Listen to thisI am passionate about families — my own and other people’s, personally and professionally. For twenty years, starting in the early eighties, I supervised a small but committed band of Child and Youth Care Family Support Workers, and honestly, during that time, I could not have had a more rewarding (or more fun) career. When I finally did move on, it was to teach Child and Youth Care students about the importance of family work. My students will attest to fact that any course that I teach ends up being about families in some way. This column pays tribute to the program and the families that taught me so much.
The early eighties were a time of almost ridiculous plenty in Alberta. Since then, we have gone through several bust and boom periods. However, in 1981, an overabundance of government money led to the funding of the Yellowhead Family Support Program. It was a small unit based on, at that time, a very novel idea: that perhaps if someone worked with high risk families in their homes and communities, we could prevent children from coming into care. In retrospect, I don’t think there was too much concern about whether the program succeeded — after all, nothing ventured, nothing gained. And as I said, at that time public money seemed to be falling from the trees, or at any rate, bubbling from the ground. So the great adventure began: a group of naive, but well-intentioned, Child and Youth Care workers, none of whom had ever seriously worked with families in any setting, set out to keep children out of care.
Gradually, that little band of fearless (or perhaps foolhardy?) workers matured into a confident, much-used resource. I have in recent years begun to read other CYC practitioners’ ideas about what makes CYC work with families unique. My colleague, Jack Phelan, tried many times (unsuccessfully) to get us to put the principles of our practice on paper. This never occurred, but we often discussed the fundamentals of our practice with each other, and as well, we provided numerous workshops and training opportunities to other emerging family-focused programs over the years. It has been something of a relief to me to discover that our daily practice really was distinctly Child and Youth Care, and that most of those now writing about this work would, no doubt, give us their blessing, if only in retrospect. When the Yellowhead Family Support Program began, the notion of keeping children out of care or shortening their stay in care by working with families in their homes was revolutionary. Now, thirty years later, the approach is well-accepted but just as exciting.
In the early stages, we were willing to try almost anything. We gratefully accepted any training that appeared to be even remotely related to family work. Thankfully, the relationship-building skills developed while working with youth and children who often didn’t want to work with us seemed to work equally well with adults (who also often didn’t want to work with us). Shifting focus from working directly with children and youth to working with whole families and with children through their parents was the most difficult piece of our initial adjustment. This shift in focus remained a hurdle for almost every individual that joined us from a residential or group care setting. Sadly, in residential and group care there was often a tendency to view the parents as the “bad” guys — the ones who had hurt “our” kids.
It turned out that most of the parents that we were working with had, as children, been abused or neglected or somehow lacked suitable parental role models. It was clear that if these hurting adult children could gradually learn to better meet their own needs and to nurture themselves, they would be better able to parent their own children. The need to “go slow” was a hard lesson for many of us — there is a tendency to want to immediately teach parenting or other skills and to give good “advice” about how their situation could be radically improved, if only they would follow these three (or four or five or twenty) “simple” steps. CYC professionals might know more about child development, behaviour management, positive communication techniques, available community resources, or whatever; only the parents really knew what they were willing to try ... what fit for them ... what might work in their home at that particular point in time (and if they trusted us enough to listen to anything we had to say). We recognized that parents would be caregivers in their homes long after we had terminated our services. The more we focused on parents’ strengths and positive intentions towards their children, the more we came to understand and appreciate their coping skills, their survival instincts, and thankfully, their willingness to share their expertise and “help” us succeed in our roles.
The beginning phases of every involvement needed to be “CYC 101”, with a focus on really listening, being non-judgmental, and having an attitude of genuine caring, especially toward the adults in the family. The first stages of involvement might include providing concrete help with basic needs identified by the family — food, clothing, shelter, medical care, outstanding warrants, and so on.
“Re-parenting” was commonly an important part of relationship-building with these adults. This kind of acceptance and practical support was frequently a new experience (especially from a member of the “system”). While an attitude of genuine caring is talked about a lot in the helping professions, practising it on a day-to-day basis in the client’s life space is crucial for successful family work.
As Child and Youth Care professionals, we seemed to be especially pragmatic in our approach to family work. Recently, when discussing the success of our program with a retired long-term family support worker whom I’ll call “Dave” (because that’s his name), he said, “We just did whatever worked.” I had to agree that, within the bounds of ethical practice, we often did appear to do just that. However, early in the Program’s development, we had established ourselves as a relational model, and for any approach or technique to become a permanent part of our practice, it had to be respectful, congruent, and achievable within the life space of the families. The same Dave also said, early on, “There are really only three things you need to know to do family work — relationship, relationship, relationship.”
Within our staff group, relationship was also our guiding principle — we did not respect each other in spite of our differences, but because of them. As a program, we shared core beliefs, knowledge, and skills, but each staff was supported to be themselves — to create unique interventions that fit for them and for each family and their individual members, and to “own” and be fully accountable for their specific practice.
Family systems theory, ecological systems theory, family of origin work, strengthbased practice, resiliency work, solution-focused approaches, use of the life space and of activities — all of these approaches were embraced as part of daily practice. Workers “counselled” and had helpful conversations with clients while driving to appointments; attending graduations and weddings; helping find housing; recreational activities; food and summer camps; drinking coffee; shopping; sewing; throwing balls; picnicking; baking; eating; colouring; playing cards; and generally experiencing life together. These shared experiences yielded learning that no textbook could equal — about pain, loss, grief, family loyalty, commitment, healing, joy, happiness; and much more. As we learned to do family work, the families with whom we were involved also taught us about ourselves and our own values, and about what really counts in life.
Interestingly, in this life space approach, boundaries, while fluid, become more crucial and needed to be more conscious than in traditional office therapies. Supervisory sessions and team meetings often included discussion of things like whether it was okay to accept a thank you gift or an invitation out to supper from a family — culture, relationship, and numerous other variables were thoughtfully considered. Often, we ended up doing things that were viewed as “unprofessional” by some other disciplines, but that fit very well for a CYC life space approach. Few self-respecting psychologists, for example, would drive a client to an appointment with another professional, attend court as a support, bring a bouquet of flowers from their garden to a depressed mother, help a parent paint their kitchen cupboards, go apartment hunting, clean, grocery shop, throw a football or picnic in the park with a family, or sit through an AADAC intake interview with a frightened parent and/or teenager. Yet these were the kinds of activities that were a regular part of our relational practice with families. As Mark Krueger would say, “We learned to ‘dance’ to each family’s developmental rhythm ... in an atmosphere that support[ed] growth, change, and/or just being together” (Krueger, 2003, p. 64).
At times, our work did not result in the “success” story that was hoped for — children did end up in care, sometimes as permanent wards of Children’s Services. These “unsuccessful” cases taught us difficult lessons — sadly, sometimes a natural home isn’t the best place for a child to grow up; sometimes even when parents are doing their best, they cannot ensure the safety, security, and healthy development of their children; and sometimes, our best really wasn’t good enough. At a recent workshop, Lorraine Fox commented that when a child cannot stay with their family, there are no other really good solutions. I agree, and in these kinds of situations I think that our program worked hard to help families achieve “less bad” solutions — a permanent guardianship with regular parental contact, placement with significant relatives or within the community or culture, and as healthy a “letting go” process as possible.
After twenty years of providing in-home services to families, and shortly after winning the Premier’s Gold Award of Excellence, the Yellowhead Family Support Program was disbanded, largely due to structural shifts in the Alberta Children’s Services system that had employed us for so many years. Interestingly, the initial shift of staff from our program to a regional training and consulting role reflected a positive shift in attitude toward families and communities that none of us would have predicted in 1981. I do sometimes worry that the distinctly Child and Youth Care flavor of the in-home support work we provided may be lost in the shuffle, but I also hope that as a CYC profession, we will continue to recognize and advocate for the importance of our unique support role in the lives of children and their families.
Reference
Krueger, M. (2003). Interactive youth and family work. In Garfat, T. (Ed.) A Child and Youth Care Approach to Working with Families. (pp. 55-65). NY: The Haworth Press.
From: Relational Child and Youth Care Practice, Volume 23, Number 3, pp.16-19.
