The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
"I wish I could get the whole thing of acceptance across to Robert," said Elsabe. "I’m going mad trying to work out some program or experience which might penetrate his skull!"
"Why do it yourself when some film company spent ten million dollars making a movie which will do it far better than you can?" asked her colleague Mike. "Get out the video of The Cure. It’s exactly about that – and the kids in the cast are just about Robert’s age."
Excellent idea. Robert might not respond to the movie as positively as Mike has done, but Rome wasn’t built in a day ... and there are plenty of other movies in which others have spent thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars saying what we want to say to Robert. At our next staff meeting we could find ourselves skipping the "choice of an appropriate technical intervention" stage ... and just asking who knows a good movie!
Of course it isn’t as simple as that, but there’s no danger in adding powerful movies to our repertoire of "techniques" in Child and Youth Care work. Better still is to take a couple of kids to such a movie in a theatre where everyone gets to share the feelings of those present. Sort of like a positive replication of Solomon Ashe’s experiment!
* * *
The idea does not apply only to movies. Often when we are racking our brains for an activity to occupy the kids and hopefully provide some good "secondary gain" we completely forget the standard activities invented decades ago by other people, far cleverer than ourselves and empirically tested in tens of millions of homes and families since – games like Checkers, Scrabble, Hangman, Monopoly and Chess. These games (think of more of these) have all survived because they are so successful in engaging people of all ages. On the next cold "indoors" afternoon, have some of these at the ready. Jot down some of the positive experiences which they generate and you may be surprised.
Your move.
