Language and professional credibility

Jack Phelan

This essay is the second in a series of attempts to present an articulate description of the process of doing Child and Youth Care Work.

Language is power and the lack of language creates the lack of a voice, which results in powerless situations.

There is an African saying “Until lions get historians, the hunter will always be glorified”.

The documentation and written description of what we do defines our effectiveness, and in the case of Child and Youth Care Work, our written words don’t speak well for us.

My thesis is that we Child and Youth Care practitioners have adopted the language of allied helping professionals, which has created some serious limitations for us. The language of psychology and social work describe the tasks of office therapy and the use of boundaries that are artificial and temporary. Our work with people is ongoing and sustained, requiring a connectedness and intimacy that clearly are not envisioned or encouraged by most other helping professions.

What we do is to use everyday experiences and tasks to create competence and hope in the people we support, starting from where they are, using plain language and often mundane behaviors. These everyday events are strategic and carefully developed to build hope, success, and new beliefs, and they are simple, yet quite complex in their design and delivery. The language that is needed to describe these straightforward and daily task strategies in simple terms must also convey the complex planning and skillful delivery required.

"I don’t give a fig about simplicity on this side of complexity, but I’d give my right arm for simplicity on the other side of complexity” – Oliver Wendell Holmes

Treatment planning in our work often consists of an accurate assessment of the distance between the present situation of the youth/family and the desired situation or place that we would like them to inhabit. The limitation of this assessment is that, although our data describes the depths to which our youth/family has sunk to a very precise degree, all that we offer as a solution is a group of “helpers” shouting “Get up here”.

What we do in skilled Child and Youth Care practice is to join people at the place they are stuck and try to see the world from that point of view, not from a comfortable office. We can bring our skills to bear in creating a way to proceed from this spot together, supporting from behind and alongside. The words for this place are often words of fear and danger, hopelessness and despair. The developmental level here is generally primitive and unsophisticated, and doesn’t lend itself to flowery descriptions.

Why, then, do our goal statements for youth and families end up being stated as “needs to learn to be more appropriate in his interactions with peers”, and “needs to express his aggressive impulses in more socially acceptable ways” or “could benefit from a parenting skills course and anger management group”? This is not the language of life and we twist and turn to fit our actions within this jargon game. Rather than describe what we do, we have allowed our work to be co-opted and trivialized. Sadly, the Child and Youth Care workers, the youth and even parents have joined in this charade.

I would like to challenge all of us to examine our reports and written documentation to see if it resonates with the feel of the work itself. I will write next month about treatment plans and the need for our voice to be heard.