eyler, Children in need of Parents. Columbia University Press. 1959.

Source: The Anti-social Child in Care, Annual Review of the Residential Child Care Association, 1(14), 1966