Listen to thisOver the past ten years or so, at least in Ontario, Child and Youth Care practice has made substantial forays into areas of work that have not traditionally been within the purview of our profession. These days, we take pride in the fact that CYC professionals are working in areas such as autism, child protection and youth justice. On the one hand, I share with so many others (who may be a little reluctant to admit this) a secret pleasure related to expansionism for the sake of it; call it empire building, conquest, accumulation or whatever. But from time to time I do what I have been taught to do as a Child and Youth Care practitioner and what I now get paid to do as an academic: I become reflective, even pensive, and since I have a natural inclination toward cynicism, sarcasm and the macabre, my reflections, I admit, sometimes are decidedly critical of our field. I have often thought that perhaps I should apologize in a preemptive way for the things I write about so as to spare others the annoyance of feeling compelled to respond to me. But since England has never apologized for appointing Kevin Keegan as head coach some years ago, and America never apologized for electing Bush not once but three times, and the whole world is still waiting for Australia to take back Crocodile Dundee (especially part 2), I think I will forgo such politeness and do what comes naturally.
So, here is my thought, framed as a question: is it really a good thing that we are expanding into all of these areas? Will it work out well for our profession and perhaps more importantly, for kids and their families? I am reminded of one of my own experiences branching out into a kind of work I knew nothing about. Here is my story.
Some years ago, I was asked to work with a family that consisted of a hard working single mom and her three children. One of the three children, I was told, “was missing a chromosome” and Mom needed someone to help get him through his morning routines because she had to leave the home very early in the morning in order to attend to her cleaning job on the other side of the city. The job was very simple: go to the family’s apartment each day, Monday to Friday, for about 6am. Mom would leave as soon as I arrived, and my job was to help the identified kid get dressed, have breakfast and then accompany him down the elevator to the front of the building where he would get picked up by his school program no later than 8am. Great, I thought to myself. I can do this job before going to my real job, which at the time was a manager’s position in a children's mental health centre. As an experienced child and youth worker, I figured, this would be a fun and easy gig. After all, what’s a missing chromosome when most days I am working with youth who have serious mental health issues, huge behavioural problems, moments of violence and other anti-social behaviours and so on.
I showed up on day 1 and no sooner had I walked through the door of the apartment that Mom stormed out to catch her bus. Since I had never been there before, I quietly opened all of the apartment doors to try and figure out where my kid actually was. Sure enough I found him behind door number three, but not before seriously freaking out the other two kids who apparently knew nothing of my presence in the home. Turns out the other two were extremely good at their morning routines and they were out of the house pretty much by 7am, leaving me with my kid. I must say that I did a very good job getting him dressed, even matching up at least some of the colours of his outfit. And he seemed very happy with me, smiling from ear to ear, even touching me and checking me out in what I thought was reasonable curiosity but a slightly misguided sense of boundaries. Not a problem, I figured; developing appropriate boundaries that are right for me and for him is something that I have been doing forever with lots of kids. So I started explaining to him what was ok and what wasn't, and I attributed his non-responsiveness strictly to the fact that he was, of course, non-verbal. That went well, I thought to myself. Time for breakfast.
I had always been a believer in a good breakfast for kids; food, I knew, is very important to ensure that kids get a good start to their school day. So I went searching for some dishes and I found both a bowl and some cereal, which I promptly placed in front of him. I even made sure that I filled the bowl with milk right up to the very top so that he would know right from the start that I would not shortchange him on his breakfast. In fact, I can state with confidence that up to that point, I had successfully demonstrated (mostly to myself) that the use of Child and Youth Care principles and skills clearly were easily a match for minor issues such as a missing chromosome. Basking in the glory of my professional brilliance, I just didn’t see it coming. And I wasn’t really sure that what I thought had happened actually did happen, because looking at my kid across the table, he seemed entirely content and perfectly calm. My surprise kept me calm too, even as the milk all over my T-shirt was soaking through to my chest and the sugary glue that held the cereal to my clothes was slowly dissolving and thereby contributing to transferring the whole mess from me to the floor.
As a Child and Youth Care practitioner, I had lots of experience dealing with temper tantrums and aggressive behaviours, but the kid had neither suffered a tantrum nor did he appear aggressive in any way. I kept my calm and in a very soft voice explained to him the inappropriateness of his action; but I refused to get sucked into power struggles and a game of consequencing, and so I finished my very first day with him and went on to my real job, a little embarrassed about my now soiled outfit and resolved to come up with an excuse (ok, a lie) for how this had happened.
Day 2 was rather uneventful, and once again by the time I arrived at my real job, I had my cover story explaining the peanut butter and jam all over my shirt ready.
Day 3 went exceptionally well, in part because the yellow of the egg yolk sort of blended in with the sunset motif of the shirt.
Day 4 wasn’t quite as good, because it turns out that although pancakes are relatively safe and clean projectiles, the only way to get maple syrup out of the hair is to get a haircut.
On day 5 I called in sick. I really was sick, not physically but emotionally. This kid was driving me nuts, and more importantly, people at my real job were looking at me with a rather discernible mistrust. If I didn’t know any better, I might have thought that they didn’t believe my story about the seriously alcoholic waitress at the breakfast diner. Fundamentally, I was concerned about two things: on a selfish note, I was tired about showing up to work looking a little dirty and smelling not all that well. But equally importantly, I was concerned that the kid wasn’t getting what I have always prided myself as being one of the things I ensured kids were getting: he wasn’t getting breakfast, and he was going to school hungry every day. Something had to change, and I had to accept the fact that it was time to call in some help. So I turned to the people I figured would know what to do: my Child and Youth Care friends. Specifically, I decided to call a friend who not only was a child and youth worker, but who had considerable experience working with kids affected by autism. I explained my dilemma and asked for help specifically with respect to the two concerns cited above. His response was just a little disconcerting: “well, if he can’t handle behaving during breakfast, don’t give him breakfast. He needs to learn that you serving him breakfast is a privilege to be appreciated”. I found this response frankly scary; quite aside from the fact that it is illegal in Ontario to withhold food as a consequence, it just seemed harsh and wrong, and it didn’t really speak to one of my concerns at all.
So I called another child and youth worker who was, at that time, working with kids with developmental disabilities after having spent many years working in a group home for “youth with behavior issues”. Her advice was equally unsatisfying: “these kinds of kids don’t understand your explanations; you have to use clear consequences that they can feel; every time the kid goes to throw his food at you, take him by the arm and escort him to his bedroom. He needs to stay there for at least five minutes, and then try again. Just repeat this process and you will find things will change”. This approach, I thought to myself, seems to suggest that I can train this kid to do things differently by exerting physical control over him. At any rate, this seems like a behavioural approach, and I am not convinced that from the kid's perspective, he is engaging in any sort of “negative” behavior.
The third child and youth worker I called didn’t hear me out; instead he reminded me that I owed him fifty bucks for a recent “night of bad decisions”, so naturally I faked a bad connection and hung up.
Since I was rather unsatisfied with the responses so far, I thought I would try again. I called a guy who had over twenty years experience in the field, had worked in all kinds of different settings, and was at that time working with kids with serious neurological problems in a program that specialized in meeting the needs of these kinds of kids. His response, surely, would be helpful. In fact, I hoped that he might have had this experience himself at some point. Here is what he suggested: “when this kind of thing happens, we always make sure we give the kid involved food that can be picked up off the floor. So if you give him toast and he throws it, just pick it up and put it in front of him and keep doing that until he gets tired of throwing it at you.”
I have to honestly admit that I gave up on quite a few friendships that day. Although I still had no idea what to do, surely these suggestions were not the way to go. I was conscious that I had received these suggestions from people who were actively working with kids at that time, and I was feeling rather low and depressed about the state of our profession. In fact, I was ready to abandon the profession and turn to an entirely different kind of professional for advice, hard as that was.
So I called this guy I knew and severely disliked. He was, by profession, a developmental services worker and had spent his entire career, spanning some thirty-five years, with kids and adults with developmental challenges. This guy was Irish, and he was categorically unapologetic about his view that child and youth workers did not know the first thing about developmental disability (and now that I think of it, the Irish never did apologize for making the rest of the world drink green beer on St. Patty’s Day). I had to swallow my pride but I knew I needed his wisdom right now. After I explained the situation and outlined my two concerns, he was very quiet initially, and then he burst out laughing for no less than an uninterrupted five minutes. Not to digress, but I never understood why the Irish feel the need to laugh at others, particularly given Sinead O’Connor and Joyce’s incomprehensible Ulysses; South Africans know to laugh with you rather than at you, and when a Scottish guy laughs at you it lasts at the most 10 seconds, then he gives you slap on the back that will temporarily render you unconscious, but then he moves on with the night. The Welsh are far too polite for this kind of thing and the English “come to think of it, I haven’t heard an English guy laugh since 1966.
Back to the story: the Irish guy did eventually stop laughing, and then he gave me the advice I really needed: “bring a second shirt, Idiot”. Click, and he was gone.
So that’s what I did. Every morning I put another shirt in my car, then I went to see my kid and spent a wonderful morning with him. And every morning I prepared two portions of food; the first he threw at me, following which I served him the other portion, which he happily ate with great delight. I walked him to his bus, went to my car, changed shirts and happily set off to work. Thankfully the alcoholic waitress finally got into treatment, so I didn’t have to make stuff up for my colleagues any more.
Child and youth care is a wonderful profession with much to offer to children, youth, their families and communities. But I am not convinced that this means we should be getting into areas of work for which we are, all too often, neither qualified nor mentally and emotionally ready. What are the odds that the same theories, concepts and practice principles and strategies are meaningful in the context of such profoundly different worlds; this is not to say that the same individual cannot work effectively with the more traditional client base of Child and Youth Care as well as the client base of the developmental services sector. But the work is different, and I don’t think it is useful to try and do one thing through the perspectives of another.
Are we doing anyone any favours by celebrating our expansion into new areas of work?
