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154 DECEMBER 2011
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A Developmental Perspective for Child and Youth Care Work

Henry. W. Maier

Care work is very much akin to the subject matter in the discipline of child development, more correctly designated as human development. Human developmental knowledge emerges out of studies of the interpersonal and ecological life experience of children and adolescents, especially growth and development within family and communal matrices. Care work with children or youth requires an intense interpersonal involvement at whatever level of development a child or youth is operating. Consequently, human development knowledge can provide a solid backdrop for care workers engaged in revitalizing children’s and adolescents’ development (Beker & Maier, 1980; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Gilligan, 1987; Maier, 1987; VanderVen, 1986; VanderVen, Mattingly, & Morris, 1982). Simultaneously care workers respond to ongoing contextual conditions in order to assure salutary life experience.

This chapter introduces a developmental perspective decisively different from the Child and Youth Care fields’ previous alignments with psychodynamic, behavioral, or cognitive psychological stances. Carol Gilligan cogently pointed out this factor more recently:

Two approaches currently characterize the response of professionals to ... [young people’s difficulties]. One relies on the imposition of control, the effort to override a tortuous reason with behavior modification and biofeedback, to focus attention simply on physical survival by teaching skills for managing stress and regulating ... [behaviors]. The other approach reaches into reason and joins the humanistic faith in the power of education with the insight of modern psychology. Positing human development as the aim of education, it turns attention to the question: What constitutes and fosters development? (Gilligan, 1987, pp. 17-18)

The perspective advocated here relies upon lifespan developmental knowledge, grounded in empirical research and buttressed by an ecological orientation as the most appropriate scientific source for Child and Youth Care work (Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981; Maier, 1979).

What is a Developmental Perspective?

Human development, especially child and adolescent development, is a universal process and at the same time, highly individualized. Studies of human development zero in on basic human functioning: the way a person grows and develops and what people do under various circumstances within their relevant environments. Development is viewed for a person’s physical, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive functioning (Ivey, 1986; Maier, 1978). Developmental change is studied and understood for the reciprocal interactions between an individual and his or her active context. Just as the context changes the individual, so the reverse is true. Human life experiences are bidirectional (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981, p. 9). In essence, by being both a product and a producer of their contexts, individuals effect their own development (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981, p. 3). Human development is known as orderly and empirically predictable. Although they occur over time, few changes emerge simply as the result of the passage of time; instead, changes emerge out of relevant experiences.

Studies of human development are constantly expanded by new research data enlarging or replacing previous findings (Skolnick, 1986, p. 7). Various details of knowledge about human behavior and development may, for the present, be in a state of flux. Nevertheless, what is currently known provides ample backdrop for on-the-spot certainty and actions. In fact, in the behavioral sciences, lifespan developmental psychology is presently assuming the foreground (Baltes, Reese, & Lipsitt, 1980; Gilligan, 1987; Kegan, 1982, p. 298; Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981; Maier, 1986; Schuster & Ashburn, 1986), superseding previous commitments to other earlier “schools” of psychology. Many of the research findings and concepts of these earlier formulations are now conceived as complementary rather than contradictory (Ivey, 1986; Izard, Kagan, & Zajonc, 1984; Maier, 1978, p. 7-10; Skolnick, 1986, p. 107). Contemporary helping orientation seems to foster a holistic approach where each person is recognized as a unique being functioning as a total entity (Maas, 1984).

It is reasonable to postulate then that no other spectrum of knowledge incorporates so closely and completely the very essence of professional Child and Youth Care work. That is to say, a perspective which appraises what is happening in an individual’s life and how interpersonal interactions and environmental alterations can change what is happening in order that children and youth can experience integrative growth in their development toward adulthood.

Illustrative selections of developmental findings applied to Child and Youth Care

Several areas of developmental knowledge out of a vast “bin” of useful possibilities are presented to illustrate how such material can directly be applied to Child and Youth Care work. They are:

  1. attachment formation and “beginnings” early or later in life;
  2. rhythmicity as the underpinning for the mutuality of personal interactions;
  3. transitional objects and how they are utilized in facing of new life situations;
  4. trial-and-error learning as a fundamental learning mode; and
  5. personal value acquisition.

Attachment Formation – and “Beginnings” Early and Later in Life

Basic to all child care is the formation of a solid interpersonal relationship between care giver and care receiver. Studies on attachment formation are useful here as an extension of that effort (Ainsworth, M.D., 1972; Sroufe, 1978). They also amplify processes of beginnings in human interactions. Attachment has to be nurtured through direct and predictable care giving. In the process of attachment formation in the beginning of a relationship, and at moments of crises, the support of attachment striving is particularly crucial. Interestingly, the more an individual feels certain of support (attachment), the less demand there will be for reinforcement of such support (Maier, 1987, p. 121-128). It is useful to distinguish between attachment and attachment behaviors.

Attachment behavior occurs whenever a child, or in fact a person at any age, wishes to strengthen an attachment or feels the ongoing attachment in jeopardy. At that point, the individual will manifest attachment behavior (e.g., physical or verbal contacts such as holding on, embracing, or clinging). Attachment behaviors are really efforts to maintain or increase attachment, they have to be seen and responded to as such.

Need and demand for attachment succorance is more apt to arise at points of personal stress, especially in periods of life transitions such as moves by the family. The need is particularly accentuated by a move from one environmental experience to another (e.g., change of school, homes, friendship groups, or other personal life reorientations) (Ainsworth, M.D., 1982; Bronfenbrenner, 1979; Maier, 1987, pp. 22-23). In turn, attachment behaviors lessen as an individual feels more assured of the wanted attachment (Ainsworth, M.D., 1982; Sroufe, 1978).

These accounts of ordinary attachment formation speak to professional Child and Youth Care work where nurturing care enhances the possibility for attachment to the care worker. This is a fundamental for effective work and is a stepping stone in “permanency planning.” Workers will need to welcome and actively support attachment strivings, hoping to normalize attachment behavior (Ainsworth, M.D., 1982; Maier, 1987, Ch. 5).

Rhythmicity as the Underpinning for the Mutuality of Personal Interactions

Recently, novel and prominent research at a large number of developmental study projects have concluded that both care givers and care receivers experience challenging mutual interactions of giving and taking, of coping together and apart, in an interweaving of rhythms (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). This potent force found in joint rhythmicity seems to enhance the very energy which links people together. It can bring about a symphony of human actions with a joint rhythm and fine tuning one to another (Maier, 1987, pp. 46-48).

With this concept in mind, the worker may attempt in the daily care tasks to energize a joint rhythm with each child and the group-as-a-whole in order to assure full engagement as a symphonic totality. Recognizing the developmental components of rhythmicity may encourage workers to search out activities and play with built-in rhythmic interactions. Rhythms in music, song and dance, push-and-pull playful activities, the rhythmic exchange in throwing a frisbee, ball or pillow, waving goodbye or exchanging solid handshakes have a strong potential for bringing about sensations of spontaneous togetherness (Maier, 1987, Ch.1).

The Use of Transitional Objects for Facing New Life Situations

Studies describing the use of transitional objects (Maier, 1987, pp. 57-58) in crucial experiences requiring change in the childhood period, can cast light on the essence of making transitions later in life when a change to a new situation seems overwhelming for an individual (e.g., being with an unaccustomed care giver, having a room change, or whatever) (Maier, 1987, pp. 57-58). A “transitional object,” as the blanket for Linus in the Peanuts cartoon, can give a person the extra symbolic assurance needed to ease the adaptation.

Workers can utilize such understanding and assist youngsters to manage severely uncertain conditions, whether momentary or long-term transitions. By supporting and incorporating the individuals’ very special objects, the worker recognizes that these items serve as linkage to previous places, people, and memories of good as well as tough times. These items, possibly a scrap of paper, a piece of clothing, a picture, or remnant of a once stuffed animal might be clutched closely, slept with, etc. The transition objects may be worn out, possibly smelly or sometimes bizarre; but they are essential to the owners and are a source of strength. In addition, care workers themselves must plan to be on hand and available as vital and tangible links in transition.

Trial-and-Error Learning as a Fundamental Learning Mode

Developmental knowledge offers rich possibilities for understanding mastery of incremental and novel experiences. Progressive trial-and-error learning is the basic cognitive mode in infancy and childhood, and on occasions of substantial new learning later on in life. This developmental fact establishes that new learning has to be first concrete, visual, and open for experiment. Initial learning must follow the cognitive process of trying out where individuals see for themselves how something works or what it means. Above all, the person needs latitude to err without that being regarded as a devastating mark of failure but as a consequential step toward learning (Maier, 1978, pp. 36, 156 & 244).

With such understanding, care workers are challenged to foster and to invent situations so that what must be learned can be tried out, experimented with, to provide those opportunities where new behaviors or understanding can be attempted, failed, and tried again. Eventually the young people themselves may experience these tasks as manageable and safe. At this point, learning takes place and is eventually integrated. Actual learning rather than temporary compliance has the potential to occur with this model (Maier, 1987, Ch.3). For instance, to learn “to wait for one’s turn” can be acquired in specially created situations where youngsters can play out their capacity to wait. Later such playful give-and-take can be built-in into more and more daily life situations of waiting. Children can be playfully engaged in getting their “proper” turns in receiving their treats while being assured that no one is to be left out (Maier, 1987, Ch. 6).

Parenthetically, familiarity with the progression of cognitive processes serves not only as an eye-opener and practice guide for the care workers; it also introduces an advantageous “thinking screen” for masterminding the very training of these workers.

Personal Value Acquisition

In early childhood and later on in subsequent value acquisitions, individuals assume personal values, utilizing a progression of imitation and later identifying with highly visible, esteemed, powerful persons and culminating in an eventual alignment with the reference groups of these “heroes” (Jones, Garrison, & Morgan, 1985, Ch. 9). Values are adopted through per-sonally satisfying experiences with selected key persons. The values a care giver holds are potentially transferrable, if such a person has been experienced as a dependable esteemed person by the care receiver. This awareness suggests for child and youth practice that it is the workers as persons who stand as the ultimate transmitters of values, not their moral edicts, admonishments, or rewards. In short, care workers must have personal satisfying meaning for the ones they serve, if they wish to effectively impact the youngsters’ values.

Moreover, the importance of peers in value clarification, especially for those in their pre-adolescent and adolescent years cannot be overlooked in group care work. Research from developmental psychology establishes that in their adolescent years, youngsters devote much energy sorting out and integrating their basic personal values (Schuster & Ashburn, 1986). Also, in their teens, alignment with peers is nearly at par with ongoing identification with key elders (Washington, 1982). Consequently, frequent informal but full group deliberations, including heated disputes with the young people are in order. Such discussions serve the youngsters as opportunities for verbally trying out a range of notions for their “fit” as they do so easily with their wardrobe fantasies on a Saturday morning shopping spree: “nothing bought, just looking!”

What about so-called “deviant” or “pathological” development?

What were formerly viewed as pathological or deviant behaviors can, under this model, be conceived and approached as ordinary but inopportune and untimely developmental occurrences (Kegan, 1982, p. 298). Former preoccupation with children’s “deviant” or “pathological” aspects of their lives easily resulted in seeing them as special classifications of persons; their thoughts, actions and affect were conceived as “defective” or “disturbed,” because their thinking or actions seemed to be incomprehensible. The youngsters were “disturbing” because they could not fit into existing behavioral, cognitive, or affective continua of human development. This dilemma seemed to stem from the fact that major attention revolved around their incapabilities and adults' failures in connecting effectively with them. Little attention was given to these youngsters' capabilities. The individual as a total person got lost among efforts to combat the “deviations” (Schuster & Ashburn, 1986, pp. 23-24).

In a developmental approach, in contrast, children are appraised and understood for their response to their daily life situations, their patterns of coping, and their way of encountering supposedly unmanageable situations. The child’s affective, behavioral, cognitive, and physio-motor interactive responses are then scanned to locate corresponding levels on the continua of development. They then can be spotted for their specific point of developmental status and transitions. They can consequently be “fitted-in” and a decision can be made with some predictive clarity about what needs to happen to reinforce development (Ivey, 1986; Maier, 1978, 01.6). For example, a big, boisterous Paul, 13, demands continuous adult approval as if he were a four year-old. He goes to pieces with temper tantrum explosions when he feels slighted, and in particular when he thinks that he cannot predict what is going to happen at a particular moment of his life. In other words, he “lets go” emotionally, of rational perception and even bodily inhibitions when he feels out of control. His demands for adult approval and his temper outbursts are not necessarily “deviant” behaviors; they also can be conceived as a desperate outreach for adult care when he feels at a complete loss. His intensity directed toward getting clarity about what is going to happen, is also a valiant self-maintenance effort. None of these are apropos for expectations of a 13-year-old fellow. Yet, these youngsters strike out for adult nurturance and a search for subsequent certainty within their lives. These life experiences would be akin to very young children whose behaviors are conceived as acceptable while full reassuring support is rendered to them.

Armed with such understanding, workers can find directions for their work with such situations. For instance, Paul, in the illustration above, could find and experience his connectedness to others who cared and sense a predictable outcome. This strategy is developmentally sound and more useful than pushing him off and isolating him for his untimely, and consequently unwanted, behavior.

In many ways the sputtering of an automobile motor due to the coldness of its engine or the strain of a steep incline can be drawn as analogous to the difficulties people experience while encountering stressful situations. In the case of the automobile motor, nobody questions the “properness” of a shift to a lower gear to allow the car to apply its energy in a more fundamental way. Before shifting to a higher gear, the driver wants to be sure that the engine is operating at a higher pace than needed for the lower gear still in place. The same is relevant in the expenditure of human energy. A recourse to earlier forms of functioning is appropriate when this more fundamental level is at the moment the more facilitating one. Such a recourse needs not then to be defined as “regression.” It is most natural to kick a tire when the car “lets one down,” or rely on finger count when one is unsure of one’s ability to keep track of something, and so on.

This important notion has implications in other ways as well. In a good number of group care situations, care work involves as much an effort to maintain an individual’s ongoing functioning as it does to enhance developmental progress. Moreover, placements into a group setting, part or full-time, transitions to a new community and a new group life culture, etc., all represent experiences which cause a person to function most naturally on a less adequate level than before (Maier, 1987, Ch. 1). A case could be made here for youngsters with severe disabling physiologic or somatic complications. For some of these, developmental knowledge can be applied toward helping to maintain their ongoing level of functioning in order that these children can survive at all.

Tune-up rather than Speed-up

In a quite different aspect, over the past 30 years there has been an eagerness to accelerate children’s learning processes as if children had to compensate for their society’s shortcoming. In the field of group care, recent concerns with proving behavioral changes as outcome and effectiveness of child tending, has as a by-product unleashed what Frank Ainsworth (1987) calls “the rush to independence – a new tyranny."1 David Elkind (1981) also warns that pushing persons to independence can have serious consequences, or is at least unkind. Although pushing may bring about adequately functioning persons, they do not necessarily become people with satisfying life experience. A developmental lifespan orientation would lead workers to more keenly gauge their care receivers’ readiness for relevant learning progressions.

Change and Integrated Change

A developmental approach to Child and Youth Care is further enlivened by two recent but very separate findings. First, Bandura’s (1977) studies on “self-efficacy achievement” bring forth clearly that actual integrative learning does not take place until the learners themselves have become aware of their changes in behavior, thinking, or affect. This suggests that it is not the observations of the workers or other fellow professionals alone, nor the attainment of sufficient points or tokens which ultimately count; instead, much depends upon the person’s own level of recognition and acceptance of his or her newly acquired efficacy.

Second, Carol Gilligan calls attention to the fact that males and females respectively emphasize and value different aspects of growth in others. Men tend to stress change and quantitative growth while women lay greater value upon connectedness and integration, that is, qualitative growth (Gilligan, 1987; Kegan, 1982, p. 5). These differences in value expectations may suggest that, in general, male and female workers hold potentially somewhat different care objectives. Such differences can be viewed as welcome variations or as potential sources of tension. At times, behavioral improvements, that is, “quantitative” change, is desired. At other times, it is desirable to promote integrated growth, “qualitative” change, with an advance in developmental overall capabilities. The latter then demands a greater reliance upon dependency nurturance by Child and Youth Care; whether a worker happens to be male or female. The above tendencies can be recognized and utilized in group care and beyond.

A developmental perspective as a Child and Youth Care practice stance

Care Work Involves Proactive Intervention

Developmental knowledge not only provides an empirically-grounded practice framework for Child and Youth Care work, it also entails the practice stance most in tune with actual tasks performed by these care givers. Workers are challenged to deal with the ordinary care demands and social surveillance basic for children and adolescents in general, at each particular period in their lives. They are also responsible for specific care needs of each individual on the basis of the child’s special personal requirements and existing circumstances. The basic care demands are rooted in general human development knowledge and overall practice experience with children and youth; individual requirements are based upon specific assessment of each child’s particular unique situation. These efforts on the part of care workers entail a combination of informed practice wisdom and clinical2 thinking.

Developmental orientation, by its solid person-in-the-situation orientation, helps to lessen the ever-existing strain between personal requirements of the care receivers and care givers and those of the institutional (organizational) setting (Maier, 1987, Ch. 9). Integral to the workers’ task performances is for them to observe, to assess, and to respond to each individual as well as to the way the particular living group is functioning. Importantly, care workers not only respond, but they themselves continuously initiate interactions and design programs which enhance the children’s or youth’s ongoing development. This may involve support or redirection of ongoing activities. At other times, they initiate expectations which reach beyond the children’s immediate ongoing functioning as if they could also manage a slight shift to a more advanced level (Maier, 1987, p. 18). In all of these and other care activities, the worker proceeds on the basis of her or his assessment (diagnosis) of an individual’s functioning (coping) and an understanding of what is needed for a step onwards in development, personal competency, and situational effective living.

Focus Upon What a Person Is Doing Rather Than What Is “Deficient”

A developmental perspective enhances a worker’s interest to discern what is each individual’s current performance. A worker’s focus then naturally looks at what a person is doing, rather than not doing. To put it another way: full attention is directed to what is the observable activity and how he or she is “making a go.” This requirement might sound rather self-evident. Yet, in much of everyday accounting of children’s or adolescents’ behavior, thinking or feelings, a common tendency is to report either what the youngsters are not doing or what they ought to be doing, feeling, or thinking.

Such accounts are apt to define the adults’ expectations; they yield little awareness into what the youngsters are all about. A worker may report, for example, that Carolyn does nothing;3 “she absolutely paid no attention to whatever I told her.” Such a statement reveals that the worker believes a girl like Carolyn should listen and obey. But it leaves one helpless in this situation, because one does not learn anything about Carolyn. In inquiring further into what actually happened between the two, it is revealed that Carolyn, 14, was apparently intently listening to her records, swaying with the music, as the worker approached her. When the worker started to speak to her from the door entry, the girl turned her back halfway to the worker. Carolyn did a lot! And with these observations, a worker may be prepared to find a number of possible points of entry: (1) joining in space and rhythm momentarily with Carolyn after acknowledging her entry into Carolyn’s sphere; (2) waiting for a brief period before asking for her attention; (3) then gauging her readiness to receive; or (4) after momentary appraisal, deciding the message does or does not warrant the intrusion. This approach, observing and sharing in what the youngster is doing, while simultaneously staking out the necessary steps in the long process toward achievement brings about increased potency to the workers’ efforts.

The Minutiae of Child Care Are the “Biggies”

While working with children or youth with a focus upon their feelings and ways of interactions, attention needs to be paid to the minutiae of interactions. It is these small details of interplay which tell by the actual variation in behavioral, thought, or affective processes, what is going on. In the preceding paragraph Carolyn was listening intently to music when the worker approached her. “She turned her back halfway to the worker.” Thus, it is known that she did respond to the worker’s intrusion. She acknowledged the worker while communicating her lack of readiness to be engaged with her, by turning halfway, leaving a partial frontal contact with the worker. Possibly the worker’s announcing herself, momentary sharing in the rhythmic experience of Carolyn’s recorded music, or seriously responding to her half acknowledgment, might result in a different outcome with some potential for movement.

Cognizant of these minutiae, concrete directions for the next interaction can be readily established and carried out. These small active interventive engagements, built upon minutiae of interactions by the care workers, as Albert Bandura (1977) points out, rather than any set of masterful techniques, clever verbal input, or major breakthrough tactics, make for effective change.

Development occurs then, by small steps through the minutiae of ordinary human experience, and within the context of daily events. In care work, apparently inconsequential activities might be some of the more potent ones such as the wink of an eye, a casual hand on a youngster’s shoulder, a clear and honest expression of disagreement, or stopping at the bedside after lights are out for an extra squeeze after an earlier tough conflictual time. These minute acts can indeed be very significant in child or youth care work.

A Situational/Contextual Emphasis

A developmental perspective goes hand-in-hand with concrete effective care work-work which is flexible, adaptive, and hopefully deals with each care event in the context of the overall situation. Care work needs to be appropriate developmentally and situationally targeted rather than merely behaviorally or theoretically programmed. An honest word of praise (or a reprimand) may be effective if the individual and care worker are figuratively together in the same place. By contrast, if the same youth is amidst his or her peers, the worker’s well-intended comments may achieve just the opposite effect. A reprimand may then be envisaged by the youngster and peers as a badge of achievement. Context, as ecological thinking demands, spells out the relevant meaning to all personal interactions. A situational definition makes or breaks the impact of a person’s activities however valid or logically sounding the intent might have been (Bronfenbrenner, 1979).

Equally important is the workers’ recognition of environmental factors and the bi-directional flow of human interactions. The individual’s impact upon his or her environment and the powerful influence of the same environment upon these inherent interactions require of the care workers that their intervention includes efforts which “make the environment safer, more developmentally sound, and more nurturant” (Whittaker, 1986, p. 78).

A developmental stance falls within an open system approach

A developmental approach leaves the way open for linkages with other systems of knowledge. If children and adolescents are observed, studied, understood, and dealt with as multi-functional but solitary beings within a social matrix and covered by powerful environmental forces (Maas, 1984), then it follows that other frameworks of psychological knowledge and their respective interventive techniques could be applied. Behavioral shaping may be appropriate when specific forms of behaviors are to be impacted; this could be accomplished without necessarily adopting a concentrated behavior modification or token economy program. Relaxation techniques can be very fruitful while dealing with facets of somatic tensions. Similarly, cognitive structuring or imagery work may be applicable when efforts are directed toward altering selected thought processes. In these illustrations, and in the potential utilization of the vast array of other psychological modalities and interventive procedures, the target is a specific human process which addresses the person-as-a-whole. Such interventive activities are supplementary to continued care activities which need to proceed simultaneously because children and adolescents require the consistent nurturing and enhancing care, protection, and challenges of instrumental adults who are fully available for them.

Implications for training and Child and Youth Care education

It is almost redundant to point out that Child and Youth Care workers have to be versed in human developmental knowledge, while observing and assessing and actually being engaged in work with the youngsters, ready to amass a vast repertoire of techniques, applied as these situations demand on the basis of on the-spot assessment. Such competencies, for the most part, have to be acquired in prior training where knowledge and application of knowledge is fused. Practice skills have to be initially learned within the context of simulated skill-building practice experiences and afterwards instep-by-step, well-selected and supervised actual practice experience in order to avoid that children or youth become the “guinea pigs” of the workers-in-training.

Training has to focus upon the minutiae of practice: what is actually involved in the specific care activities instead of merely acquainting trainees with the tasks at hand. So simple a task as “calling youngsters in from the playground” represents a complexity of possible interactions. The same is true for physically separating oneself from a child while conveying in action to the child: “I am still with you!”Training before and on the job is essential to mastery of at least beginning competence. Continuous learning and refinement of know-how should be further demanded in order to keep somewhat abreast with the exciting new findings from developmental studies (conceptual and empirical research). Hopefully before too long, research findings will be accumulated from care workers’ own repertoire.

Closing comments

A developmental perspective is appropriately advocated because the subject matter and research undertaking of contemporary lifespan developmental psychology deals with the very questions that engage Child and Youth Care workers in their daily work. They come up against the lives of children and youth in their immediate contextual situations. They confront the ways care givers and care receivers impact each other and their joint environment. These encounters intrinsically are reflective of the child’s or youth’s developmental course and current status.

However, a developmental perspective is not merely preferred for this commonality; it is particularly suitable because of its rich resources of immediately applicable knowledge, based upon empirically verifiable research. This is the kind of knowledge foundation which is directly necessary for the work with children and youth and their immediate care givers.

Also, a developmental perspective is at this point not only advocated as a specialty for direct care work, it is currently emerging as the orientation of choice in the wider human relations fields. Child and youth care workers can be challenged to be group care practitioners who are at the forefront rather than late in utilizing such an orientation. They have the potential to emerge as creators of practice experience, hopefully yielding research data for their own fellow professionals.

Finally, a developmental perspective is confidently introduced for its essential humanistic and ecological approaches, its scientific (research) explorations, and its consistency with that which is valuable in human existence. Children, youth or adults, researchers, teachers, or Child and Youth Care workers who can join their creative efforts in advancing developmental knowledge and its application will also advance their own future.

Notes

  1. "Some of the short-term residential programs which specialize in teaching independent living skills are insufficiently clear about developmental issues, especially the place of nurturing experience in that process. They try to force growth. Growth cannot be forced through some kind of hothouse process and to attempt it, may do harm” (Ainsworth, F., 1987).
  2. "Clinical thinking” has nothing to do per se with a white coat, medical model, or use of anyone brand of psychological or psychiatric nomenclature. Instead, clinical thinking pertains to a judgment made on the basis of actual observation and painstaking study of the particular circumstances in order to obtain for each case a distinct assessment (diagnosis) of the case-specific conditions. “Clinical” stands for data obtained by other than class or categorical ordering, theory, or by a belief system.
  3. Please note the contradiction: nobody can do nothing!

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Bandura, A. (1977). Self-efficacy: Toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological Review, 84(2), 191-215.

Beker, J., & Maier, H.W. (1980). Emerging issues in Child and Youth Care education: A platform for planning. Child Care Quarterly, 10(3),200—209.

Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The ecology of human development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Elkind, D. (1981). The hurried child: Growing up too fast too soon. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley.

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Maier, H.W. (1986). Human development: Psychological basis. In A. Minehan (Ed.), Encyclopedia of social work (18th ed.) (pp. 850-856). New York: National Association of Social Workers.

Maier, H.W. (1981). Rhythms of care. In F. Ainsworth & L.C. Fulcher (Eds.), Group care for children: Concept and issues (pp. 28-30). London: Tavistock.

Maier, H.W. (1979). Child care workers’ development from an interactional perspective. Child Care Quarterly, 8(2),94-99.

Maier, H.W. (1978). Three theories of child development (3rd ed.). New York: Harper & Row; (1988 – A paperback by Lanham, MD, University Press of America).

Schuster, C.S., & Ashburn, S.S. (1986). The holistic approach. In C.S. Schuster & S.S. Ashburn, The process of human development: A holistic lifespan approach (2nd ed.) (pp.23-41). Boston: Little, Brown, & Company.

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VanderVen, K. (1986). From child care to developmental life cycle caregiving: A proposal for future growth. Journal of Child and Youth Care Work, 2(2), (Spring), 53-63.

VanderVen, K., Mattingly, M.A., & Morris, M.G. (1982). Principles and guidelines for child care personnel preparation programs. Child Care Quarterly, 11(3),221-244.

Washington, R.O. (1982). Social developments: A frame for practice and education. Social Work, 27(1), 104-109.

Whittaker, J.K. (1986). The ecology of child and family helping and expanded practice roles for Child and Youth Care workers. Child Care Quarterly, 15(2),77-79.

From: Journal of Child and Youth Care, Vol.8 No.2, pp. 57-70.

The International Child and Youth Care Network
THE INTERNATIONAL CHILD AND YOUTH CARE NETWORK (CYC-Net)

Registered Public Benefit Organisation in the Republic of South Africa (PBO 930015296)
Incorporated as a Not-for-Profit in Canada: Corporation Number 1284643-8

P.O. Box 23199, Claremont 7735, Cape Town, South Africa | P.O. Box 21464, MacDonald Drive, St. John's, NL A1A 5G6, Canada

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