Listen to this

Moving into the Second Quarter of the 21st Century

Kiaras Gharabaghi

December is a month of reflection. It is the last month of the year in many calendars around the world (but not all), and this year, December is the last month of the first quarter of the 21st century. And what a quarter it has been. Sadly, a great deal of misery has unfolded and continues to be imposed on the lives of many, especially children and youth. As child and youth care practitioners, we ought to take note of this challenging moment in human history. It is not the first challenging moment and certainly won’t be the last one, but it is one moment where we might come together and think about how we want to approach the next quarter of this century. To that end, I have some recommendations, most of which I recently shared with the National Association of Child Care Workers in South Africa. This month, I want to share them with all of you, so here it goes.

1. More than ever, let us stay united. Child and youth care is very much a contested practice, both because it remains unregulated almost everywhere and therefore is seen as ‘less than’ many other practices, and because the term ‘care’ is itself contested and largely privatized in many jurisdictions. Private care is not the same as what child and youth care as a field set out to do many years ago. Private care is the commodification of life itself, especially of life that is deemed unproductive and wasteful from a growth perspective. Sadly, children and elders are the main targets for this designation. Therefore, at a time when our very existence is becoming increasingly contested, it is good to stay united. This doesn’t mean that we have to agree on everything, nor that we should take stop trying to get better at what we do and how we are. But it does mean that we might recommit to an overarching idea that being with children and youth in the every day, and presenting various versions of care, both interpersonally and in community, is something we can all get behind.
2. Practice care amongst yourselves. This is much more than simply reminding ourselves of the many ways in which people practice self-care, a concept I have never really been partial to. Instead, practicing care amongst us is ensuring that we contribute to a community of child and youth care and are inviting of others to enter that community. This is important even if those seeking to enter also seek to change the community. We can and should evolve as a community of child and youth care. Sometimes, openness to change allows for engagement with some of the less celebratory aspects of our community, including its profound whiteness and hesitation to embrace knowledge and wisdom from other ways of being in the world.
3. Explore care with children, families and communities. We sometimes assume that everyone knows what care is, what it can look like, and that being cared for is something everyone is seeking. But this is not at all the case. In fact, most care systems historically and perhaps still today are systems of oppression, and many young people, families and communities rightfully avoid becoming subjected to such care regimes. But if we want child and youth care to be about care, then we better explore together with children, families and communities what care can mean and the multiple ways it can manifest. For many communities, care seems very far off these days. War and violence, racism and exclusion, imposed poverty and powerlessness leave little room for that. And yet, care is always just around the corner, even if we don’t always recognize it. So let us explore what care is and can be but let us do that with those we care for and about, so that they might care about experiencing care on their terms.
4. Document what you see on the ground. This is perhaps the most neglected aspect of our practice. Child and youth care practitioners see so much every day, including things that expose the injustices across racial, faith, ability and disability, and gender identities. And yet much of what we see goes undocumented and exists only as stories. Evidence still matters. If we want collective action, or action taken by governments on behalf of children, their families and their communities, we must present evidence of where the gaps are, what is going wrong, and what it takes for things to go right. In many respects, I am calling out everyone for knowing so much and documenting so little. This is irresponsible.
5. Continue to use your own lived experiences and the wisdom of your ancestors as a guide, but also understand that the children, their families and their communities face a very different world from the one we might have faced. The next few years will alter the way we exist in this world. Between generative AI, the transformation of information systems and the age of constant surveillance, climate change and its implications, and the reawakening of the arms race accompanied by a normalization of violence and death, the children and youth we are working with have much less time to think, much less time to love, much less time to be invested in anything in particular. They won’t know what is real and what is artificially generated and perhaps it won’t matter all that much. In fact, they may even accept an artificially generated child and youth care practitioner in their lives, which might offer them more opportunity for self-determination than the real ones do! In short, the past still matters, and so do wisdom, stories, and inter-generational knowledge. But the future may not be continuous with that past and ignoring that would not be good for child and youth care as a field or as a practice.
6. Make new friends. The time for communities of like-minded people to be relevant has long passed. All forces threatening the value of care in our society don’t care at all about disciplines or professional turf. They care about outcomes, growth, wealth and power. This is a time for child and youth care to start paying attention to others not in the form of critique and rejection, but in the form of opportunity for collaboration and pooling perspectives and practices. Child and youth care needs new friends. Engineers, software developers, lawyers, urban planners, journalists, environmental scientists, public health professionals, food scientists and anthropologists, and so many others would be enormously helpful in our quest to reintroduce the value of care.
7. Prepare and be equipped for the digital age. As referenced above, communication structures and processes are changing rapidly. Child and youth care has often been referred to as a talking profession, or a practice that operationalizes its relational ways through interpersonal communication. That was fine when most young people received input through individuals speaking to them. In the digital age, this is not how information works, nor how relationships work. Even intimacy, love, sex, and connection are more dependent on the capacity to swipe left or right than they are on any spoken words. Time to get equipped and understand how young people communicate through the medium of multiple technologies and changing norms.
8. Take care of your Elders. In the end, child and youth care may well place value primarily on children and youth, as the name of our practice would suggest. But never forget that any society will be judged by the value they place on Elders much more so than children or youth. Elders are wisdom, knowledge, and truth. If we are not engaged with our Elders, if we don’t place the dignity of their lives ahead of everything else, we really have no business calling ourselves a ‘care profession’.

So, there you have it. Eight recommendations for the next quarter of the 21st century. I hope that our conversations in the coming year will begin to move toward engaging with the things I have referenced above. It is December, a time when many people turn to family and friends to come together and celebrate our relationships. Or perhaps the privilege of being able to come together, which, as many people around the world are finding out, is not to be taken for granted. For those who celebrate the holidays as family and community time (rather than a religious time), I wish you a wonderful time and the health, courage, and determination to face the future with hope and with intention to seriously engage with this new world.