The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
Doreen came into the office to tell Graham (unit manager) that some of the kids were outside smoking again in the car park. "Well," replied Graham in frustration, "Just tell everyone that from now on nobody is allowed outside at all after dinner."
This is the kind of decision we are often tempted to make in Child and Youth Care programs. When we study it in retrospect, it was not a quality decision. It seemed to be addressing the problem (whether it was the smoking or the gathering in the car park) but all it really did was to avoid facing the problem and dealing with it positively. Graham may have argued that it was "in the interests of the children" but if we are honest, it offered nothing to the learning and growth of the kids, and merely saved Graham the bother of having to make such decisions in future. It also saved him the bother of engaging the issue of smoking, or of dealing with why he didn’t want the young people to gather in the car park ... whatever.
As Child and Youth Care workers, we are constantly called on to make (often challenging and difficult) decisions which promote the developmental and treatment goals of the youths we work with. We rack our brains with problems like "How do we make it possible for George to have such-and-such an experience or enable him to pluck up the courage to say ...?" or "Where can Susan do that (practise the trombone or write private letters)" or "Who will go with her to deal with this issue she has with her Mom?"
(There are times when we have to take decisions for the benefit of staff! Yes we will, time and again, take decisions which involve us going the extra mile, but when we repeatedly take decisions which are beyond our capacity as a team (in terms of time, numbers or skills) we risk the well-being and safety of staff members and this can compromise our whole program.)
But Graham might have solved his problem differently: "We’ll probably never stop everyone smoking, but we need to spend some time working out what more we can learn and do about the health and education aspects of smoking?" or "It seems that some of the kids do need a space where they can be out from under the feet of the adults – what changes can we make?"
Today in our practice we monitor the quality of the decisions we make – to see that they encourage progress in our kids, and not merely help us to avoid the brainwork or legwork which is part of our job.
