The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen to this
During a recent morning workshop a teacher came up and asked "How do you handle a child who hits out at other kids?" I said I didn’t know; that there was probably no answer to such a question, and that it was rather like asking "How long is a piece of string?" Needless to say, after some clarification, we then hung around for a further hour wrestling with the question.
There was a time, 20 or 30 years ago, when Child and Youth Care workers got together over tea at regional association meetings asking similar questions – "How do you handle a child who lies, steals, masturbates, bullies, overeats, truants ...? The expectation was that amongst all of our members there was an accumulated wisdom for solving all the problems we encountered in group care settings – that each problem had a solution, and that once we had "learned" them all, our lives would be incomparably simpler.
Today we know that there is no unitary "cure-all" for kids who present with troubled or troubling behaviour, and that usually "the shortest way home is the long way around." We have to know a lot about the child and we have to know the child; we have to know what the child has experienced and learned; we have to know the context of the behaviours, the meaning which kids attach to circumstances and events, the abilities and skill levels at their disposal, their attitudes to their world and the people they interact with ... and after a lot of listening, relating, observing and hypothesising we may be able to start assembling and scheduling a set of environmental controls, family and community links, teaching models and interventions ... and even then, who knows? Certainly there are no quick "tips" – and what "worked" with one child (or any other child) yesterday (or any other day) is unlikely to be appropriate for this child today.
Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus who taught about the complexity and fluidity of events had something to say about this: A person can never cross the same river twice: because the second time it’s a different river ... and the second time it’s a different person. In our practice today things may look much the same as they did yesterday – but today is entirely different: these are today’s kids and we are today’s adults and we’re all doing today’s stuff.
