Listen to thisChild and Youth Care is a fickle field of practice. Sometimes, it can seem like we, as a field, are talking out of both sides of our collective mouths. Good practice involves creating thorough and detailed programs and intervention plans! Good practice also involves being flexible and willing to modify, switch out or abandon those plans altogether! Best practice for creating safety means creating a set of routines and consistent expectations in the programs that we work, but good Child and Youth Care Practitioners also consider the individual needs and developmental contexts for each young person they work alongside (Freeman, Fulcher, Garfat, Gharabaghi, 2018). Child and Youth Care Practitioners must be comfortable with this ambiguity. We must flow between firm plans and expectations, and individualized, flexible approaches seamlessly. Intentionality, as a characteristic of practice, challenges us in the same way.
When we are reflectively and reflexively engaged in our practice, very little of what we do should be ‘off the cuff.’ Our actions, language choices, physical position in a room, and so many more elements of day-to-day relational engagement should be done with a purpose, with intentionality (Freeman, Fulcher, Garfat, Gharabaghi, 2018). But what about spontaneity? Some of the most impactful moments in any relationship, and learning experiences are spontaneous in nature. So, again, a large part of good Child and Youth Care practice is navigating the complexities of being intentional in almost everything we do, while also allowing room for the spontaneous nature of human relationships in our engagement.
Jack Phelan (2007) identifies Child and Youth Care Practitioners as ‘experience arrangers.’ I believe this term is perfect when considering the intersection of spontaneity and intentionality. It gives room for the practitioner to recognize the individual needs, suggestions, or developmental levels of the young people we support, but also to use this information so that we can create structured and intentional activities that support development and relational engagement. The story below is intended to be an illustration of just this. The practitioners in this story arrange experiences that they didn’t structure days or weeks in advance, but in the exact moment the young people in the story present them with the opportunity. Their ability to intentionally recognize opportunities that are spontaneously presented to them by young people, results in interventions that support belonging, mastery, independence, generosity, and connection in a developmentally appropriate way.
Muffins & Munchies
“Nothing to eat in this house,” Hiktok complained loudly from the kitchen.
“Wesley just made muffins, dude. Grab one of those,” I shouted from the dining room while throwing a card down onto the deck in front of me. Wesley, Karla and I were playing Crazy-8s in the kitchen.
“Nah,” Hiktok responded, and I heard the fridge door close after he had decided there was nothing worth eating in it. He walked into the dining room and stood over our card game. “Never buy enough munchies,” he stated.
‘Munchies,’ meant chips, pre-made boxes of cookies, and other highly processed snack foods. We were above the Arctic circle in Nunavut. So, not only were we living in a group care program, where there were certain expectations to maintain a menu with a limited amount of ‘munchies,’ but none of those kinds of foods benefit from a government subsidization and are incredibly expensive as a result.
“It’s the weekend, dude,” Karla, my teammate working the floor for the next 3 weeks, reminded him. “Go do your room clean, and a few extra chores, you can stock up on some munchies with the 20 bucks you make.”
Hiktok didn’t offer a verbal response but furrowed his brow and scrunched his nose up to demonstrate his disagreement with that idea. “Old enough to pick my own groceries, anyway. I’m almost ready to get my own place.”
Hiktok was sort of right in that regard. He was 17 and would be 18 in about 6 months. He had a part-time job at the grocery store in town that could be full-time as soon as he didn’t have to work around his school hours, and he, his social worker, and his older sister (who had been his primary caregiver for years prior to him moving in with us), had discussed a plan for him to get on the housing list and move out on his own in a year or so.
Karla took her attention away from the card game on the table and turned to Hiktok. “You know,” she said, “you make a good point.” Karla gave me an I-think-I-have-a-good-idea-follow-my-lead look that I had come to recognize given we had been working and living together for a couple of weeks now.
Hiktok raised his eyebrows in response to Karla’s statement, but spoke to Wesley, whose turn it was to play. “Got any 2’s? She’ll have to pick-up 4 if you play one.”
Wesley grinned. He pulled two cards out of his hand and played a pair of 2s. “Pick up 6,” he said.
Karla rolled her eyes through a smile. “Thanks, Hiktok.”
“I already saw it,” Wesley stated defensively.
“Yeah, yeah,” Karla said while pulling 6 cards off the top of the deck. Before she had them all organized, she pulled one from her hand and threw it on the discard pile. It was another 2. “Pick up 8, Francis.”
I groaned.
Hiktok laughed. “Harsh, eh,” he said.
Karla was still putting her handful of cards in order but went back to the conversation about groceries. “We need to go grocery shopping today, and you are right, you’ll be moving out of here before long, and into your own place. You’ll need to know how to budget and buy your own food. How about this trip, you get $150 to buy your own food for the week. Suppers will still be included on the house list, but you buy your own breakfasts, lunches, and snacks.”
“Can buy whatever I want?”
Karla hesitated, looked at me. I think she was in a little bit deeper than she expected to be when she let this idea out into the world. I gave her a we-came-this-far shrug.
“Whatever you want,” she said.
“Iiiiii,” Hiktok exclaimed, “let’s go then!”
“Room cleans first, then we go,” Karla directed.
“I’ll get the vacuum,” I said, and got up to make myself useful.
* * *
The sun was hot and high in the sky. It felt like the kind of heat I would expect in the summer, but the folks who lived in town assured me it wasn’t normal heat. Our Suzuki 4x4 SUV was kicking up a trail of dust while we cruised back into town on the airport road. The airport road was the only place you could (legally) get going faster than the 30km/h speed limit in town, so we ripped out on it anytime we could manage it. As we rolled back into town, we got stuck behind one of the street spraying trucks. These were a new concept for a Southerner like me. They had an external sprinkler system hooked up to the rear of the plow trucks (if you’re from the South like I was, picture the salt spreader, but it spreads water) and they drove around town dosing the roads to keep the dust under control. I wondered if they were really necessary when I first had them explained to me, but after a couple days when the drivers were on vacation and they couldn’t cover their shifts, I figured out that they were. Experience is the best teacher, after all.
Anyhow, Karla, Wesley, Hiktok, and I hopped out of the Suzuki when we arrived at the store and slammed our doors in semi-unison.
“Going to look at the LEGO,” Wesley announced and bolted to the toy aisle before all of us were even inside.
Hiktok grabbed his own cart. “Hundred fifty bucks?” He confirmed.
“Hundred and fifty bucks,” Karla repeated with a nod.
“See you at the check-out,” Hiktok told us wheeling towards the produce immediately to the left of the entrance.
“You need a calculator, a pen and paper to keep track?” Karla called out holding up a calculator from the 90s she had pulled out of the office drawer before we left.
“It’s good, Karla,” Hiktok said, shoving his hand into his pocket, pulling out his iPod, and waving it at us without turning around.
“They grow up so fast,” I chirped, grabbing a cart and some cardboard boxes the store left up front for customers to carry out their haul.
Karla grinned at me. “Hopefully this works,” she said.
“Tell me what ‘works’ looks like,” I probed.
“Well,” Karla started, “I was going with the flow when I threw this out there.”
“Of course,” I said. “The best interventions are often a little spontaneous.”
“And yet,” Karla reminded me, “an intervention isn’t an intervention unless it’s intentional.”
“Fair,” I agreed. “So, then. What was your intention when you offered Hiktok a hundred and fifty bucks from the grocery budget without consulting with Jean back home?”
Jean was our Program Manager, and Karla, being the ultimate professional, I knew her to be, would (maybe not) appreciate my teasing around acting before consulting. And, true to form, she gave me an oh-please look of annoyance.
To be fair to Karla, it was one of the advantages of working on the floor in the high Arctic while your Program Manager worked at a distance back down South, it was much easier to implement the easier-to-ask-for-forgiveness-than-permission approach.
“Well, I was intending for it to be a learning opportunity in a couple of ways. First, it’s going to give him an opportunity to master some budgeting and grocery shopping life skills.”
“Nice one,” I offered. “I was assuming as much there.”:
“Right,” Karla went on. “Second, I figured it would support his sense of independence. I mean, He’s not wrong that he’s at least close to moving out on his own. He might as well get used to it.”
“OK. Nothing I hadn’t interpreted back in the kitchen,” I said, keeping up.
“Lastly, and to be honest this one is more about us, I was …”
I interjected. “Hoping he’d see why we buy the things we buy, limit ‘munchies’ in the grocery budget, and we’d have to listen to less of his bellyaching?”
“Bingo,” Karla confirmed as she threw a bag of oranges and a bag of apples into our cart.
“Francis, come!” Our conversation was interrupted as Wesley beckoned to me from the toy aisle.
“You good?” I asked Karla.
“All good,” she said.
I headed to the toys and when I rounded the corner, Wesley was holding a LEGO set in his hand. He noticed me approaching and held it up towards my face.
“Captain America: Civil War LEGO,” He proclaimed proudly.
“Deadly,” I affirmed. “You’ve been waiting on that to get into town.”
“40 bucks...” Wesley said, leaving the words to hang expectantly.
“How much you got?” I asked him, dodging the implied request for us to buy it for him.
“Just the 10 bucks from room clean,” he said.
“You can do 5 more chores when we get home then. That’ll be twenty,” I reminded him, knowing before the words left my mouth, they were not what Wesley wanted to hear.
“Still need 20 bucks more,” he said, staring back at the box in his hand and flipping it over and back again. “There’s even 4 figures in it,” he said, “usually only 2 in a set this size.”
I wasn’t sure about the facts on LEGO sets, but I had come to understand that Wesley was an expert on the matter.
“So, if you do your extra chores this week, and next, then you can come back next weekend and get it.”
“Might be gone by then,” he said.
“Might be,” I said.
He looked back down at the box. If I was being honest, I’d have loved to have told him to do his extra chores, pay for half and we will cover the other half, but I knew for sure that was not a therapeutic intervention and more about my need to make someone else happy.
Wesley looked back up at me. “I got an idea, but you guys are probably going to say ‘no.’”
“Try me,” I challenged him.
“Could sell muffins at the field tomorrow. Everyone will be there for the Nunavut Day concert.”
In a rush of inspiration from Karla’s on-the-fly intervention back at the kitchen table, I rolled with it. “OK. Are you thinking the same kind of muffins you bake for the house?”
“Yeah,” Wesley said. “I could even use the ones we baked yesterday! There’s still 20 or something left!”
“Hold on. Those are the house muffins. Those belong to everyone else. You can’t sell other people’s stuff.”
“OK. Then I’ll make another batch when we get home,” Wesley didn’t miss a beat.
I thought for a second, and figured he could be pushed a little bit harder to make this a more meaningful intervention. “Those ingredients were still bought from the house grocery money, dude. I don’t think that’d be cool to sell that stuff either. Can you think of another way to get the ingredients you need?” I was thinking Wesley could use his allowance to buy the ingredients himself and make his own muffins to sell, but I wanted to give him the opportunity to get there.
He furrowed his brow and looked down at the LEGO box in his hand again. He reached into his pocket with a grin and pulled out his 10 bucks. “Could use this to buy the ingredients. I can make 24 muffins. If I sell them for 5 bucks each, I’ll have way more than 10 bucks anyway.” Ten dollars was not even close to enough money for the ingredients he would need, but I figured a 12-year-old spending every dollar of his allowance to purchase the ingredients was meaningful enough.
“I like it,” I said. “Let’s go find Karla, she has the cart.”
Wesley put the LEGO box back on the shelf, but moved all the other boxes and hid the one he wanted way back behind them all. “Hopefully no one will find it before I get the money,” he said. We strolled down the end of the few aisles in the grocery store, peeking down each one, until we saw Karla and Hiktok looking at the toilet paper. Hiktok was setting a 12-pack of the stuff back on the shelf.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“Hiktok was just wondering if he needed to buy his own TP for the week as well. I told him we could still cover toiletries.”
“Good thing,” Hiktok said. “Expensive!”
I chuckled. “Yeah, and do you plan on living with your girlfriend?”
Hiktok raised his eyebrows.
“Does she wear make-up?”
“Yeah.”
“Then you better double the amount you’ll need, dude.”
Karla chuckled. “He’s right,” she said, “but that’s a problem for another day. We ready to check-out?”
“Almost,” I said, “Wes, has a plan he wants to run by you.”
Wesley told Karla his plan to make and sell muffins.
“Awesome!” Karla exclaimed. “I grabbed some frozen blueberries and the other ingredients already, so you can just give Charlotte the 10 bucks at the cash when we pay.”
“I’m going to get chocolate chips, too. That way my customers can have a choice of which muffin they want.”
“Savvy,” I told him with a fist bump. “Go grab them and meet us at the cash.”
Hiktok placed his haul on the belt and waited for Charlotte to ring everything through. He was intently staring at the total as it climbed up with each beep.
“Looking a little nervous,” I teased him. “Weren’t you keeping track of how much you spent?”
“Might’ve stopped counting halfway through,” Hiktok said, his eyes not leaving the screen.
“Might’ve?” I said.
“Did,” he admitted.
“186.84,” Charlotte announced.
“Ohhhh,” Karla razzed him, “so close.” Then she spoke to Charlotte. “He had a $150 budget to buy his own food for the week.”
“What’re you going to put back, bud,” I asked him.
Hiktok was looking over his order. “4 bags of chips,” Charlotte noted. “Really trying to munch out, eh?” Karla and I shared a glance at Charlotte’s words and smirked at one another. Hiktok ended up taking two bags of chips back and the 2nd pack of bacon he had grabbed.
“This might be going just how you intended,” I whispered to Karla as Hiktok came back from returning the items to their proper shelves.
“OK,” Charlotte said, “147.91.”
Hiktok grinned.
“Just under,” Karla said. “Nicely done.” After Charlotte confirmed Hiktok was under his $150 limit, I loaded the rest of our order onto the belt, and Hiktok put all of his things into his own carboard box to keep them separate. We rang everything through, Charlotte put the order on our company credit account, and everyone started grabbing boxes to pack up the Suzuki. As I grabbed the last box, it hit me that I should check with Charlotte about Wesley’s plan.
“Charlotte, Wesley wants to make and sell muffins at the field for Nunavut Day tomorrow. That’s not, like, disrespectful or anything is it?”
“Not even,” Charlotte said. “People bring stuff to sell every year. Usually set up tables around the edge of the crowd.”
“Perfect,” I said. “And he doesn’t need a vending license or anything to do that, eh?”
Charlotte scrunched her nose at me and chuckled in response.
“That was a Qallunaat question, wasn’t it?” I asked.
Charlotte raised her eyebrows and smiled at me, while I carried the last box of groceries out to the Suzuki. “Koana, Charlotte!” I called as I left the store.
* * *
The next day, Wesley had baked his muffins, and had them ready to go in two containers. He had a dozen blueberry muffins and a dozen chocolate chip. He also had spent his time before bed the previous evening making a sign to advertise what he was selling and what the prices were. He had originally planned to sell the muffins for 5$ each, but after I shared some rudimentary financial information, he decided 2$ would make it more likely to sell all of them, and still get him the 40 bucks he needed for his LEGO set. His two buddies showed up at the door just as the opening acts were hitting the stage for the concert, and all three of them headed out.
It wasn’t quite 10 minutes later when Wesley showed back up and asked if we could open the storage room so he could take a folding table out to the field. I got up to open the door for him, but Karla interjected and stopped me.
“We’re going to need a deposit for the table, bud,” she told him.
“What’s a deposit?” He asked.
“It’s like a promise,” I explained, keeping up with Karla, “that you won’t damage the table and you’ll bring it back when you’re done. So, you give us some money now, and you get the money back when you bring back the table safe and sound.”
“Fuck sakes,” Wesley said. “Too many rules, just get me the table.”
“This is how businesses work, dude,” I told him, choosing to ignore the harsh tone and language.
“How much?” He asked.
Karla and I looked at each other. “How much you got?” Karla prodded.
“I got a toonie upstairs on my dresser.”
“2 bucks works,” I said. “Go get it and I’ll grab the table for you.”
I leaned the table against the wall by the back door before Wesley returned from his bedroom and sat back down at the table with Karla and Hiktok to finish our game of cards. Wesley bounded down the stairs in a flurry and threw his toonie across the table so that it rolled and flew off the other end.
“There’s your stupid deposit,” he said. He turned on his heel without another word and headed for the back door. I could hear him struggling with the table but decided to let him figure it out on his own and, after a cacophony of metal and plastic banging, the door closed, and it was quiet again.
“Jeez,” Hiktok said as he tossed a card down on the pile between us, “Really grumpy.”
“It’s stressful running your own business,” I said before slamming down a queen of spades. “Now pick up 5, Karla!”
Wesley came back about an hour later, change rattling around an old plastic yogurt container he had brought out to his table with him. “30 bucks already,” he announced when he entered the kitchen.
“Deadly, Wes,” I congratulated him. “But that’s only 15 muffins, you had 24, where are the rest?”
“Daniel and Wade are selling at the table for me,” he explained. “I gave them 2 muffins each that they can eat or sell. That way I can take a break in here, and I’ll still have 40 bucks when they sell the rest of mine.”
I couldn’t help it and let out a single guffaw. “The next Mark Cuban,” I said.
“Who?” Wesley asked.
“Never mind,” I told him.
“I’m going to have a snack, then we should head out,” Hiktok proclaimed. “The Jerry Cans are going to be on soon.” Hiktok stood up from the table and went into the kitchen. There were some rummaging sounds and the crinkle of a plastic bag. He returned with two bowls of chips. “Got you some munchies from my stash, Wes.” They both sat down and started quickly shoving chips in their mouths.
I pulled out my phone and discreetly texted Karla: Looks like the grocery shopping intervention also offered a chance for Hiktok to show some generosity. Just as you intended I’m sure.
References
Freeman, J., Fulcher, L., Garfat, T., Gharabaghi, K. (2018). Characteristics of a relational child and youth care approach revisited. CYC-Online ,236, pp 7-46. CYC-Online October 2018 (cyc-net.org)
Phelan, J. (2007) Another look at activities. CYC-Online, 96, January 2007
