Listen to thisOne of the better developments in the broader fields of child and youth services over the past ten years or so (maybe even twenty years or so) has been the desire on the part of institutional actors to create spaces for the voices of young people and their families to become part of professional meetings and organizational development. The intention is certainly good. Organizations from across institutional sectors, in child welfare, child and youth mental health, and even schools and education contexts have added young people to their Boards of Directors, include young people as speakers at annual general meetings, and often feature young people from their programs at academic and professional conferences. Many organizations these days consult with young people before embarking on major change initiatives. This usually involves surveys, focus groups, and even individual interviews with young people to ascertain their views and ideas.
As a general movement in child and youth services this is certainly a positive development. It is furthermore complemented by legislative and regulatory initiatives in many jurisdictions (both in the global North and the global South) that demand the inclusion of youth voice in many processes and in decision-making that may directly impact a young person’s life. And it is also complemented by increasing research initiatives that unfold through some form of participatory action research framework that, although often over-stated, aims to center and be guided by the voices of young people in very significant ways. Whether it is embedded in child rights professional and academic circles or in the more radical activist, disruptor, and changemaker contexts, there is enormous value to this work, and it has in fact made a difference in how we conceptualize professional action. Having said that, there also continues to be a great deal of rhetoric and superficiality to these actions, and within service systems, there certainly remain massive barriers to make young people’s voice actually matter. This is true both in the context of policy and system initiatives and in the individualized context of care planning. On paper, young people’s voice are undoubtedly represented; in practice, the container within which those voices are presented and beyond which they cannot be heard is quite small. Some might even suggest that it is further shrinking these days, because youth voice does not always mesh well with the quasi-religious desire for evidence-based practices and science (medical) model approaches to treatment.
It also needs to be pointed out that while child and youth services have made much progress in thinking about youth voice, they have not really made a lot of progress in thinking about family voice, which might include biological parents, adoptive and foster parents, or caregivers within broader kinship care networks. In fact, ‘parents’ or caregivers are much less represented on organizational Board of Directors, rarely are featured at annual general meetings, and even more rarely are featured at academic or professional conferences. Whenever I ask service providers about their work with parents and caregivers for the purpose of amplifying their voices, the response indicates that relationships with parents and caregivers are generally weak and not sustained beyond service contracts and client end dates. Although some organizations do in fact have parent advisory groups of varying kinds, these are very often disconnected from most of the professionals working within the organization. It is the rarest of rare occasions that a social worker from a child welfare agency, for example, could name a single member of such a parent advisory group, much less tell me where and when they meet, what they talk about, and what sorts of initiatives have emerged from their work. They might know that their organization has a parent advisory group, but they almost never know why or what this group actually does. In short, they rarely can relate the voices of parents and caregivers to their own work, which means that these are voices that do not matter at all beyond the public relations rhetoric of the organization.
Be this as it may, lately I have been paying attention to the inadequacies of how service providers and service systems engage with youth and family voice specifically with a view to learn about the degree to which such voices are expected to be normatively and operationally aligned with the professional voices in the sector. And what I am observing is not very uplifting. I have been wondering about why it is that young people speaking at a professional conference always sound so incredibly good; in fact, if the conference organizers didn’t tell the audience that these were young people from the system, one would barely be able to identify them as such. I notice, for example, that the youth speakers are often as comfortable if not more comfortable than social workers speaking into a microphone to an audience of hundreds of people; I notice that they don’t use any profanity; I notice that they are able to describe processes and specific concepts of service provision with professional language, using terms such as ‘transitioning from care’, ‘therapeutic relationship’, and even ‘goals’, ‘plan of care’, ‘case conference’, ‘staff turnover’, and so many others. I also notice that they are almost always at the end of their time in care, often past the end and now being supported through extended care arrangements available across most jurisdictions these days. I notice that they don’t smell like they had a smoke just seconds before coming to the stage; I notice that they are complimentary to the organization that nominated them to speak, but critical of the broader system, and I notice that they seem to think of themselves as speaking for all young people in and from care rather than just for themselves. In short, I notice that these young people have been professionalized, or at the very least, they have not been reminded that the purpose of their presence is not to sound like everyone else present. That would simply defeat the purpose of having youth and family voice to begin with.
Of course, I also notice the absence of parents and caregivers at most professional and academic conferences. To the extent that sometimes they are present, they are almost always white and identify as cis-gendered, straight women. And when they speak, they are top of the line, incredible speakers, and present with depth and clarity that puts most professionals to shame. It turns out that in many instances, they are in fact themselves professionals, just not necessarily in the child and youth service systems. In short, they are profoundly, and perhaps intentionally, unrepresentative of the parents and caregivers most involved with child and youth services, for better or for worse. One gets the sense that conference organizers are forever concerned about deviations from the core message of the conference, which generally is a celebration of all the things we do well and an endorsement of the things we want to do next largely to confirm that we are doing so many things well. Any threat to this positivity, however real or perceived it might be, is simply not invited.
This is a real shame. I continue to believe that the greatest threat to the quality of services in formal, institutional service systems is the divergence of professional ways of being in the world from the lived experiences of those being served. And those lived experiences are neither consistently negative nor positive; in fact, the extent to which these are presented critically or in a thankful manner is quite irrelevant and I don’t mean to suggest that those with lived experience necessarily must critique the systems that have served them. Many are in fact quite grateful for the services they received, and these helped to make their lives better.
What does matter, however, is that lived experience is voiced in ways that are true to these experiences and in language that reflects the humanity of lived experience rather than the sterility and institutionalism of professional practices. We learn a lot from pain, confusion, uncertainty, frustration, and anger when it is set against the barriers to recognizing human emotions through professional language. I am quite certain, for example, that most 16-year-old kids in care do not talk to themselves like this: “I seem to be feeling abandoned in my relationships at this agency; I wonder about the rate of staff turnover here”. More likely they might say to themselves: “Another one come and gone; fuck these people”. This doesn’t mean that they don’t appreciate the relationships while they unfold; but it expresses the severity of impact when those relationships collapse, disappear, or are sidelined for other priorities a worker may have. It is important that we hear it from young people as they feel it. The nature of the problem is not one-dimensional, and it cannot be solved by measuring the rate of staff turnover. Similarly, I have heard parents speaking at formal events say things like “I realize that the system is highly fragmented”. When I ask them about what they meant in a private space, they say things like “I just got pushed around from one place to the next; these people have no idea about my life. Everything is on their schedule. This is batshit crazy!” Again, the term ‘fragmentation’ is something we like to theorize endlessly; the term ‘batshit crazy’, on the other hand, tells us that our theorizing is not what is needed right now.
Child and youth service systems have good intentions. But they also have professional priorities, and they serve as spaces for professional careers, status, prestige, recognition, science, medical practice, and more. This is precisely the reason why we need the knowledge that flows from lived experiences. We need it to remind us that most of the time, we serve our systems. We spend relatively little time serving humans. Only humans can challenge us to rebalance our approach. So let’s not rob them of their humanity by either explicitly and forcefully or in more nuanced and softer ways eliciting professional standards from them.
