The Long Term
Last month Keith White wrote an excellent piece in his In Residence column in which he pointed out the importance of the annual cycle of special events in drawing communities together and in giving children a role to play and a sense of security in being part of something bigger than themselves.
The late Robbie Kydd gave a memorable speech in which he looked back on his career in child care and concluded that the main thing he had been working to achieve was to create good memories for children that would sustain them throughout their lives.
“Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”, as the Jesuits put it, or, as Peggy Watson said, “The most important thing I felt I could give my children was a sense of self-worth through praise for achievement when they were little, so that they had the self-confidence to face life as adults”.
In all these thoughts, childhood is seen as a long-term investment in the child as the potential adult. This is not to deny the importance of childhood in itself and the need for children to have fulfilling experiences as they proceed from babyhood onwards. It is vital, though, that we encourage children to feel valued, that they know we think they have a lot to offer, and that they will continue to play valued roles into adulthood.
Even our short-term interventions need to be framed in this expectation. Interventions such as social case work assessments need to be seen, therefore, as episodes in which children are being helped to move towards a fulfilled adulthood, not just as immediate problem-solving so that the case can be closed. The approach taken to case management over the last three decades may have been necessary in order to target resources as effectively as possible, but the pressures implicit in trying to see off a problem speedily are something which social workers need to battle against. Real investment of time and skills at critical points can pay handsome dividends long afterwards.
Achieving a long-term perspective is one of the challenges for the new children’s services, which are meant to focus all the services round the meeting of the child’s needs. Aftercare is an obvious example. Great strides have been made in recognising its importance in recent years, but the aftercare offered by local authorities and other agencies rarely matches that offered by families, although children who have been looked after by their local authorities typically have greater needs in the early years of their adult lives than their counterparts who have not been in care.
Mill Grove, of which Keith White writes, is a model of continuity, offering a life-long sense of belonging to the children who grow up within its community. In recent years the native American saying that the upbringing of a child is too important a matter for the family and is the responsibility of the whole tribe has been much quoted. But who are the tribe in today’s society? By and large, social groupings in the United Kingdom in the twenty-first century do not have either the boundaries to clarify the group to which people belong nor the continuity to offer real stability.
If we turn to the responsible agencies to create communities to provide support, how can local authorities match the tribe (or Mill Grove with its century of history), in the light of the turnover of foster carers and social workers and the opening and closure of children’s homes?
Could they establish ongoing groups of children being looked after, who (with professional support) could help each other as they go through early adulthood, sharing the same types of problems and learning solutions to support others? That would be a true Barclay community of interest. Whatever the answer, the question deserves careful thought if we are to demonstrate the importance of children in the public care by investing in their long-term needs.
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