The complete set of 198 Hints are available in paperback from the CYC-Net Press store.
Listen
The great heresy of our trade is that we should treat all youth the same. The directive on consistency is most often made for the sake of the staff rather than the children – to protect staff from possible criticism and to save them from the expectation to act individually, appropriately and creatively. When we respond to a child we hold in our minds a number of intersecting continua, and the variables which these generate and which ultimately affect our behaviour are infinite.
The first of these is the continuum of reacting – or not reacting at all. We will walk past Steve who is berating another fellow in the most obscene terms. We do our quick mental checksum and decide whether his verbal barrage is really a vast improvement over the physical assault of last month; whether expressing his feelings at all is far healthier than his former bottled up rage; whether this growing assertiveness is a heartening substitute for his earlier submissiveness and vulnerability; whether Steve is working at a more fundamental and urgent stage than that of cordial manners ... And so we decide whether (or not) to pay any attention to his cussing. On the other hand, for that other child six feet away in the same room, who is a different person in a different set of circumstances, we may well decide to intervene. But we could never simply treat both in the same way.
So we run through these continua which help us decide on our response on a case by case basis. We notice Marie beginning to hit out at others and our checksum may warn us that this is deteriorating behaviour which calls for intervention; we see Rick smuggling a cigarette into the bathroom and we choose not even to notice.
What resolves these apparent inconsistencies is that they are subsumed under more important continua of our own – we know what is going on right now with our kids ... or we don’t; we have an idea of where we are heading and have agreed on our team about priorities and urgencies ... or we haven’t; we’ve worked out that to get through the present stage we may have to make some trade-offs ... or we’re stuck on no-matter-what demands.
What looks like inconsistency is in fact consistently applied thinking. If our friend Steve from paragraph two were to behave destructively at a later stage when he can (or needs to) be more mature and responsible, we will (seemingly inconsistently) respond differently. Greek philosopher Heraclitus summed it up thus: No man can cross the same river twice, because the second time it is not the same man – nor is it the same river.
