Listen to thisI have been thinking about logic and humility in the previous two months and now I want to create a bit of a challenge for you, the reader who is also a Child and Youth Care practitioner.
I will be posing a residential program example, but be assured that the setting can be modified to a school, street corner, hospital or family home.
I have lived in the Child and Youth Care world for many years and I often see practitioners misjudge, often by overestimating, the developmental capacity of the youths and families we serve. The result is frustration on both sides and relational resistance building for everyone involved. One of the usual situations that create this relational disconnect is when a worker is using logical consequences (a jargon term that we have all come to accept without critical review) to teach a youth to be more sensible.
Let me pose a situation – A youth in a group home is expected to wash the dinner dishes before going out for the evening. He is given a choice by his worker to do them immediately, or to have a short break before starting. All his friends are heading for the park right after dinner, and he goes with them, leaving the dirty dishes in the sink. The worker is upset with this turn of events, and ends up washing the dished himself. When the youth returns a few hours later, the worker angrily confronts the youth and gives him a logical consequence of doing two chores the next day.
Unfortunately, this youth does not see the logic in this and storms away, to brood and grumble about how unfair this is. The worker is feeling quite justified and blames the youth for not thinking logically, perhaps even commenting on this youth’s inability to grasp the obvious in the log book. The worker does not reflect on how this event has damaged his relationship with the youth, and may even see it as a step forward, citing boundaries, etc.
Humility, as I have previously framed it, is the ability to stay curious and unthreatened when confronted with attitudes and beliefs that contradict your own cherished ideas about life truths. The goal is to build bridges between my logic and yours, not to force my logic onto you.
The Child and Youth Care practitioner, using his own belief system, sees a need for a logical consequence here and I agree with him. We only differ on what the logical consequence actually is. I would suggest that the problem here is that this worker overestimated this youth’s ability to have enough self control to resist the temptation to leave with his friends and as a result of this the consequence is that the worker had to do the dishes, which is very logical to both of them, and the teaching value of the consequence will be useful for the worker.
I can hear the groans and protests about letting the youth get away with something. I want to invoke your ability to be humble, then think about the relational cost and physical effort required to implement the double chore logical consequence. Then reflect on how it will actually make the worker less able to think developmentally, because it is a very unsophisticated and self-centered response, more focused on the worker’s needs than the youth’s. Now I can hear the whole team, perhaps including the supervisor, commenting on how I probably never worked with difficult youth, and I can assure you that I did. New or untrained workers should not try this skill of humility until they are safe within themselves around such difficult youth, but skilled Child and Youth Care practitioners can smile and see the logic in this and similar consequences that occur when we misjudge youth in our attempts to create life lessons.
