ListenStories Series #3
Much of Child and Youth Care work happens not in planned conversations, but in the shared routines of daily life. Cooking, cleaning, walking, and waiting together can create spaces where young people feel safer to engage on their own terms. These moments may seem small, but they often carry the greatest potential for connection and growth. The following story reflects one of those moments. An everyday interaction that quietly shifted a relationship I had nearly stopped trying to name.
This is a story about a nine-year-old boy, a kitchen, and a pancake. It’s a story about waiting, about not being chosen right away, and about how relationships sometimes arrive sideways, through batter and heat and timing, rather than words.
I tell this story because when I forget what relational practice really looks like, I look at a photograph of a pancake and remember …
* * *
Theo was nine years old and did not trust many people, least of all women. At least, that was the story his body told. He didn’t say it outright. He didn’t need to. It lived in the way his shoulders tightened when I entered a room, the way his eyes tracked exits, the way conversation stopped just short of landing. Theo tolerated me. That was about it.
I worked in a residential setting then. We were taught, formally and informally, to pay attention to relationships, to notice where we were welcomed and where we weren’t. With him, I wasn’t. Not really. Theo would sometimes help me in the kitchen. ‘Help’ might be generous. He hovered. He lingered. He picked at tasks and drifted away. If I asked him questions, he answered with shrugs or silence. If I tried to fill the space, the space would get bigger instead. So, I learned to stop trying so hard.
We sometimes cooked together in parallel, me on one side of the counter, him on the other. No pressure. No agenda. Just the rhythm of breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a house that needed feeding. He cracked eggs. I stirred batters. He washed his hands three times. I waited. That was the pattern for weeks.
Then one morning, it was pancakes. The pan was perfectly heated. Batter sat thick in the bowl. I poured the first few. Easy, practiced flips. Theo watched on closely. I could feel it, even without looking.
“Can I try?” he asked.
I stepped back.
He poured too much batter. The pancake spread into something more like a blob than a circle. He waited too long. Then not long enough. When he finally tried to flip it, the pancake folded in on itself and tore. He slammed the spatula down.
“So stupid,” he muttered. I didn’t rush in to fix it.
Instead, I asked, “What do you think went wrong?” He shrugged.
We stood there for a moment, heat rising from the stovetop, the smell of batter just beginning to burn. Then Theo asked, almost quietly, “How do you know when it’s ready?”
I told him what I knew. Not as instruction, but as shared noticing. “You watch for bubbles,” I said. “The edges start to look dry. It kind of tells you.” He nodded; eyes locked on the next pancake.
This time he waited. He leaned closely, face inches from the surface, watching. Tiny bubbles appeared. The edges changed color.
“Now?” he asked.
“Whenever you think,” I said.
He slid the spatula under and flipped.
It was perfect. Golden. Whole. Exactly right.
He froze. Then Theo screamed.
“I DID IT!”
“I DID IT!”
“I DID IT!”
He jumped up and down, arms in the air, voice echoing through the house. He grabbed the pancake, held it up like a trophy.
“LOOK!” he shouted to no one in particular. “LOOK WHAT I MADE!”
He made me take a picture of it. Not of him, of the pancake.
“I’m showing everyone,” Theo said.
And he did.
Every staff member who came on shift saw that pancake. His social worker saw it. He retold the story repeatedly, how he messed up the first one, how he figured it out, how he flipped it himself.
Theo didn’t say my name much in those retellings. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that something shifted. Not dramatically. Not all at once.
But from that day on, he talked to me more in the kitchen. Asked questions. Showed me things. Sometimes he still pulled away. Sometimes he still went quiet. But there was now a shared moment we could stand on together, something solid, something earned.
I kept the photo. I still have it.
On those hard workdays, I look at that pancake and remember that connection doesn’t always arrive through conversation. Sometimes it shows up when someone is trusted just enough to try again.
I hope this story reminds us that relational practice often unfolds in ordinary moments, not always grand interventions. That trust may grow quietly, through ‘doing with’ rather than talking. Patience, presence, and shared activity can create spaces where confidence and connection emerge naturally.
I also hope it invites reflection on how success, especially for children who have known a lot of failure, can become a powerful relational bridge when it is truly theirs.
Reflective Questions
