A Team Building Exercise: A Teachable Moment Missed

John Stein

It was 1975. Three of us who had just completed our master’s degrees and a Vietnam veteran with a degree in English were hired to open a new secure treatment facility for hard core juvenile offenders in Pennsylvania. The state had contracted with a private agency to operate this new program and provided a vacant hospital dormitory on a farm once worked by patients from a nearby psychiatric hospital. The program was to be for the intensive short term treatment of juvenile offenders who were convicted and sentenced by the courts. The agency consisted of only a board of directors who had operated a halfway house for adult offenders that had recently closed. We were hired on Tuesday and told to be ready to take our first boys on Friday.

None of us had any experience in residential programming for children, but three of us had our degrees and a year’s experience as counseling and teaching interns in a maximum security prison; the vet, he was just resourceful. We cleaned up the facility, got phones installed, purchased basic supplies, rented the essential copy machine, set up beds, nailed the windows shut, and took two boys on Friday.

It was a bit chaotic, but we and the kids all survived. A few months later, we were up to full staff and our capacity of twelve boys. The board hired an executive director, a Vietnam veteran with a master’s degree from the class before ours and no experience in residential treatment. It was still a bit chaotic, so the new director decided to bring in a consultant. We were pretty excited about this. He was a Ph.D. psychologist and had taught the counseling course in our master’s program. He was quite competent.

Our consultant wanted to spend time observing our program before offering any training. We waited patiently for a few weeks while he spent a few hours visiting on each shift and on the weekends. Then we all met one afternoon for the long-awaited training.

The psychologist began by asking us to describe the kids we worked with. As the assistant director, I didn’t want to influence things by offering my thoughts; I was more interested in what the staff had to say. He stepped up to the blackboard to record the responses:

lie
steal
lazy
can’t control their tempers
aggressive
unmotivated
unappreciative
disobedient
belligerent
irresponsible
don” feel remorse
sneaky
can’t delay gratification
you can’t trust them
ungrateful
disrespectful
don’t follow rules

No one had anything positive to say. I considered breaking my silence and offering something positive, but I wanted to see what our expert did with all this. It was a teachable moment. Finally, he said, “Ok. That’s enough. No wonder you are discouraged and depressed, being around kids like this all day.” He then went on to talk about some things we could do for self-care to preserve our sanity, given the terrible people with whom we worked.

I was most disappointed. What a teachable moment. What an opportunity missed.

These kids were not all bad. In this group of kids, there were all of the qualities that we might want in our own kids. There were those who were honest. (I had left my wallet lying by the pool table one day, forgetting it as I left to take a phone call. Just as I realized my error, one of the boys brought it to me; all the money was there.) We had boys who were trustworthy“When they gave their word, you could count on it. Of course, when they didn–t, you could count on some trouble. We had boys who would not raise a hand against anyone, even when provoked. We had boys who were intelligent. We had boys who were doing well in school. We had boys who were clever and resourceful. (One managed to pick a lock one day and go for a walk while we were in a staff meeting.) We had boys whose sense of humor made us laugh. We had boys who were loyal. We had boys who would help anybody with anything, even though they seemed quite unable to help themselves. (Some always volunteered to help carry in supplies; one insisted on changing a flat tire for a female staff one day.) We had boys who were hard working. (We would occasionally pay boys to wash our cars so they could earn some extra money; we could count on an extremely thorough job even though they didn’t have the best supplies for this job.) We had good athletes. All of our boys were good looking kids and well-groomed. And more.

I have used this approach with groups of parents. I ask them to describe their kids. I get a list very much the same. I am careful not to ask for problems, just a description of their kids. It’s always negative. (Ok, once I had a lady once say something positive about her daughter. But only once.)

It’s natural and normal to focus on problems. People who choose to work with children who have problems, well, they want to help children with their problems. The reason they even have relationships with the kids is because of their problems. If the kids didn’t have problems, they would not be in treatment. And the parents, the reason they were in my groups was because their kids had problems, and they wanted help. If their kids were perfectly fine, the parents wouldn’t be in the group, they would be home enjoying their kids. It is really challenging to focus on strengths when we feel the need to focus on problems.

However, children tend to see themselves through the eyes of others. (So do adults.) When others see them as bad kids, it tends to become part of their identity, part of how they see themselves, part of who they are. People who think of themselves as bad people do not tend to do good things, neither for themselves nor for anyone else. It just doesn’t fit with who they feel they are.

Occasionally, someone advocating for family placements instead of residential placements asks why anyone would think taking children with problems and placing them in a setting with other children who have problems would be beneficial. But the children are not all bad. All the qualities are there. We only have to be open to them in order to see them. Then we have to be prepared to build on them. The kids can teach each other, if we only let them. If we guide them. If we use their strengths. It adds immeasurably to what we adults can provide.

When we can only focus on the negatives, and there are plenty of them, then I’m afraid the negatives are all we see, and somehow, what we end up building upon. When all we talk about in staff meetings are the problems during the past week, then that becomes what people think about and talk about outside the staff meetings. Ok. Sometimes we talk about accomplishments in our staff meetings, but aren’t those accomplishments too often related to the problems, to the goals we set for children, having to do with “progress” in solving their problems?

My guess is that all children in care do more good things than bad each day, each week, except perhaps when they are serving a restriction. Serving a restriction makes it a little harder for children to do good. They are “punished” while they are serving their restriction. When they feel that only bad people deserve to be punished, aren’t they then likely to think of themselves as bad, at least while they are serving their restriction, their punishment? And when they ask for something they can’t have because they are serving a restriction and we have to remind them they are on restriction, does that feel like punishment all over again? And if they have just done something good, are they then experiencing punishment for good behavior?

The more we talk about children's positive qualities among ourselves, the more we begin to think about those things and to focus on them. The more we focus on those things, the more it will affect how we experience the children, how we see them. How we see them affects how they see themselves, how they feel about themselves. The more we focus on the good things, the more good things we are likely to get.

I’m not suggesting that we ignore the problems. They are real. I’m suggesting that we strive for balance, and that should we err, at least once in a while we err on the side of the positives.

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(I left the program in Pennsylvania a year later “it had been taken over by another corporation and my position was eliminated. It operated for about thirty years, expanding to a capacity of 20 boys and receiving recognition for innovation and success, continuing to employ youth care workers instead of uniformed corrections officers Closed a few years ago in a round of state budget cuts, it is credited with being the first privately operated correctional program in the US.)