Giving up on kids

"I have been badly let down by one of our adolescent girls and after all I have done for her, I feel like withdrawing my affection and support from her."

It is clear that you are feeling hurt and disappointed about someone with whom you have been making some effort. It is natural for us to be disappointed when our plans and commitments don't seem to bear fruit – and indeed when they seem to have been wasted.

But we often have to be reminded that the children and youth we work with are in care because of long-term, serious difficulties, and that success is never guaranteed or easy to come by. We will spend long hours trying to teach better behaviours, and just when we think the kid has 'got it' she does something to show us that we still have a long way to go. But if we withdraw our affection and support from a youngster whom we feel has let us down, we will probably just confirm for her her painful experience that people will reject when she fails – or in some other ways disappoints others.

Shared responsibilities
Progress and success with this girl should not be your responsibility alone. You and your colleagues should have accepted this responsibility together, and this means two things:

(a) Together, your staff team should be planning interventions and committing resources and energy to this young person; and

(b) Together, your team should be bearing the disappointment (and, if necessary, agonising) over the lack of progress.

What this means “and this is extremely important “is that your supports and rewards should be coming from your colleagues and from the satisfaction of having done what you set out to do “not from the loyalty and performance of one of the children. This team support makes it possible that the direction of the flow of care is from the adults to the children “not the other way around. In the normal commerce of family relationships, the children rarely pay the adults back for their contributions in time and energy; they repay by making, in turn, a commitment to the families they will create, to their partners and their children.

A danger
There is a serious danger that you may convey a sense of your own emotional dependence on this young person, which will unnecessarily raise her anxiety and guilt over not meeting your expectations. In adolescence, especially, we are moving our young clients towards acceptance of responsibility for their own behaviour. What we should be concerned about with this particular young girl is that she will be able to function satisfactorily within her own world. Right now she needs you to stick with her, focussing on what she needs to learn and master, not confusing this with what you may need from her. When we find ourselves having to play adult/parental roles with children, alongside our teaching and guiding roles, it is easy for us to get hooked into our needs for personal satisfaction from “our" children. But in the words of Kahlil Gibran, “your children are not your children ... “

Professional attitude
In our giving and involvement with hurting and troubled children, we can lose the balance we should maintain between personal closeness and professional distance. A teacher may be disappointed when a pupil fails a test or doesn't learn a difficult subject, but this demands further effort on her part “not the withdrawal of her efforts. So with us as Child and Youth Care workers. Things are always coming out other than the way we planned: our job is not to get strung out over that, nor to take it personally, but to get back to the drawing board. We have to ask ourselves: what can we do next? Nobody is “letting us down"; we just have to try something different, and try harder!

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Someone once remarked that the quality of a good child care programme was not measured by the behaviour of the children towards the adults “but by the behaviour of the adults towards the children.