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Listen to thisMost Child and Youth Care practitioners have been trained into believing that consistency is a cornerstone of good Child and Youth Care work. From Day One every new worker believes that being consistent with the approaches used by the other workers prevents confusion and chaos. The alternative, supposedly being inconsistent, will create an anarchistic society reminiscent of The Lord of the Flies. Like most bad advice, there is enough truth in this axiom to keep it alive long past its date of usefulness.
Consistency means that every worker will treat every youth the same when they do similar behaviors, and that every worker will act the same as other workers in similar situations. The failure to do so will apparently result in confusion and loss of trust and safety by the youth because they will not understand how different youth can be treated differently and how different adults can act differently in similar circumstances. Even as I write this it feels silly. Youth and adults are all very able to see differences in people and judge similar behaviors by different people as not the same without losing a moral or even a practical compass.
New youth need to be treated consistently by all staff until they settle down and feel safe in your program because they are not yet ready to have any relationships with helping adults.
Predictability and believing that “the staff” are safe to be around is a key part of establishing this safety. After 30 days or so, they now need to see staff as individuals who might be attractive or interesting enough to get closer to. This is the beginning of relational Child and Youth Care work. So the approach of all staff acting the same is not useful anymore for that youth. They also need to have more freedom and fewer controls, so the consistency approach of all behavior from different youth having a consistent response is no longer useful.
An example may help; I worked in a group home with adolescent boys. Two youth returned to the home late one evening, one was a new youth (with us only a few days) the other was a youth who I had a relationship with because he was there for several months. I met them at the door and informed the new youth that he was one hour late, so he must come in tomorrow one hour early. I turned to the other youth and said that he needed to sit down with me in 20 minutes and discuss his behavior. The new youth said that he would rather sit and talk to me than come in early, the other youth said he would rather come in early than talk to me. I let them continue on into the living room. Neither of them was confused about being treated differently, and it was a useful thing to do to both of them. The new youth needed to learn the rules and the youth who had a relationship with me needed to think about his poor decision.
The only person confused was a new worker who was
observing this. Consistency builds safety, and it impedes individual
strength building. New staff are not safe, so they need to act
consistently “treat all youth the same and have the same response to
similar behavior. New youth are not safe, so they need to be treated the
same by all staff, with no relational approaches.
If you are not a new staff (one year or less experience) you should be
treating each youth as individuals, with different reasons for behaving.
If you are a new staff you need to treat all behavior the same no matter
who does it until you feel safe in your personal competence.
So to sum it up:
