Listen to thisIn Canada, we have been seeking regulation and government mandates for child and youth care as a profession for several decades. All the attempts to get there have failed. We are nowhere near becoming a regulated profession, and even in the one province where regulation seemed imminent and was already celebrated (Alberta), it turned out to be not quite what was advertised. For one thing, what was being regulated was not child and youth care, at least not by that name. Everywhere else, notwithstanding hopeful statements to the contrary, we have never been even remotely close to becoming a regulated profession despite very strong efforts and excellent work on the part of those trying to get there. What can we do in response to this long-time, repeated, chronic failure to achieve regulation?
My goal this month is decidedly not to wade into debates as to whether regulation is a good thing or not. There have always been pros and cons, and at any rate, others have had wonderfully animated debates about these matters already. I really have nothing new to add. But I am interested in exploring what it might mean for the future of child and youth care if indeed we proceed as an unregulated profession in a landscape of existing and newly emerging professions and quasi-professional practices that are in fact regulated. What are our options, and how doe continue to develop and improve the professional practice of child and youth care?
One option, without a doubt, is to continue along the same pathway we have been on for decades. We can continue to advocate for regulation and invest time and energy into forming relationships with the politicians of the day and the bureaucrats in charge in the hopes that one day, something will change. On the one hand, I have tremendous respect for those who want to keep trying. They are, in many ways, the real leaders in our field and they are investing their time and energy, almost always without any form of compensation, to achieve something on behalf of all of us. Even if one might not be entirely convinced of the end goal, one does have to admire the tenacity and commitment to this cause. The risk of this strategy is that it further cements the frustrations of those hoping for regulation and potentially persuades excellent practitioners to eventually leave our profession and switch to something that is regulated and that opens doors in the employment markets and the professional prestige context. The additional risk is that the people most likely to keep trying are some of the most positive, hardworking, committed people in our field. We don’t want them to burn out, become disillusioned, and lose their spirit that has served our field so well.
Another strategy, and one that seems increasingly popular, is to try and align the field with existing regulatory bodies so that child and youth care practitioners can become members of regulatory bodies that are already recognized in the employment market. In Ontario, this usually means either trying to join the College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers or the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. Many child and youth care practitioners have in fact done this by themselves, using a portfolio approach in which they demonstrate that the combination of formal academic training and professional practice serves as equivalency to the normal requirements for these regulatory bodies. I applaud the individual child and youth care practitioners who have taken this step, which has undoubtedly opened new doors for them to take on jobs that otherwise might have been beyond their reach. There is, however, a world of difference between individual, typically highly experienced, child and youth care practitioners doing this to advance their career options and aligning the field itself to the requirements of these regulatory bodies. The latter would effectively eliminate child and youth care as a professional practice on its own and integrate some child and youth care competencies into the existing professional frameworks and competencies of other professions. I am not sure this is what we want.
A third approach is to institutionalize what is already happening at a significant scale. This is the idea of thinking about child and youth care as a foundation for more specialized professional practices, such that a career-oriented approach in our field would really start with a child and youth care education but then require a transition to a more specialized context, such as, for example, behavioural sciences or adventure therapies or others, all of which are at least somewhat regulated.
I would never fault any member of the child and youth care community for taking up any one of these approaches. Individually, any one of these can be meaningful and constructive, and at any rate, I can respect the fact that each of us does have to think about our own, personal aspirations and where we want to end up. Fair enough. However, I don’t think any of these things are meaningful strategies for the field of child and youth care as a whole. To this end, I am thinking differently about our future these days, and I want to briefly share these thoughts with you in the hopes of developing them further in the coming months (using CYC Net as my forum for doing so).
Whatever may happen with respect to regulation, the simple fact is that the profession of child and youth care in Canada is not regulated, has never been regulated, and that there are no indications that it will be regulated anytime soon. Some might be happy about this and others might lament that, but it is simply true. For me, that means it is time to think about our field not as one that is seeking something (regulation), but as one that is established as it is. We must be a field of professional practice whether we are regulated or not. But if we are not regulated, what are we as a field? What is child and youth care as an unregulated profession and how does it fit in the landscape of social, health, and community services that increasingly demand some form of regulation for eligibility for employment?
I think it is important to remind ourselves that our field, at least in its current manifestation, came into being in resistance to regulated professions. When nurses, who provided care and support to young people facing adversities, became regulated, they no longer wanted to provide that care as it felt professionally inferior. They wanted to proceed with the activities and preoccupations worthy of a regulated health care profession. This left many young people without the everyday support they needed. Similarly, when Social Work became more rigidly regulated, that profession too abandoned the everyday needs of young people and focused instead on case management approaches to service. To be sure, these are important things and there is no judgment in simply stating that. However, it was because these professions moved away from their direct interactions with young people that child and youth care emerged. Someone eventually realized that you cannot meaningfully meet the needs of young people by working away from them. What was needed was a professional whose scope of work never moved entirely outside of simply being with young people.
For about fifty years (roughly from 1960 to 2010), child and youth care evolved by thinking ever more deeply about ways of being with young people across different settings and contexts. Post-secondary education institutions facilitated that process and served to spearhead ever-increasing complexity and sophistication in the understanding of how we can be with young people. Sure, there was an initial emphasis on being with young people in group homes because this is where the identified need was, but over time, the thinking and practice expanded across virtually all institutional settings where young people facing various adversities found themselves, from group homes to hospitals, and from schools to community organizations. But there are at least two things the field did not do particularly well in Canada (and perhaps elsewhere).
First, the field failed in its obligation to think beyond white lived experiences and formulated a way of being with young people that reflected only those lived experiences. In fact, the field failed to facilitate entry into discussions and theoretical development of the field for people with diverse and intersectional identities and for whom knowledge and wisdom had different starting points. In other words, much like all colonial conspirators, our field became arrogant and protective of its origins and started placing barriers to entry for many people. As a result, many communities that came into contact with our field were not impressed; in fact, child and youth care not only had little to offer to those communities, but perhaps did some harm, especially in Black communities and Indigenous communities, but notably also in disability communities.
The second thing we did not do particularly well is to define quality in our practice. We allowed our field to expand based not on the quality of our practice but on the assigned role of those hired to perform child and youth care practice. This meant that across many of our settings, poor practice became very common, often perpetrated by individuals who were assigned the role of a child and youth care practitioner but who were clearly not equipped to perform that role well. This is one of the reasons why much of the health, education, and community sectors are now demanding membership in regulatory bodies for the purpose of employment. It is an (slightly misguided) attempt to weed out those practitioners ill-equipped to practice by setting minimum standards of qualifications that are verified and surveyed through regulatory structure and processes.
I can’t really blame the employers. Across many sectors, organizations have to deal with ever-greater demands as part of their accreditation standards, and many such demands now extend into human resources. It becomes more and more difficult to make the case for unregulated professionals, and there is not much of an incentive to do so. The one sector that continues to struggle somewhat with this is residential care, where standards around who can work in such settings continue to be quite weak, but the volume of residential care has decreased significantly over the past two decades and the demands for more concrete qualifications to work in these settings has increased. I am not confident that residential care will not, eventually, make demands for regulated professionals only, and one can already see a shift in many such settings away from those identifying as child and youth care practitioners and towards behavioural therapists and instructors instead.
What does the future hold for our field?
I think it is important for us to explore (in the Canadian context) the possibility of right sizing our field. At the moment, we are producing graduates of child and youth care diploma and degree programs in large numbers, often without any regard to how well such graduates are positioned to actually practice in this field. Child and youth care programs in Ontario are popular for international students, who often are less interested in professional practice and more in immigration pathways (and I fully support their aspirations for immigration and citizenship). To serve the needs of a diverse student body, whereby diverse means a student body with varying levels of interest and engagement in the field, quality becomes secondary to retention. In other words, even before the graduates enter the world of professional practice, the quality of their preparation has already suffered significantly. This does not bode well for how our field is perceived in community.
Instead, I favour a much smaller field for now, but one that is driven to enhance quality through improved pedagogic methods and significantly enhanced practice-based learning opportunities. I furthermore favour a field that aims not to recruit entrants en masse, but instead aims to ensure representation from chronically excluded groups, and that furthermore aims to rework all its curricular and substantive content to ensure meaningful reflections of many different ways of knowing and many different lived experiences. The reason I favour these this kind of an approach for the field in Canada over the next decade or so is because I think the quest for regulated professions will certainly continue and the mass employment of child and youth care practitioners as unregulated professionals will end. On the other hand, there is one thing I am quite certain of, largely because this has been and continues to be my own experience: when the regulated professions fail, which they do very often, sooner or later a stressed-out manager who has run out of ideas and is desperate for help will make that call. The same call that they made in the 1960s. They will call me, a child and youth care practitioner. They will call you if you stay in the profession. And in those cases where the regulated folks come up with various excuses for why things aren’t working and why the young person and their family are to blame, no one will care that I or you are not regulated, so long as we bring to the situation what we have always brought – a way of being in the world that is relational and aims to make every moment meaningful (credit to Thom for that phrase). So long as we are prepared to hang out with young people that have driven the system crazy. So long as we become present.
