The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
You are walking with your child on the mountain. It is quite steep, rocky, and the grass is long, but she keeps up, determinedly, a yard or two off the pace, enthralled with this altogether new and different experience. Occasionally you think she is struggling with a thicket or a climb and you turn towards her, arms outstretched, offering to help. But she swings not just her head but her whole body with the firm message "No, leave me." You comply, keep your distance – but also your closeness.
Then there appears a ridge across the path, fully a metre high, which even you are going to have to negotiate with care and maybe a little loss of dignity. She arrives at the ridge. Walks a little to the left and then a little to the right to see if there is a way up, but this ridge is taller than she is. After a minute, you turn once again to her, offer your arms, and without a second thought she allows you to grasp her around the waist and heave her to the top of the ridge. She resumes her walk without so much as a "Thank you" while you, on hands and knees, scamper up the ridge yourself.
Adjust the above scenario for age, task, and the child’s developmental status (whether physical, cognitive, emotional), and you have a good analogy for the Child and Youth Care intervention. We see the futility of adopting a "Shape up or else" mentality. In our walk alongside troubled kids and families we give them space to carry on by themselves as far as possible, to show themselves what they can do, and we show our tacit acknowledgement. We may have had a say in adjusting the difficulty level of the current task, the ruggedness and challenge of the terrain, but beyond that we keep our distance – and our closeness.
In our kind of work, our actual intervention might have been no more than a reassuring touch on the shoulder, or it might have been a three-week concentration on a difficult problem-solving issue. The intent and process is the same.
The essence of this whole story is, of course, contained in the very first sentence at the top of this page: You are present, doing something, in challenging circumstances, in a relationship. You have already done much of your work even to have arrived in this situation. When the youngster reaches an obstacle, our intervention is natural, mutual, in the interests of the current task – beyond which hardly a word needs to be said. Both of us come out the other side of the experience different.
