4 June 2008
NO 1305
Group care
At the beginning of 1985, after six years writing and teaching about practice in group Child and Youth Care settings, I left university life to return full-time to the Walker Home and School in Needham, Massachusetts. As a new program administrator, I was immediately struck by how much more complicated the business of therapeutic group child care had become. Child care professionals at Walker School and, I believe, throughout the group care field are confronted by a confusion of equally powerful points of view as they try to do their jobs.
First, particularly given the increasingly difficult, multihandicapped children placed in our care, it is clear that no one theoretical system is sufficient to guide day-to-day practice. As we make key clinical decisions, we often struggle to combine concrete behavioral objectives with longer term goals generated by psychodynamic or systems considerations, just as valid as the need to teach new behaviors. The result is not always comfortable, or clear as a blue print for effective intervention.
With reference to the families of the children and adolescents we serve, public policy and the impact of a growing number of new practice theory formulations challenge both practitioners and parents to reframe residential group care as family-centered and family supportive. This perspective is exciting in theory because it breaks down the stereotypical barriers between parents and child care workers in the name of creating a sense of permanence for every child in group care. Yet it is also disturbing as it demands program change, reallocation of resources and innovative partnerships where real power is shared with parents within the institution.
From most public and private community funding and regulatory agencies, the child care professional continues to endure the pressures of increased demands for accountability and decreased willingness to provide adequate fiscal support. Often the effect of this outside pressure on child care workers is indirect, creating tension within the agency between line workers and program administrators who are so in tune with the need to reduce costs and risks of liability as to be perceived as out of touch with the real needs of the clients.
From the perspective of non-familial child care as a social institution, Child and Youth Care work in the United States is still a faintly suspect semi-profession, and direct care workers still lack adequate social status, adequate pay and, much too often, an adequate share of decision-making power within the group care agencies built around their work. At the very least, this sociological anomaly complicates effective direct care practice. At worst, whole agencies struggle to recruit and maintain even marginally competent direct care professionals, while significant numbers of child care workers struggle with powerlessness and cynicism in their work.
All of these points of view are relevant to practice in group child care settings. The problem for the child care worker and the program administrator alike is to achieve some sort of integrative focus – what Albert E.Trieschman called a "unifying something"as a basis for building a coherent helping environment. The extraordinary achievement of this elegant volume of essays by Henry W. Maier is that it goes a long way toward providing just such a unifying something for professional child care work.
Professor Maier takes what he calls a developmental perspective to reframe the basic challenge of residential group care whatever the age of the clients or the specific objectives of the setting: "In what way can group care, that is, non-familial living, assure children a developmental progress similar to that of children growing up within regular family care settings?" (Chapter I, p. 9). The answers provided in this collection of separate papers written during the last ten years are based on a consistent and deceptively simple idea: The heart of the matter is the making of human connections and the giving and receiving of basic care. One way or another, each of the twelve essays develops the idea that the essential preoccupation of child care work is and should be "the interactive symphony of caring": how and why children at different developmental stages react differently to caregivers; how giving and receiving basic care is shaped by space, by organizational structure, and by the demands of society as a whole; and, most of all, how the mutuality of caring and the connectedness between caregiver and child or adolescent define the humanity of every child care environment.
RICHARD W. SMALL
Small, Richard W. (1987). Preface to: Maier, Henry W.
Developmental Group Care of Children and Youth: Concepts and
Practice. Binghampton, NY. The Haworth Press. pp. xiii-xv.
REFERENCES
Barker, R.G. (1968). Ecological Psychology. Pal Alto, CA. Stanford University Press.
Parsons, T. (1964). The Social System. New York. The Free Press.
