The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
The children and youth we work with very often have the feeling that things don’t go their way in life, and they suffer from a pervasive pessimism which expects the worst from most situations. They have lost trust. Putting on a bright face and telling them to "cheer up" is not convincing.
One of the significant "gifts" we can offer is to discover and/or create things for them to look forward to so that they can learn to experience for themselves cycles of expectation and positive outcome. Pessimism means that nothing worthwhile can be seen up ahead. Optimism (or hope) is the idea that something interesting or rewarding will happen tomorrow – and this makes today infinitely more bearable.
As with most youth programs, we work at both the individual and program levels.
We look for future personal events in their lives which we anticipate with them. "Oh, yes, this weekend you’re going to see that movie ..." or "Tomorrow’s pocket money day when we all get rich again!" The depressed or pessimistic kid will not normally respond to these prospects with animated joy, but we are planting small points of light in their darkness. We are not doing a facile "count your blessings" exercise; we are, for the moment, doing something for them which they are unable to do: lifting their eyes.
We do this at the program level too. "Don’t make plans for Thursday, I thought we’d go eat at KFC (or at the beach or barbecue out ...)" "I’ve been thinking about painting your room next week – what sort of colours do you like?" "How about meeting me after school at Kids Inc. and you can pick out a new top?"
This is not spoiling or buying kids. It is doing what we would be doing anyway, but consciously setting up sequences of promise and fulfilment so that the intervening hour, day or week has an ingredient of expectation, something worth waiting for and looking forward to, to vary the data on which they are judging their lives.
In our practice today with kids who have lost hope, we look for ways to articulate their own lives for them, or to build short (and then increasingly longer) forward-looking time frames into our program.
