ListenI am a firm believer that the fundamental goal of Child and Youth Care practice is to assist young people in their development of an autonomous self; in fact, if ever there were a theory of Child and Youth Care practice, it would be a theory of autonomy. And yet, it has always been my experience that there is an enormous resistance to the idea of an autonomous self for young people and that this resistance is at the root of the limited ways in which we, as a field of practice, have enabled or operationalized concepts such as children’s rights, participation, and voice. It is almost like there is an underlying fear or anxiety that furthering the autonomous self in young people somehow reduces the relevance, the power, the control of professionals and their institutions, systems, and professional identities. Perhaps one reason for this is the ambiguity associated with the term autonomy itself, and the many ways in which this term has come to be misunderstood or misrepresented as a synonym for other terms. So let’s start there.
The most obvious confusion arises when the term autonomy is mistaken to suggest independence in its operational form. Particularly in residential care settings, conversations about autonomy often become conversations about disengagement, allowing young people to do what they want, to make decisions independently, or to go about their lives regardless of the consequences of their actions. On the one hand, everyone recognizes that even in this mistaken version of autonomy, there is value, because young people do have to make mistakes to learn from, and they do have to own their decisions and the consequences of those decisions. Too much control is broadly understood as hampering growth. On the other hand, this concept is seen as difficult in residential care settings (also in schools and other institutional settings) largely because of the need for some control in the setting to avoid chaos, inconsistencies in the enforcement of rules and regulations, as well as to mitigate risks that might accrue both to individual children and youth as well as to the program itself. This way of thinking about autonomy is highly problematic and probably negates the concept right from the start because it suggests that the autonomous self is tied directly to the performance context of the setting. In this conceptualization we see autonomy as a threat to meeting specific treatment goals, or as a disruption in behavioural control, or as potentially worrisome in the context of group dynamics. We assume furthermore that the autonomous self stands as an alternative to the program, the rules, and the treatment plans. In other words, we see the furthering of autonomy as a departure from the program’s goals and routines.
In fact, autonomy has very little to do with independence as an operational concept. Autonomy is not about the absence of rules, regulations, behavioural controls, treatment plans, or any other similar things, although all these things should always be reflected upon through the lens of who benefits from them (in most cases, it’s not young people). Autonomy is instead a social pedagogic concept, drawn from the emphasis on human subjectivity in both interpersonal and collective contexts. Autonomy is that which mitigates against the ways in which North American approaches to treatment and care render young people as objects. The autonomous self is one that constructs how we are going to be in relation to others and to things, spirits, social and environmental change, values, freedom and oppression. Our personhood rests in our autonomous self. The autonomous self is external facing but internally constructed through everything that is embodied within us. Our humanity, and therefore our subjectivity, depends on our ownership of our autonomous self.
We grotesquely underestimate the degree to which virtually everything we do mitigates the development of the autonomous self for young people. The very idea of placing young people in programs, with predetermined routines, structures, rules and regulations, and then assessing their performance in relation to these things, negates even the possibility of developing one’s autonomous self in any way other than through resistance and fight. Young people who do well in residential settings, by which I mean they follow the rules, get along with everyone, meet the goals set for them (and occasionally by them) regularly, and ultimately demonstrate high levels of functional skills that allow them to achieve success in school and elsewhere, have achieved something, but what they have achieved rests on the surface of their skin. It can be washed away in a heartbeat because this kind of achievement has no roots, is not anchored anywhere, and depends largely on the external circumstances presented to the young person in the form of programs, relationships, and opportunities. At the first sight of adversity, these young people either crumble or need to place themselves somewhere where their wounds can be fixed. As we all know, finding those fixing stations becomes increasingly difficult for young people once they age out of youth-serving systems.
The data doesn’t lie. We know that the outcomes of residential services have often been very positive for some young people and very negative for others. It is fair to say that those who have achieved positive outcomes, probably have more solidly positive outcomes now than ever before. But it is also the case that those who have had negative outcomes continue to produce the same disturbing post-care data they always have. High school completion rates have not changed in decades; participation in post-secondary education continues to be below 4% almost everywhere in North America; homelessness and shelter life is as common now than it was twenty years ago. Suicide rates and the rates of premature death of young people from care continue to be several times that of young people in the general population. Aside from these relatively easily measured outcomes, many more negative ones continue to impact a substantial proportion of those with care experience, who often live on the threshold of early pregnancy, substance use, trauma symptoms, dating violence, food insecurity, participation in criminal activity, and more. Living on the threshold of misery is not captured by outcomes data but it is not a success; it is a precarious life filled with anxiety and pain. What are we missing?
I would suggest that what we are missing is not so much about the things we currently do, but about the one thing we really don’t do much at all, and that largely remains a mystery to Child and Youth Care practitioners and to social workers managing and coordinating case plans. We have no meaningful strategies to assist young people in the development of their autonomous self. And yet it is through that autonomous self that young people will experience whatever comes next. Many young people experience adversity during their emerging adulthood. Some engage with those experiences as objects, waiting for the next intervention, allowing things to happen however they might. Others drive the experience themselves, continuously reinforcing their sense of self through decisions and ways of being that reflect the self growing within them. Their experience in the shelter is not a victim experience, but instead an experience to be shaped, owned, resisted, or pragmatically exploited. They are young people who know the difference between charity and ownership.
I am not suggesting that residential settings should stop their focus on behaviour, conformity and compliance. I am not suggesting that we should abandon treatment and evidence-based practices in residential care. Everyone who knows my work also knows that I have very limited confidence in any of these technocratic, bureaucratic, and narcissistically professionalized ways of being with edgy youth. But that’s ok and I can respect differences of opinion and different interpretations of what is, to be fair, very confusing and often contradictory research evidence on outcomes. But I am suggesting that we need to focus much more substantially on our duty to assist young people in the development of their autonomous self. We can do that in a number of ways.
First, we need to pay much more attention not to anti-racism but to identity futurism. This means that we must allow young people to build their autonomous self on the basis of who they are, including their racial, sexual, gender, ability and disability identities. For all young people (and adults too) the core question is always: How will I preserve and strengthen my racial, my gender, my ability and disability identity as I move through a world that is far from seeing me, far from celebrating me, far from acknowledging my contributions? Direct and deep engagement with young people about the beauty and strength of who they are is a core requirement of Child and Youth Care practice, and yet it rarely happens and no programs in residential services or in other institutional sectors prioritize this. Instead, our professional and institutional demand is for young people to adapt themselves to the demands of existing rules, procedures, and systems. We don’t consider the enormous loss young people experience as they let go of their (multiple) identities in an effort to conform. That’s our first mistake.
Second, we need to understand resistance to rules and regulations, to treatment and care, to relationship and connection, as the most rational and meaningful activity young people engage in. Their resistance, often expressed through behaviour, is their attempt to become a subject against the pressures of submitting as an object. Their resistance is their connection to their humanity and quashing that resistance through control and intervention undoes their humanity. This does not mean that we should ignore bad behaviour, poor decisions, or young people disengaging from programs and services. It means instead that we should get excited at the opportunity to explore with them what is driving their behaviour and their decisions. The question is not ‘why are you doing this?’ but ‘who are you becoming?’.
To be perfectly clear: I am not advocating for a laissez-faire approach to being with young people. Quite to the contrary. I am suggesting that we have made our job far too easy and comfortable to really be legitimately calling this Child and Youth Care practice. That practice requires us to spend much less times as enforcers (although it is fine to enforce rules), as security guards and surveillance operatives (although it is fine to maintain oversight and safety), and as the purveyors of external control (rarely the right thing, but occasionally necessary). All these things are easy and require almost no skills whatsoever. Instead, our job is to be with young people as they develop their sense of self independently of our structures and programs. Our job is to ask questions and engage in discussion with young people about their journey of becoming. And our job is to ensure that we too recognize our inherent need to be important and in charge of things, and our claim to knowing what is a good way to be in the world. Mitigating the enormous impact of working to meet our own needs, which is the lifeblood of all institutional care settings, is something we have clearly failed to do.
Our world is filled with uncertainty, ambiguity, ethical tensions, oppression, and anxiety. Every day we spent without asking ‘who am I in this world and who do I want to be?’ is a day in our lives on which we don’t matter, because we have reduced ourselves to a mere object manufactured through discourses of conformity and compliance. The best thing we can do for young people is to ensure that whoever they are, they own their way of being in the world. Who they are becomes the one thing worth fighting for, worth preserving. Only then will they have a vested interest in the things the world throws at them. That is the thing about autonomy – it’s what makes us human.
