The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
It is such a cliché that we get tired of hearing it – "lead by example, not by precept". A precept (a command, an instruction, a moral maxim) is always easier, isn’t it, and it lets us off the hook: "I told her to do it; I taught him that he should do it like that; I said to them that ‘the devils finds work for idle hands’."
But these are a pathetic substitute for following through with solid teaching which really takes responsibility for helping kids to develop new values and attitudes. It is not true that when "we have told them so" we have done our work. We need to show that we have truly been "friends with influence."
One of the most powerful ways in which we teach children is when we accept that we ourselves might be subject to the same failings and errors which we usually see only in the kids. How often do we (gasp!) apologise when we have behaved insensitively or rudely? How often to we admit that we forgot to make an arrangement or an enquiry? Do we react only with defensiveness when the kids (or someone else in their family or in the program) accuses us of some short-coming?
How powerful it would be if we were to model the honesty or the regret we feel about some of our own poor behaviours! Imagine admitting that "I completely forgot that I agreed to telephone your teacher this morning and I am very sorry – I will do so first thing in the morning and will let him know that it was my fault it was forgotten." Or, "I must admit that I have too easily seen the negative qualities in your family, and failed altogether to see the positive things which are important to you ..."
[I will leave it to you, the reader, to list the things
which a youth might learn from such a response from us. Write us at
info@cyc-net.org if you have any
good ideas about this.]
One of the seminal texts about the work we do in groups of troubled kids in
programs like ours, is that of Maxwell Jones who, in a hospital setting,
virtually invented the "therapeutic community". In one of his books he
wrote:
" ... And the doctor, in order to understand and to use the forces within a social situation, must be willing and upon occasion to become the subject and have his performance scrutinised by his colleagues, and even by the patient when this seems appropriate."
In our practice today we will be powerful models and
motivators when we get down from our high horse of authority, and present
(by our behaviour within our group) simple positive qualities of humanity.
Read that last sentence again before you meet with you kids today and before
you reach for another of those precepts.
Reference
Jones, M. (1968) Social psychiatry in practice: The idea of the
therapeutic community. Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, p.14
