Many years ago, I wrote this essay about child and youth care practice and why we may want to slow down our expansion into areas of practice not traditionally associated with child and youth care. Using a story related to working with a neurodiverse young person, I argued that child and youth care practice, and the training leading to that practice, is not well suited for working in the neurodiverse space. A few years later, a graduate student of mine who now is an emerging scholar and a fantastic critical voice on issues related autism services and Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA), Dr. Nancy Marshall (along with Catlin Thorn), questioned my argument and instead suggested that neurodiversity is very much within the purview of relational practices, and those, in turn, are the essence of child and youth care practice.
Here we are, a decade later, I am happy to concede that Nancy has ultimately been proven right. Sort of.
What I want to discuss this month is definitely relevant in Canada, I suspect likely relevant in the United States, UK, and Australia, and may be relevant elsewhere, but I am not entirely sure about that. In Canada, notwithstanding many changes in service systems over the years, there continues to be types of services that are largely managed through child and youth care practitioners, at least on a day-to-day basis and in relation to direct service work. Most notable among these are residential care facilities operated either as live-in treatment programs within the formal and accredited Child and Youth Mental Health sector or both private and public organizations, both for profit and not-for profit, and usually serving primarily young people referred through the child welfare sector. The other very common service type are school programs or specialized classrooms, referred to as Section 23 classrooms in Ontario but using other names in other provinces, that generally are based on a partnership between a School Board and a mental health service provider and offer smaller class sizes with a teacher and a child and youth care practitioner designed to serve the education and mental health needs of young people who were unable to find success in mainstream schools or classrooms. These kinds of programs are considered treatment programs and generally are not about punitive measures taken by schools to deal with poor behaviour (although in practice, this is questionable).
For most of the past few decades, the young people served in these kinds of programs, although very diverse, were neuro-normative young people with mental health challenges, often also with challenging family and ecological contexts, and with varying degrees of overlap between wellbeing issues and youth criminal justice issues as well as psychiatric issues. Child and youth care practitioners were the core of the response to the needs of these young people. And for most of the past 50 years or so, the training received by child and youth care practitioners in Colleges and Universities across Canada was well-suited for doing this kind of work. That training was informed by relational practices as these were articulated in the works of Garfat, Phelan, Krueger, Vanderven, Stuart, Fox, and so many others who are likely familiar to longtime CYC-Net audiences.
Over the past fifteen years or so, changes were introduced to child and youth care curricula that were indeed desperately needed. Although this is a brutal generalization and simplification, very broadly stated these changes were related to a much greater focus on equity considerations, issues of anti-racism, gendered analyses, inclusivity, anti-oppression, and Indigenous epistemologies and ways of being. There is no question that these changes were necessary; our entire field up to that point was largely based on a white lived experience, reflecting stories and ways of knowing that overwhelmingly mirrored that experience. Not surprisingly, it is also true that the way in which child and youth care was being taught, framed, theorized and narrated helped to reproduce systems of care that were not particularly caring, and likely harmful, for many young people, particularly for Indigenous and racialized young people and those identifying with LGBTQ2S+ communities.
At the same time, however, there were also changes in the fields of practice where child and youth care practitioners are the dominant workforce, particularly in residential care settings and in school settings that combine mental health and education services. And while the nature of those changes is diverse and often complicated to explain, one obvious and very significant change has been the massive influx of neurodiverse young people into these settings. Neurodiversity is a very broad term that captures many different circumstances and young people, but it typically includes autism spectrum disorder (ASD), fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD), and notable cases of regulatory challenges and diagnoses such as ADHD, ADD, anxiety and others. The other notable shift in service systems has been a relatively recent commitment to providing trauma-informed practices in program design and operation.
So here we are, in 2026: we have child and youth care practitioners who are trained to recognize inequities and fight these with determination; we have advocacy efforts and practice guidelines to prevent and undo the criminalization of racialized identities, to mitigate and ideally stop the judgment of non-binary gender identities, and to move beyond Eurocentric ways of knowing and being and incorporate, or even replace these with Indigenous, Afrocentric, and other ways of knowing and being. What those child and youth care practitioners don’t have and don’t get in their pre-service training is education about neurodiversity in any meaningful way. What they don’t get in their foundational texts about child and youth care, or even in the articulation of relational practices, is the fit between these and the lived experience of neurodiverse young people. What is entirely missing from child and youth care curricula is an exploration of families or communities exposed to or dealing with neurodiversity in their midst. What is also missing entirely from the curricula is an examination of the interface of neurodiversity and trauma, and how that might impact trauma-informed practices in institutional or quasi-institutional settings.
And yet, once they arrive on the job, what they are faced with are large numbers of neurodiverse young people placed in the setting not because that is a good fit or matches their needs, but because no other setting could be identified for them. In the case of neurodiverse young people, residential care and specialized ‘mental health ‘classrooms, are almost always placements of last resort. The programs, routines, and ways of navigating every day moments are almost never designed for neurodiversity and almost always assume neuro normativity laced with mental health challenges. The separation of working with families while serving young people in residential care or in specialized classrooms continues unabated, notwithstanding pronouncements of more integrated aspirations. But all the available research tells us that this won’t work, will do harm, is a disservice to the young people and their families, and has no meaningful chance of offering improved life chances to anyone.
I am deeply worried about the non-response of our field and especially of post-secondary education in our field to these changes and the reality that for many years to come, many child and youth care practitioners will work with neurodiverse populations as their primary client base without any pre-service training on what that means, how that works, and what might be different in the work with this population compared to the work that is presumed as the population in existing curricula. I note that we did in fact do harm for many decades to Black, Indigenous, racialized and other young people by not adjusting our curricula to include critical explorations of racism and Eurocentric epistemological supremacy for far too long. That change was slow and only came after the data on the mass incarceration of Black youth and on the suicide rates of Indigenous youth, became intolerable even for die hard traditionalists in our field. I don’t think it is ethical to wait again until we hear about the harms done to neurodiverse young people in what are, after all, still carceral and certainly institutional settings, in ways that our stomachs churn.
I am not advocating for abandoning what we have, and especially the more recent focus on equity and anti-oppression/anti-racism. To the contrary, neurodiversity exacerbates these issues. However, we do have to begin to shift curricular focus on generating familiarity and exposure to neurodiversity in much more substantive ways if we continue to be interested in being the core profession that works in these settings. These days, when I enter these settings I encounter chaos, mayhem, and a very clear orientation to crowd control, containment and ultimately security and safety, largely because professionals of all stripes, including social workers and psychologists, administrators and clinical executives, are overwhelmed and uncertain on how to be with people whose fundamental construction of reality operates outside of the positivist and often very binary logics we have become complacent to. I can clearly observe the criminalization of neurodiversity unfolding, following very similar patterns as past criminalization of specific population groups. We must do better.
