The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
When we use diagnostic labels or judgemental words, we paint kids into a corner – and ourselves into another one.
Rupert and Peggy, Child and Youth Care workers, are
talking in the passage.
"I really don’t trust Margaret," says Rupert. "She’s a thief."
"How can you say she’s a thief?" asks Peggy. "I think that’s an awful thing
to say!"
"Well," replies Rupert, "not only does she take other people’s things – she
admits it, and, moreover, she says she doesn’t know why she takes them. In
my book that makes her a thief."
Peggy doesn’t know how to answer. She feels this is wrong.
"I feel awkward about what you’ve said," she says. "Help me by thinking this
through with me. For instance, you seem to have reduced Margaret to one
single idea: she’s a thief."
"That single ideas’s probably why she ended up here," says Rupert,
defiantly. "It’s about the most important thing about her."
"And when would she stop being a thief?"
"When she stops stealing, I guess."
"And then she’d be a ‘non-thief’?" asks Peggy.
"She would," says Rupert.
"But we couldn’t, from that point in her life, forever call her a
‘non-thief’", argued Peggy. "Or we would also have to call her a
‘non-trapeze artist’ and a ‘non-Greek philosopher’ and a million other
‘non-things’ because she won’t be all those things either!"
"Mmmm," thought Rupert. "It would be like black and white, one thing or the
other, and I suppose people are never just one thing ..."
There was a pause.
Peggy picked up the thought. "So even though she may ‘take things’ now, she
is also a 13-year-old girl, a good athlete, articulate, quite pretty, has
been through a tough life, is humorous ..."
"Mmmm," though Rupert again. "I get it. My ‘black-and-white’ picture gets
coloured in, and the ‘taking things’ as you so euphemistically put it, would
be just one shadow in an altogether more complex and interesting picture."
These two care workers are really on the path of working this out for us, so we don’t have much more to say! Imagine if we were to be known by just one bad or embarrassing thing about us? Imagine if all the other aspects of our lives which we work so hard at were totally discounted because of one fault! It would be like ‘One strike and you’re out’ – and that doesn’t fit well with our field’s philosophy.
In our practice today we avoid being overwhelmed by any single troubling aspect of a child or youth. In fact, we are being more useful by attending to all aspects of their continuing development. As we facilitate their growing sense of safety, self-confidence and belonging, it is less likely that they will resort to risky and dramatic expressions of neediness and distress.
