Listen to thisRecently I was with a community of service providers involved in child and youth services discussing gaps in service provision and community needs. At some point in the proceedings, we were split into smaller discussion groups, and when we were all together again, each table was asked to report back on what was discussed. Table after table reported frantic discussions lamenting the lack of early intervention in the community. People told stories about teenagers arriving in their services and struggling significantly. “If only we had been able to provide service to these teenagers much earlier, we would have been able to avert the current struggles”. “We need to intervene earlier.” “We cannot wait for the crisis”. “It takes too long for people to get the services they need”. At some point I was asked to comment on the discussions and the themes that had emerged from these. All I could muster was this: “If you are looking for early intervention, you are about three to five generations too late”. It went over like a lead balloon.
On my way home that day I thought a lot about the concept of early intervention, and specifically why we seem to always focus on this concept and lament its insufficient presence. It occurred to me that talking about early intervention by definition means that we have in our minds a starting point for whatever troubles a young person may be facing. Perhaps an early intervention at age two might have averted the need for later interventions at age 10 or 17. I suppose this kind of logic is all fine and good, but it really only makes sense within a highly Eurocentric conceptualization of young people’s challenges and the adversities they face. The premise is that dysfunction arises at a particular point in time, largely disconnected from history, politics, societal movements and dynamics, as well as culture, identity, and the development of self in relation to one’s heritage. It furthermore means that we think of the ecological context of the young person as time-bound. We are specifically thinking of the family that is around the young person right now; we are thinking about the institutions serving (or disserving) the young person right now. We are thinking about learning, schooling, development, and social integration based on the conditions for these right now.
I also thought about why intervening at an early age is considered an early intervention. Presumably we intervene at whatever age because we have reason to believe that problems may be forming. Something must have happened to give rise to this believe, so that even when we think we are engaged in an early intervention, we are still intervening only after the problematic has already been observed and is well on its way toward further development and deepening. In what way is that any different than what we do when we intervene later in life? Clearly, an early intervention cannot be about age. Instead, we might consider an early intervention to be about intervening early in a predictable or at least possible sequence of events and circumstances such that later events and circumstances in such sequence can be avoided. For example, if we can identify learning challenges in a young person early in their educational career, and we can take actions that help that young person stay in step with their peers at school, we might avert things like bullying, low self-esteem, isolation and loneliness, and this, in turn, might avert externalizing behaviours that ultimately will entrench the young person deep into coercive and carceral systems. Alright, I can live with that logic and acknowledge that it makes sense.
However, in within the logic in the example above there are some major conceptual problems. Unless we believe that the only possible cause for learning challenges dates to the birth or after the birth of the child, intervening at the stage of identifying such learning challenges for that child would not really be an early intervention. What if these learning challenges are the result of FASD? Or are related to a family environment that is chaotic and disorganized and where the child rarely benefitted from being read to? What if these learning challenges arose from the inhalation of second-hand smoke from various substances in the family home? Why didn’t we intervene when the child’s caregivers were younger and well on their way to form habits that would later disadvantage their children? And what if those caregivers were facing these challenges in their youth because their own parents were subjected to intense violence in Indian Residential Schools, or were subject to apartheid policies that disempowered and marginalized their entire communities? And what if all of this is really the result of colonialism?
An early intervention into our child’s learning challenges today might have been the dethroning of Queen Elizabeth 1 quite a few centuries ago. She was the champion of expanding the colonial project, including the transatlantic slave trades, after all. Or maybe sabotaging Columbus’ boat. I am quite sure that a competent history buff could easily trace our child’s learning challenges back to the Roman Empire, perhaps the Greeks, the Persians, or some prior empire several thousand years ago. A good political economist might trace these challenges back to the birth of capitalism (which didn’t have a single moment of birth), or to the dogma of major religions, or to white supremacy, or even all the way back to the pre-humans’ gendered division of labour.
How convenient it is, therefore, that we now use the concept of early intervention as a way of separating, indeed severing, the connections of child and youth challenges today with our histories and ways of being for centuries and millennia. Perhaps this is simply an easy way of avoiding responsibility for how we got to this point, and for the challenges our young people face. All these challenges are connected to social dynamics that emerged long ago. Intervening a few months or years before another Indigenous young person, Black Youth, trans youth, or young person with disabilities comes to the attention of the youth criminal justice system is not ‘early’. Quite to the contrary, it seems to me that such early interventions are last gap efforts on the part of those of us who have benefitted for generations from the racism, ableism, gender and neuro-normativity, and other forms of othering to ensure that the fundamental structures giving rise to that advantage are maintained.
So don’t worry about it when a young person comes to your service at what may appear a very late stage in the development of whatever problematic they may be facing. Welcome the young person and listen for the traces of their ancestors. Almost all answers to current problems are to be found there.
