Professional Issues in Child and Youth Care Practice

Kiaras Gharabaghi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317986607
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

This book provides an overview of the core professional issues in the field of child and youth care practice. The author explores themes ranging from relationships and the exploration of Self to career building and field-specific approaches to management. The book is written from a pragmatic perspective, and serves both to advance current thinking in the field about professional issues as well as to provide the student of child and youth care practice and practitioners with practical and accessible approaches to developing a strong and sustainable professional identity. All of the themes in this book are explored within a context of ethical decision-making and practice approaches informed by a commitment to children's rights and empowerment. Throughout the discussions, concepts and themes are considered in relation to four specific lenses: the power lens, the diversity lens, the language lens and the transitioning from theory to practice lens. These lenses serve to ensure that the reader adopts a critical understanding of the professional issues in the field and is able to develop his or her own professional identity while mitigating the power and identity issues necessarily associated with being a practitioner in a helping profession.

This book was published as a special issue of Child and Youth Services.

Professional Issues in Child and Youth Care

SUMMARY. Several contexts and themes of professionalism are considered including the nature of “professional issues,” professionalism, and writing about professional issues. The professional issues discussed are the socio-political and cultural contexts, systems, employment, career development, relationships with other professionals, and the self. Next, I discuss the professional issues of professional organization, arguing that the professional status of child and youth care matters less than the meaning of the work to practitioners. I also argue that more work needs to be done before the field can be professionally organized. Finally, I suggest both scholarly research work and less formal, more accessible writing have a rightful place in the ongoing evolution of the field.

KEYWORDS. Child and youth care professional issues, social and cultural contexts, career development, inter-professional relationships, child and youth care employment issues, professionalization, proessional organization, youth development, professional development

It is a strange profession indeed when one of the great contributors of knowledge within the profession, Henry Maier, apparently felt it necessary to remind child and youth workers that one of the things they ought to do each day is “say hello” to the children and youth they work with (Maier, 2003). One would not think that it is necessary for child and youth care practitioners to be reminded of such a basic element of civilized human interaction. In fact, one would expect a professional in the field of child and youth care practice to say hello and a whole bunch more to clients as a matter of course. But such is the nature of what we do; it ranges from the seemingly obvious to the banal to the sophisticated and all the way to the apparently insane. Jack Phelan (2008) exclaimed during a conference presentation that “What child and youth care workers do is simple, but their rationale for doing so is complex.”

Child and youth care is a label that captures a wide range of activities. Such activities include those that are action-oriented, concrete and relatively easily understood by those who might inquire about them as well as activities that are seemingly passive, that lack any discernible movement or action, and that are much more difficult to explain to others who might be interested. It is one thing to say that we work with children and youth and that our work might include therapeutic play and problem-solving and behavior modification. While each of these terms is rendered meaningful through the interpretations and perspectives of those exposed to them, at least there is an element of visualization that can unfold within a general context of such activities (VanderVen, 2003). On the other hand, when we say that child and youth work is about “being” with children and youth and about developing relationships with them, we quickly move from somewhat comprehensible ideas to language that seems to suggest that child and youth care is really about not much of anything. As Fewster (1982) put it more than 25 years ago, “It’s not very impressive … to build a professional identity around the simple ability to relate to kids. Understanding how a particular child sees himself or the world around him is not likely to impress the neighbors or command respect within the professional community.”

What child and youth workers do and what they are thought to be doing by others are often two completely different things (Weisman, 1999). Furthermore, most child and youth workers are themselves unsure about what it is they do, but they are busy doing a lot. Paradoxically, it has become increasingly difficult to find common understandings of what child and youth care is precisely at a time when child and youth workers are working in more service sectors than ever before.

This series of articles explores this and other professional issues of child and youth care practice. The exploration is informed by the ever-increasing divide between the development of the discipline of child and youth care in academic and research contexts on the one hand, and the evolution of the profession in the field, in agencies, in communities and in the minds of the practitioners on the other hand (Gannon, 2003; Stuart, 2008; Winfield, 2005). While this divide is not often acknowledged, when it is, the message is clear. As Phelan (2000) put it: “I am worried that the writers and teachers whom I talk to only really make sense to other writers and teachers, not actual practitioners. New staff, and especially students in field placement, quickly abandon all theoretical concepts in the face of the sensory overload that immobilizes them as they start to work in residential group care. There often is a lot of support from less skilled staff to do this and to start using ‘common sense’ approaches.”

I want to contemplate the possibilities for the future of the profession, the dilemmas faced by practitioners in the present and some of the core themes that are and will continue to impact on the development of the profession and on the development of the practitioners, including themes of power, language and diversity. Such an exploration and contemplation requires a degree of flexibility in how we articulate thoughts and ideas; I will present these in both theoretical and conceptual terms, but I will also present these in pragmatic and extremely practical terms. And rather than moving from theory to practice or vice versa, I will move between theory and practice without warning and without missing a beat.

In writing these articles, I am reminded of a scene in a really bad 1980s movie starring Rodney Dangerfield. Dangerfield plays a character who returns to college after having successfully built a business empire in the oversized clothing industry. In one scene, Dangerfield interrupts the highly trained and educated professor who is lecturing on business principles, and he begins to provide his version of business principles that include such things as bribing city officials in order to get some breaks on garbage disposal regulations, manipulating tax accountants, aggressively pursuing personal relationships with potential business partners, and so on. The professor is disgusted by this presentation, but all the other students are eagerly taking notes, ignoring the professor’s lecture and focusing on the much more practical and “real world” knowledge being shared by Dangerfield.

I aim for somewhere between the professor’s and Dangerfield’s versions of how to conduct business. On the one hand, there is today a great deal of academic work—conceptual and research based—that can in fact advance the professional context in which child and youth care practitioners do their work. On the other hand, the everyday experience of child and youth care practitioners is not quite as clean, not quite as controlled, and not quite as simple as it is presented in much of our academic discussions. Therefore, my approach to writing these articles has been one that tries to speak to the everyday realities facing practitioners while, at the same time, I have tried to contribute to the academic discussions about specific topics and themes as well. My hope is that the reader will find something startling, upsetting, and thought-provoking for discussion with colleagues, friends, children and youth, as well as professors and teachers. Before I embark on this exploration of the professional issues of child and youth care, it is worthwhile to clarify what I mean by professional issue, as well as to review, ever so briefly, some of the discussions and debates about professional issues in our field that I will not cover in the articles to come.

WHAT IS A PROFESSIONAL ISSUE

When one uses the term “professional issue,” it begs the question how such an issue is differentiated from other kinds of issues. After all, we do commonly use terms such as “clinical issues,” “practice issues,” “research issues” and “personal issues” as well. Conversely, why are we talking about professional issues as opposed to professional solutions, problems, themes or approaches? It is difficult to provide clear and concrete answers to any of these questions. It is probably fair to say that there are no clear separations between professional and clinical issues, or between professional issues and professional approaches, solutions or themes. The first conclusion we can therefore draw is that any discussion or contemplation about professional issues that we might engage in represents an approximation more so than a determination; we are contemplating something that we can define within rather broad parameters only, recognizing that the designation of something as a professional issue is not really a scientific or even particularly firm categorization but, instead, a loose and pragmatic designation that neither is nor has to be consistently maintained.

With these limitations in mind, we can nevertheless propose a working definition of “professional issues” that at least will guide us through this series of articles and that might explain why some topics are covered and others are not. For the purpose of these articles, therefore, a professional issue is one that meets some, most or all of the following criteria:

• Societal, cultural and political issues that impact or potentially impact on the practitioner;

• Issues that reflect the systems context in which child and youth care practitioners operate;

• Issues that reflect the employment context of child and youth care practitioners;

• Issues that reflect the career development prospects of child and youth care practitioners;

• Issues that reflect the interactions of practitioners with professionals within the field or from other fields;

• Issues that are fundamentally about the practitioner, even if they manifest themselves within the context of the practitioner “being” with a child, youth or family.

This list of criteria is far from exhaustive, but it does cover a wide range of issues, themes and scenarios that constitute a frame of reference for contemplating the profession of child and youth care practice and the professional identity of the child and youth care practitioner. It is worthwhile, therefore, to provide some examples for each of these criteria so that, as we move forward in our contemplation of the professional issues in child and youth care practice, we have some idea about the limitations of what we will cover and the opportunities for reflection on issues left unexplored.

Society, Culture and Politics

Historically, child and youth workers were somewhat insulated from the broader societal, cultural and political dynamics of their work (Ingram & Harris, 2001). The institutions that typically employed child and youth workers frequently were closed off to the public, including particular communities, neighborhoods and even families. As a result, the social, cultural and political experience of child and youth workers was reflective of the subcultures and politics prevalent within their work settings. Of course, these subcultures and politics were themselves influenced by broader societal dynamics, but there was little emphasis on understanding the relationship between what is “out there” to what happens “in here.”

All of this has changed considerably over the past two or three decades. De-institutionalization has resulted in the deployment of child and youth workers in much more open settings, even in the context of residential care. Group homes and residential treatment centers, as well as shelters and drop in programs for homeless youth, are now commonly located in neighborhoods and communities with no specific access barriers beyond security related measures to prevent unwanted intruders. Child and youth workers now have to deal with neighborhood concerns, changes in the community and patterns of violence and crime in spaces where they work. As the profession has moved beyond its historical focus on residential care, child and youth workers doing family work in private homes or providing services in community centers and other public spaces now are impacted by the social, political and cultural context of their employment spaces, and this has raised myriad professional issues for the discipline that were less obvious and perhaps less prevalent in the past.

Increasing diversity and acknowledgement of that diversity has resulted in a focus on anti-oppression approaches to being with children and youth as well as issues of racism and other forms of discrimination that are more openly identified and debated not only in the context of the specific services being provided but also in the context of relationships between staff, organizational dynamics and employment standards (Moore, 2001; Ragg, Patrick, & Ziefert, 2006; Skott-Mhrye, 2006). Issues of poverty and social alienation amongst particular demographic groups, especially in urban areas, has resulted in greater attention to social phenomena such as youth gangs, gun violence, drug trafficking and other issues that raise both safety-related concerns for practitioners as well as questions about cultural competence and ethical commitments in terms of working with clients without becoming an inadvertent informant for the local crime stopper program (Finlay, 2007; Gharabaghi, 2005; Schissel, 1997).

The politics of justice have intruded significantly in the employment environments of many child and youth workers. A “get tough on crime” mentality frequently promoted by government and citizen groups alike has impacted on the integrity of the child and youth care approach, which tends to prioritize relationships and caring over investigating wrong doing and convicting the perpetrators. Canada, for example, has the highest rate of youth incarceration amongst the OECD countries, and this is reflected in the large number of criminal charges emerging out of environments where child and youth workers are employed, notably of course residential care facilities (Finlay, 2007).

Other issues, including employment equity, unionization, accountability and transparency, all have become much more prevalent in recent years and have impacted the professional experiences of practitioners (Ingram & Harris, 2001). It is therefore critically important that when one considers the professional issues of child and youth care practice, one is conscious of the broader social, political and cultural dynamics unfolding locally, nationally and even globally. It is simply no longer possible to fully appreciate the full complexity of professional issues based on an analysis of the day-to-day experience of child and youth workers in their sometimes insular work environments.

Systems Context

In most jurisdictions in North America and, perhaps to a lesser extent in Europe, the issues and needs of children and youth are serviced by a fragmented and frequently uncoordinated system of service providers, service sectors and funding streams. While much of the literature and theory of child and youth care, social pedagogy and other human services fields have long recognized the interconnectedness of issues and themes faced by children and youth as well as their families, the response to such issues is parceled out between entirely separated institutional service providers in sectors such as education, child welfare, youth justice and others.

As a result, children and youth encountered by practitioners frequently have been or still are involved in helping systems beyond that in which any particular practitioner is employed. This, in turn, places considerable onus on the child and youth workers to be knowledgeable of other systems and to maintain extraordinarily high standards with respect to professional communication across sectors and service providers, participation in multi-sectoral and multi-disciplinary case management processes as well as advocacy to assist clients in navigating the full complexity of an uncoordinated and often rather expansive system of services. It also creates challenges for the practitioner to follow through on some of the more fundamental conceptual components of the discipline such as, for example, being with children and youth in their life spaces. Given the bureaucratic nature of virtually all of the sectors and service providers involved with the children and youth, accessing these spaces for any particular practitioner is often not so easy. Jurisdictional conflict, agency territorialism, and professional arrogance on the part of individuals or agencies are formidable obstacles to providing a service to children and youth that transcends these systemically entrenched but highly artificial separations and divides. Client files are transferred between sectors and institutions based on events and scenarios in the present, resulting in a watering down of responsibility and accountability for outcomes on the part of any single service provider or practitioner. The classic example, of course, is that of youth criminal justice...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abstracts
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Professional Issues in Child and Youth Care
• 2. Boundaries and the Exploration of Self
• 3. Values and Ethics in Child and Youth Care Practice
• 4. Relationships with Children and Families
• 5. Relationships Within and Outside of the Discipline of Child and Youth Care
• 6. The Community Context of Child and Youth Care Practice
• 7. Professional Issues of Child and Youth Care Through the Language Lens
• 8. Professional Development and Career Building in Child and Youth Care
• 9. Child and Youth Care Approaches to Management
• 10. Conclusion: Where To From Here?
• Index