Creating a warm place where children can blossom.

AuthorGilligan, Robbie

Abstract

This paper addresses the themes of resilience, rights and responsibilities, to explore how community life, professional practice and social policy can be more attuned to the needs of vulnerable children. It considers the parts children, families, communities, professionals, government and the wider public can play in creating conditions under which children can thrive. It argues that our approach must be guided not only by an application of knowledge, but also by a sense of hope.

VULNERABILITY AND ISOLATION

A colleague and friend of mine is a gifted and sensitive social worker. She makes a great job of running a local children's support project in Dublin.

One day she received a note about a boy in primary school who was causing concern. He was being referred to her project for ongoing work, because of his challenging behaviour in the classroom and elsewhere. He was a pupil at the school where her project is based.

She decided to observe his behaviour in the lively playground at lunchtime, as part of her preparation for engaging with him. She saw him running around relentlessly in a manic game of chasing. But as she looked more closely, she realised that there was actually no one else in the game with him. He was running around this busy playground on his own.

Imagine any attempt to work with this boy that did not have this level of detail about his predicament. Any such attempt would veer far wide of the mark in terms of impact and effectiveness.

YOUNG PEOPLE IN CONTACT WITH SERVICE SYSTEMS

To begin to help children, we need truly to know them and their context. Many young people known to our services may face a heightened risk of social isolation, in some way like this boy in the playground. For a myriad of complex reasons, at least some of these youngsters may grow up with a smaller social network than an equivalent young person not in contact with our service systems. A restricted social network may lead to a reduced range of social roles.

In the absence of additional or alternative social roles, these young people may develop a consuming and stigmatised master-identity of "young person at risk", or of "client of social services" or of "young person in care", a master identity that comes to dominate their sense of self. (2)

Such stigmatised identities may also lead to excessive reliance on formal services. The young person's reliance on formal services for help may be both a cause--and a consequence--of weaker access to informal social support. And, the young person may also end up with a narrower base of positive role models on whom to draw for guidance, inspiration and encouragement.

Young people in public care offer many examples that illustrate this point. Those of us working with young people in care must be sensitive to the possible risk for these young people of being entrapped in a ghetto populated almost exclusively by young people in care or their carers, a ghetto that may lead onto longer-term social exclusion on many fronts. At worst, we must strive to protect young people in care, or leaving care, from an "endless tundra of aloneness and loneliness" to quote a telling phrase of the Irish playwright, Brian Friel. (3) This "endless tundra" of loneliness may be a real risk if we are not very active in promoting and preserving social connections for each vulnerable young person as they grow up.

I am reminded here of the young woman--let us call her "Annie"--who was at a little low-key leaving-care graduation party in her honour. (4) There was a very positive atmosphere and she joined in the speeches to say a few words reflecting on her experience. Looking around the room, she said "All my friends are adults". Most of the people present were adults from the services who had helped her along the way.

She meant the comment appreciatively and affectionately, but there was certainly another very telling way to read it. Her story illustrates the risk of restricted social networks, excessive reliance on formal services and the master identity of being-in-care. Immersion in professional service systems may risk cutting young people off from peers and natural networks.

A young adult who had grown up in the care system in Australia touches on the same issue. He was contemplating marrying the mother of his child, but he said he would have "no one to invite to the wedding" (Maunders et al. 1999). A challenge for those concerned with the lives of young people in care is to ensure that young care leavers do indeed have social networks that can yield up a potential list of invitees to their wedding. I want to suggest that a sense of "belonging" should become very central in thinking about the needs of young people in care or any vulnerable young person.

THE NEED FOR RELATIONSHIPS

Raymond Carver, the great American writer and poet, addresses this issue of belonging --a central question for all of us--in his poem "Late Fragment". (5) As I understand it, this was his last poem, written as he was dying of cancer:

And did you get what You wanted from this life, even so? I did. And what did you want? To call myself beloved, to feel myself Beloved on...

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