The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
We are all too familiar with the Child and Youth Care worker’s administrative tasks of logging, reporting and record keeping. We do these usually to keep the program running properly, to keep interventions on track, to keep team members and others informed. And, of course, we do this for the benefit of the kids and families who are the ‘consumers’ of our program and team.
But there is another kind of logging and record keeping which is just as important to the children and youth we work with – not the program's but their own. If you have amongst your personal skills the ability to click and shoot, no matter how complicated or simple the camera, do it often. You will never know how central to their self-image, their sense of being, are the pictures and mementos we manage to collect of their lives.
Two things: One: with the disruption and confusion so common to families of kids in our programs, the taking and collecting of photographs and other keepsakes is usually low or absent from their priorities; these youngsters invariably get to the end of their childhoods with but fragmentary reminders of the journeys they have travelled. Two: we may be the only people in a position to record the current periods in their lives, the times they are with us and working on significant healing and growth points. If we are doing our job properly, these will indeed be times of challenge and change, and hopefully of new discoveries and new directions – times they will want to remember.
Our aim is that the young people we work with will leave with new insights and skills and strengths.
But let them also leave with some pictures!
