The EirCan Series
Working with Families
in Social Care/Child and Youth Care Practice
The EirCan© Perspective
Thom Garfat, PhD
&
Niall C. McElwee, PhD
Supported by the Midland Health Board, Ireland
Smashwords Version (2011) Copyright to authors (2004)
Chapter One
INTRODUCTION
The basic purpose of the Getting Started series
The basic purpose of this series is to encourage social care and youth care practitioners, across a number of different areas of work, to read current material that is grounded in practice and theory but is written in a style that is accessible, interesting and meaningful to the daily life experiences of ‘doing’ social care.1 We wrote this particular book because we both believe that to work with a child or young person effectively, one must include the family. To us, however, the family can assume many shapes. Family may well be who you consider it to be rather than what you consider it to be (Garfat & McElwee, 2001).
The basic purpose of the EirCan Series is to facilitate front line practitioners and family support workers to understand better the dynamics of practice in different areas, through providing frameworks for conceptualization and practice. This volume, which is the first in this series, is intended to open up the territory of family work. It is designed to be useful for: 1) the individual looking to enhance her knowledge about families., 2) the instructor/lecturer looking for a basic curriculum guideline, 3) the team wanting to branch out in to family work It is not only for newly qualified practitioners, but also for those who are just beginning the journey of becoming involved with families. The series itself is intended not just to be ‘books to read’ but also as guides for a learning programme for students, practitioners, supervisors, family support workers and teams.
Social care is a profession characterised by working in partnership with people who experience marginalisation or disadvantage or who have ‘special needs’. Social care practitioners may work, for example, with children and adolescents in residential care; people with learning or physical disabilities; people who are homeless; people with alcohol/drug dependency; families in the community; older people; recent immigrants; and others. Typically, although not always, social care practitioners work with children, youth and their families (McElwee & Share, 2005).
There exists a particular approach to ‘doing’ social care work and family support which is a child and youth care perspective. This perspective differs from other professional approaches as we will see in this book due to its emphasis on the use of daily life events, relationship and ‘being in the moment’. This book, and the thoughts in it, are founded on this approach and reflect the current state of the field as it relates to family involvement (see, for example, Garfat, 2004). Part of the purpose of this volume in the series, then, is to make more explicit this approach to working with children, youth and families.
How the idea for this series originated
The idea for the EirCan series came out of a number of conversations between the two authors which evolved from their experiences with practitioners, students, supervisors and other professionals. As we visited social care projects and college programmes around the world, and primarily in Ireland and Canada (our own countries of origin) or as we made presentations at conferences, we noticed that we were being asked very similar questions from front line staff around what we might describe as “how to do”, or about “how to think about doing” social care and child and youth care work. This is not surprising given the lack of resources currently available for practitioners in our field in both countries.
Literature in the field of child and youth care in North America is full of references to the nature of the child and youth care form of practice. At various times, writers have described the uniqueness of the field, and even its `magic' (Garfat, 2003). We are starting this debate in Ireland also. Despite this, we particularly noticed that there are few books with a basic ‘hands on’ approach that practitioners could consult. For example, as there remains no Irish social care text book (the first one edited by Share and McElwee is due for publication in Spring 2005), new front line staff have to rely on their more established colleagues to inform them of empirically validated best practice.
Based on this awareness we decided to create a series of EirCan books to help answer the questions, and fill the gap. Our experience is that social care practitioners, in the main, have no particular love for lengthy tomes so we piloted our idea of books no longer than one hundred pages which the practitioner could use as a reference text.. Thanks to the innovative design, each book will fit handily in a work locker, a satchel or a ruck sack.
The overall goal of this series is to offer a basic foundation and set learning directions for the reader in various social care contexts such as working with families, working in residential care, working in community projects, working in youth care, working with specific populations.
The EirCan framework
Child and youth care is at a critical stage of development in many countries and Ireland is keeping with this trend where the professional status and identity of the social care practitioner is still emerging (McElwee 1998, McElwee & Garfat, 2003). There is no doubt that the role of the social care practitioner is becoming increasingly complex with an emerging body of literature referring to the process of reflection as being central to effective practice.
Over a period of some five years we have been developing and refining a theoretical model of practice for social care practitioner that we call the EirCan perspective. We have chosen this term to represent the most appropriate of both the Irish (Eire) and Canadian (Can) child and youth care ways of thinking about, and working with, children, youth and families. This approach combines our collective experiences and thoughts around social care provision for vulnerable children and youth.
The EirCan perspective focuses on self in the context of relationship as central to the helping process. This is a particular view of training/ education and practice where reflective practice is at the core of engagement with children, youth and families. Child and youth care is approached from a care perspective with practice grounded in a cultural context utilising empirically validated intervention approaches.
Unlike many related professions such as psychiatric nursing and special education teachers, the social care practitioner occupies the actual life-space of the child or young person with whom she/he works. The artificial boundaries of total institutions do not exist, thus creating space for daily life-events to be used as they are occurring as therapeutic moments. There is a set of attitudes, specific knowledge, skills and proficiencies that are uniquely those of the competent social care practitioner. This book explores some of those.
We believe that relationships are the essence of effective practice for it is within the context of meaningful relationships that young people and their families frame their experiences and find new ways of living together successfully. In the context of genuinely caring and mutual relationships, they find new ways of (re)structuring their experience of the world and the encounters they have had and may have in it. The attention to relationship and being-in-relationship while utilizing everyday life events as they are occurring for therapeutic purposes is one of the ways in which the professional practice of child and youth care work distinguishes itself from other forms of helping and caring (Garfat, 2001; McElwee, 2001). In order to be effective in their role, practitioners and family support workers need to become reflective practitioners, and much of that reflection needs to focus on the personal and professional construction of experience.
It is our contention that programmes should be designed to fit the characteristics of both the individual worker and the wider profession. Preparation for a career in social care demands a commitment to learning the essential components of developing healthy, caring relationships as social care work is fundamentally concerned with relationships that empower by integrating self, teaching, counselling, and learning into a myriad of interactions throughout the course of the day (Krueger, 2002). The minutia of everyday life should be the focus of all intervention (Maier, 1987).
A shifting focus of practice
It is now common to read in descriptions of child and youth care programmes that the service user population includes families, or that child and youth care programmes consider themselves to be family-focused (Garfat, 2001a). Such was not always the case. A review of programme descriptions from the middle of the last century (see, for example, Ohio, 1941; Redl & Wineman, 1952) would reveal that the programs were very much focused primarily on the young person. Frequently, no mention was made of family, or family involvement in the programme, or with direct service staff.
There is of course, good reason for this shift in focus. Child and youth care, like most ‘helping’ professions, has come to realize that the young person is a member of a social interacting system and that the development of the young person, and the young person’s thoughts, actions, values, beliefs and experience of self occur within this system (Garfat, 1998). We have come to realize that lasting change is only facilitated when helping professionals interested in the troubled young person are involved with the total family system (Garfat, 1998; McConkey-Radetski & Slive, 1988).
Like most changes in our field, this shift to becoming more family-focused has developed organically and one would find it impossible to define exactly when it occurred. However, what is clear is that there has been a dramatic change in how family and family members are perceived by child and youth care. As this shift in perception has occurred the role of the child and youth care worker, in terms of family involvement and engagement, has also been affected.
Chapter Two
SOME REFLECTIONS ON A CHILD AND YOUTH CARE APPROACH TO WORKING WITH FAMILIES
All of us, family members and workers, have had previous experiences which will be relevant to our interactions. Previous experiences with social service workers, with police or other authorities, of trying to obtain help and of having strangers in the house, may all be relevant for the family. Previous experiences of trying to be helpful, of working with families with similar characteristics, or of working independently may be of importance to the practitioner. And, of course, the history of each is relevant to the others. In writing about history here, we are concerned primarily with the previous experiences of the family, family members, and the child and youth care practitioner. For the importance of history cannot be denied and the family, in whatever form we understand it, remains a very significant influence on all of us (see Fewster, 2004). When we enter in to a situation, or have an experience, we search for ways to make sense of that experience (this will be discussed more in the chapter on meaning-making). One of the most powerful influences on how we experience and interpret that experience comes from our previous experiences of similar situations.
Imagine for a moment that a practitioner is going to visit a family that lives in a particular part of town. The last time that the worker visited a family in this area she was ejected out of the family home by a mother, angry with what she thought the worker had said. Going now to visit this new family, the worker will be influenced by the previous experience. She may be hesitant, determined, cautious, excited as she uses her framework of previous similar experiences to prepare herself for this new encounter.
Imagine, too, that the family who is waiting for the worker to arrive has made previous attempts to obtain help, although in a more traditional form. And each time, the help has not seemed to resolve the problems they were experiencing. As they wait for the worker to arrive, will they not be thinking about these previous experiences, and will their expectations not be influenced by them? And what if all of their previous experiences had resulted in positive outcomes? How might this impact on their expectations?
As workers, when we prepare ourselves for our encounters with families, we need to ask: What am I bringing to this encounter from my own previous history? What similar experiences have I had? What similar situations have I encountered? And how do these help or hinder me now? As we work with families, we also try to understand their previous experiences and how these impact on our encounter.
Child and youth care work with families is a complex and demanding field of practice. The purpose of this current chapter is to provide some ‘food for thought’ for social care workers/family support workers interested in working with families. It is not intended to be exhaustive, simply to provide some stimulus to encourage the practitioner to reflect seriously before jumping on to the bandwagon of working with families.
Child and youth care workers who engage with families are not family therapists in the formal sense of that term. Nor are they social workers, psychologists or some other human services professional, although many of the task, philosophies and skills are similar. They are social care practitioners and, as such, we argue that they should practice within a child and youth care framework. They are not therapists, but their work is genuinely therapeutic. They do not follow the models of other professions, although they learn from, and in many cases contribute to them. In order to be an effective social care practitioner with families, the social care worker must know, and be fully grounded, in their own profession and the way in which family is considered in social care and child and youth care practice.
Opening up the definition of family
We mentioned in the opening chapter of this book that family may well be who you consider it to be rather than what you consider it to be (Garfat & McElwee, 2001). While historically the definition of ‘family’ was confined to a married couple and their offspring, modern times have seen a change in the definition to reflect the greater inclusiveness of a contemporary society (Garfat & McElwee, 2001). It is not uncommon now, for example, to see the definition of family, in social care/child and youth care practice as: the members of a biologically connected system who have impact, or the potential for impact, on the young person in care or, persons not biologically related who have assumed roles traditionally occupied by biologically related persons