Since it's founding in 1997, the CYC-Net discussion group has been asked thousands of questions. These questions often generate many replies from people in all spheres of the Child and Youth Care profession and contain personal experiences, viewpoints, as well as recommended resources.
Below are some of the threads of discussions on varying Child and Youth Care related topics.
Questions and Responses have been reproduced verbatim.
Listen to thisHello everyone,
I have a question. I have read much about the importance of
relationships in CYC-Online
and in the discussions. It has me
wondering, to what extent are we giving children or youth a choice in whom
they have relationships with? For example, to what extent are kids
involved in hiring their Child and Youth Care personnel? Or to what
extent are children and youth involved in choosing the agency from whom they
receive service? Or where they will live if placed?
John Stein
New Orleans
...
John,
Though we do not include children in our hiring, we do try to ensure they
are willing to enter our program. Our admissions manager, psychiatrist, and
often a staff person go to the child's home to interview and talk about our
program with the child and family to ensure it is a good fit. We prefer to
have the child and family come to our campus to see the program and talk to
staff members as well, though this is not always possible. Our belief is if
the child is not willing to enter our program, it may interfere with or
stall treatment. For those who cannot come to see the campus, we often
provide pictures and other information so they can at least see what it
looks like. This has proven beneficial for both us and the child and family.
Establishing the initial relationship with children and families prior to
admission is very helpful.
Jean Dickson
...
Interesting.
I believe that each agency should have as part of their
Hiring Board, graduates of "the System" if not from their own agency, I
believe the youth perspective is valuable. Our Ontario Child Advocates
Office has a Youth Partnership Mandate which is well established and could
be of some help assisting in developing such a resource.
These youth 'Advocates" can bring the agencies youth perspective to the
hiring table by meeting with the youth in care and identifying
characteristics they would like to see in staff in their agency. Love the
idea!
Youth should have some pre-placement visit to assist in transition...clearly
identified concerns by the youth should be investigated further. I would
like to say that youth should have more say in their placements but it
becomes very difficult with the system as it's currently running.
How can we make the transition in a planful way where they have some sense
of ownership?
It may take many different forms
Peter Hoag
...
Great question John. We are working on a project right now to discuss
and examine some of those questions – by partnering with agencies that are
also interested in creating services with voice and choice – as well as
relationship. It's a little early in the project for me to be able to
answer your questions, or even to suggest what the issues are in answering
them, but if you are interested in a synthesis review on what's available in
the literature, we did a review of the literature first and looked at some
of the models of service delivery that are "personalized" to see how those
services managed and responded to the values that are implied in your
questions. That report can be downloaded at
http://digitalcommons.ryerson.ca/cyc/3/
The report identifies a number of well known models and then synthesizes
them into a conceptual model to assess service delivery around the values of
voice, choice, and relationship (among others). Other questions that
have to be addressed when we give young people a formal choice in their
relationships include: What if we don't like the choice they make? How do we
resolve disagreements between young people and their parents, who have legal
responsibility for them? What kind of risks are young people taking in order
to have a voice and a choice? How do we protect them from those risks? (is
that our responsibility as an adult-or not?) We are trying to suggest
processes for resolving conflicts between values that seem simple and
straightforward but when implemented begin to raise significant challenges
within services.
Carol Stuart
...
In the past I have had older kids in on interviews for staff and I found it
very useful – both because they are pretty savvy about who is "suited" for
our work and because, as you suggest, it helps them to feel more empowered
about who we give them to "relate" with.
Lorraine Fox
...
When Steve Bewsey and I worked together, Steve would take interviewees
down to the shelter and let the youth "interview" them to get an idea of how
comfortable they were with youth in general. This showed us a lot about
their communication skills, attitudes about youth, etc. Maybe Steve
will read this and add more. Anyway… it's a great idea and gives an
opportunity for youth to be involved with programs "at all levels" --
paramount in youth development approach.
Jack Nowicki
...
Hi John:
I want to respond specifically to your question "should youth have a choice
in who they have relationships with", and I am presuming you are at least
partially thinking about a residential group care context, hence the
examples of youth involvement in staff hiring, etc. I really can't
answer that question with a 'yes' or 'no', but I want to raise a few
considerations here.
First, I wonder why youth should have this choice? Is it so that they can increase their chances at relationships that are enjoyable? That they find useful? That they might find meaningful? Is it to empower youth or at least to mitigate the power differentials between staff and youth? Is it a matter of democracy, social justice, moral or human rights? Very few children/youth have choices about many of their dominant or highly influential relationships. Kids don't get to choose their parents, siblings, extended family, teachers, doctors, arresting police officers, neighbours, spiritual authority figure, soccer coach, etc. Even within their peer groups, their choices about who to have a relationship with often comes with an obligation to have relationships with others in order to maintain access to the chosen relationships (in other words, peer groups are formed based on collective choices rather than individual choices).
If youth living in a residential program were to
be able to choose the staff, what would the choice be based on? Presumably
not a relationship, since the choice would have to be made before a
relationship can evolve. I suppose one might argue that the whole
point of relational approaches to the work is to provide opportunities for
youth and staff to explore self and other in the context of positive,
negative, enjoyable, difficult, consistent and contradictory experiences.
I wonder if it would be a mistake to think about relationships as mere
extensions of the persons involved: If a youth doesn't immediately
connect to a particular person, they ought to be able to simply eliminate
this person from their life. I think of relationships as much more
complex than that, and the benefits of exploring being together in the
context of relationship, good, bad or ugly, are limitless. The onus is
on the practitioner and her/his supervisor to ensure that they are 'present
in relationship', and that they are able and willing to check on the status
of the relationship on a regular basis (Delano's work on supervision speaks
to this well). As Garfat wrote somewhere, in relational practice we
ask "how are we doing today; how is the space between us", and in so doing
both staff and youth have opportunities to regulate the intensity of
relationship, the preeminence of particular relationships and the degree to
which we wish to engage at any given time. I would worry a lot about
what young people and practitioners would lose if they began to make early
choices about who to be in relationship with and who to discard. I
can't think of too many relationships in my own life that are today
what I thought they would be when they first started.
Carol Stuart made reference to a project we are working on related to
personalized service (she provided the link to our initial report on this
too). In this project, we are exploring the issues of voice and
choice, and I like using phrases such as "voice and choice WITH
CONSEQUENCE", largely because I find we (as professionals) have become far
too talented to frame or rationalize tokenism as meaningful. But
having a voice and being able to choose is not inherently beneficial nor
indicative of a mitigation of power differentials.
By way of example, consider the current issues in the Middle East in relation to similar issues some years ago. In the late 1970s, the Iranian people certainly found their voice about their dislike of the oppressive regime of the Shah, and they exercised their choice by getting rid of him; turns out that getting rid of the Shah hardly improved things, because choice quickly reached its limits; the people ultimately did not get to choose who came after.
In residential care, even if young people
participate in the hiring, how real is that voice and choice? What if
they want to hire someone who doesn't fit the professional requirements of
the organization? How about someone with an extensive criminal history
but claiming to be on the right path now? Or someone who has been
fired by many others already? Would we allow this to happen?
Probably not, and as soon as we intervene, the choice we offered becomes
just another mechanism of control dressed up as democracy, social justice,
or simply good practice (in reference to a recent debate in this forum, I
have found some of the work questioning the intuitive logic of modernity
very useful in this context; for example, Skott-Myhre, Newbury, Ricks, and
many others). I would be very hesitant to connect our commitment to
relationships to concepts of voice and choice that are at best incomplete
but more likely loaded up with deceptive materials.
Having said all of that, I can also argue the reverse, but in more limited
contexts; for example, I would favour young people in residential care being
able to choose their primary or key worker rather than simply being assigned
one; I would favour families being able to choose their family worker from a
group of workers after they had a chance to "interview" them; I would favour
young people being able to contribute to the performance evaluations of
staff members, so long as the supervisor is well versed in engaging with
such contributions in non-judgmental and reasonable fashion. In fact I
would favour anything that challenges the assumption that youth should be
responsive or appreciative of the relationships offered. This
assumption reflects a particularly authoritarian strain in Child and Youth Care practice that has not served youth well.
Ok, my battery is running low, so let me just say thank you John for raising
such a great discussion topic!! I must make my way to Louisiana in the
near future...
Kiaras Gharabaghi
...
Last month John asked "... to what extent are kids
involved in hiring their Child and Youth Care personnel? Or to what
extent are children and youth involved in choosing the agency from whom they
receive service? Or where they will live if placed?
...
Hi John,
I think the idea of having children as part of the
hiring process is an excellent one. In my time as Director of our program's
girls' unit we had a rotating group of girls who were responsible to prepare
a few questions for the candidate andthen three of them would attend about
a fifteen minute segment of the interviewand have a chance to present their
questions. We would then meet with the group after the interview to get
their input and viewpoints. The girls were clear they didn't have "veto
power" but their recommendations were considered seriously. The process
worked extremely well and a significant majority of times their
recommendations matched up well with ours.
Additionally, when I became the agency associate director I would have two
young people give a tour of our campus to each supervisor/administrator
candidate. So, while they did not sit in on the interview I would meet with
the two kids afterwards and ask their impressions.
Frank Delano,
Hawthorne, New York
