The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
"It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers." – James Thurber
We who work with children, youth and families are probably reasonably oriented within our own life circumstances. We know our way around, we know enough to come in out of the rain, we know who’s who in the zoo. We can be tempted to believe that having reached this personal zone of achievement and comfort qualifies us to be useful and helpful to others. We couldn’t be more wrong.
Our clients are not us. They are not like us. They have lived different lives in different circumstances. They speak different languages, if not literally then conventionally. They will go on to live in different cultures, in different families, in different places – and in an age of which we have no experience whatever.
We betray them when we seek only their compliance with our own methods and customs, with our own adjustments and solutions. Decades ago Toffler warned us that facts are ephemeral, and that more than anything human beings must be adaptable. Jeffery Leach, in a review of Toffler’s 1970 book, likens future shock to "the same sort of disorientation that a person experiences when he moves to a new area, or a new country, and suffers a severing of all he has known."
(Of course there are a number of enduring values and principles which we feel may inform good decision-making in the future, and we offer what we can of these, though even these may change over time.)
For us this means that rather than giving people knowledge and information today, we prepare them to be able to find guidance and information wherever and whenever they may need it. Imagine our own youngster leaving for a far-off country of which we have only the vaguest knowledge – we would have little to offer except perhaps how to find the signposts which might help to them make sense of their new environment and adequately negotiate whatever demands and challenges they find when they get there.
We are talking here of a style of practice in which we resist giving kids brownie points for listening to us and, rather, teach them to develop their own questions to which they may find their own answers. "Do this" is replaced by "What do you think you could do about that?" Instead of "Here is the information you want," we say "Where could we find out about that?" Giving young people practice in evaluating situations and being able to come up with their own solutions is the truly helpful resource we can offer for their tomorrows.
