By Dr Keith J. White

Paper Given to SIRCC Unit Managers Networking Day
Jordanhill, Glasgow, Thursday 7 October 2004

Introduction

This paper and the thinking it represents has not come out of academic research and theory, although it has been developed in the light of these, but from daily interaction with children and young people at Mill Grove. I was born there, Ruth and I have been committed lifelong to the Mill Grove family since 1975, and it has been our privilege to live alongside young people of every type, shape and background. I see Mill Grove as a social compost heap: a community of almost infinite complexity, with interlocking systems and sub-systems.

For over 100 years we have been seeking to adapt the setting, our responses and care to the real needs and gifts of children and young people. So we offer you today our interim thoughts, always aware that tomorrow our systems may require substantial adjustment and fine-tuning in the face of the challenges of a new young person or situation.

There is nothing completely new or revolutionary in what follows. You will be familiar with much if not all of it from your personal experience, reading, training, practice and interaction with young people. It owes much to the work of Mia Kellmer Pringle and Charlotte Towle. I have been developing this model for about 25 years and you will find it, for example, in the Barclay Report, Chapter Four, 64-5.

I am aware of alternative schema and frameworks including rights-based analysis, the Looking After Children materials and associated assessment frameworks, Maslow’s famous or infamous hierarchy of needs, Erikson developmental stages, and the work of Bronfenbrenner on human ecology as it relates to children and young people. The model I am sharing with you draws on these, but is deliberately open-ended and versatile so that it can adapt to new insights and a variety of contexts.

My sense is that unless we find a simple, yet direct, way of placing the young person in the centre of all our thinking, understanding, practice and policies, we will, however unintentionally or reluctantly, be at risk of letting systems, processes, economics, politics, institutions and priorities squeeze the young person into their moulds.

One place where the model is briefly set out is in the book, Celebrating Children, Eds. G. Miles and J. Wright, Paternoster 2003, Chapter 17, pages 123-6. It has been adapted there for organisations working within a Christian worldview, but is, in my view, equally appropriate and accessible whatever the beliefs and perspectives of those seeking to use it.

The Five Fundamental Needs and/or Gifts Summarised

The terminology is difficult and I am uneasy about most that is currently on offer - whether “rights” or “needs”, but until something better emerges this is what seems most useful. In my submission the overriding need/gift of the child or young person, and what everything adds up to is:

The Need and Desire to Love and be Loved

Now there’s a four-letter word that is rare in the literature with which you are familiar: legislation, guidance, statements of purpose, induction packs, LAC forms, policies and the like! But nothing I have experienced or read in the past thirty years of professional experience has diminished in any way my conclusion that this sums up what is at the heart of every child, young person and adult, however disguised or repressed. The five Needs/Gifts that I am going to describe all add up to this. If you like the five needs must be met in some measure if a child is to be able to love and to experience/receive love.

Before going any further let me make it quite clear that it is unlikely and rarely that those of us in residential care will be the objects or subjects of this love. We will not often be in a position to meet all the needs I am about to list, but we are strategically placed to ensure that these needs are placed firmly on the agenda or placement/leaving care plan.

It is one of our primary tasks in my view to put in place processes and plans that will contribute effectively to the recognition and meeting of these needs in the life of each young person. Whatever we do, however well intentioned and professional, will not serve the young person unless it contributes in some way to the meeting of these needs, and the expression and encouragement of these gifts.

1 Security
(You will find as we proceed that you might have other words that you use in place of or alongside those I give you. I have chosen simple words, easy to translate, and that resonate with other related ideas and concepts.) By security I mean very much what John Bowlby has in mind in his book A Secure Base, Routledge 1988: “a secure base from which (the young person) can explore the various…aspects of (her) life, past and present, many of which (she) finds it difficult or perhaps impossible to think about and reconsider without a trusted companion to provide support, encouragement, sympathy and on occasion, guidance” (page 138). Like Bowlby I believe that we all need a “place” or “base” to come back to, which we can take for granted; a safe place. It may be an actual place or a specific person. But it can also be a combination of place, person, memories, beliefs and relationships. Obviously I can neither develop this concept in detail now, nor the psychological attachment theory that underpins it.

Such a place or base is undermined or destroyed by any number of factors and events. These include worldwide: war, famine, poverty, loss of parents, family, community; the predatory behaviour of other people and groups (including bullying), and the breakdown of trust. You can fill out this list from your own experience, and my guess is that you will find it hard to think of any young person with whom you work, whose security, in the sense in which I mean it, has not been seriously undermined, if not destroyed.

At the very least in your practice and setting you can commit yourself, your organisation and your colleagues to understanding the critical and non-negotiable importance of security, to identifying and weeding out any policies, practices or people that overlook or undermine that security, and to providing wherever possible a measure of this security either yourselves or by beginning to identify, nurture or establish that secure base somewhere else.

2 Significance
By this I mean that each young person is an individual whose well-being and capacity for loving and being loved depends on the developing awareness that they matter (are significant as a person) to at least one other human being on earth, and that this person (or, better, persons) is (are) unconditionally committed to them for life. We go beyond systems and policies here. The child should know that this person will always be there for them whatever they have done or not done, however much or little they are valued by others.

Usually in human history such an unconditionally committed person will be a member of the child’s family. That is part of what we take for granted about family: that you are always a member of the family come what may. Sometimes, for whatever reason, there is no person in a child’s biological family who fulfils this vital role.

Rarely in residential care will we, the carers, fulfil this crucial, but onerous role. It happens at Mill Grove because of its special nature more than in many other settings. But, and this is the real point, the challenge of identifying one or more such adults for every young person in our care is one of the primary tasks of any intervention. It may be over time that a relationship in the child’s family can be healed, that one of the extended family, such as a grandparent who has this commitment can be traced. But if not we must set in train the process of identifying someone. We are not looking for a substitute parent, but what Bob Holman has wisely termed a “resourceful friend”.

I have known neighbours, teachers, peer group friends, members of a church or faith group, residential carers, foster carers and residential workers fulfil this role. The young person will, of course, be encouraged and supported to be an active agent in this whole process.
It’s a tall order, and some shy away from it. But if we do, we risk skating around a great hole in a young person’s life. Some may say that the systems simply don’t exist to do this. But that is no reason for continuing with the status quo. The title of this paper indicates the fundamental or radical nature of the challenge that faces those daring enough to allow the child’s needs to shape our tasks and policies. In most settings it may well be that it is the key worker who is charged with this task of seeking out and identifying the person who comes to see and know the young person as deeply significant in their life.

3 Boundaries
I am conscious that the first two needs/gifts are so demanding and challenging that we may be tempted to despair of ever seeing them met for many children. If so, the next three may be those that seem that much more practical and relevant to your context and work.

In thinking of boundaries I include the physical, relational, moral and emotional. Related words might be routines, patterns of life, rules, agreements, meaning and values. It does not need me to tell you that all the young people that we are seeking to help have in one way or another suffered from inconsistent, unpredictable, brittle, fragile, unreliable boundaries. Some have experienced life and relationships that verge on the chaotic. Whatever our definition of abuse it will at some point involve the transgression or absence of appropriate boundaries.

Put the other way around, for a child to develop and flourish with a sense of self-worth that enables the giving and receiving of love, firm and consistent boundaries are essential. This will include appropriate privacy of personal space, a predictable family or home life, daily and weekly patterns, moral guidance, the discipline of learning frameworks, protection from harmful forces and situations, and the freedom to take risks and to explore.

It is here that residential care has an obvious and tangible contribution to make to a child’s life. It should be consistent and predictable, alert to the need for personal and group boundaries to be negotiated and agreed. In the best settings there will be agreement among the carers at a deep level about the philosophy and principles underpinning the life and practice of the community. And the best way of establishing and maintaining such boundaries is, of course, by living them. “Lived boundaries” are a way of linking external rules to “habits of the heart”. Relationships between the carers and within the employing body are critical here, as are those between professionals and professions. Recruitment, induction, rotas and handovers are points at which consistent boundaries must be meticulously maintained or they will be undermined.

In British child care the peer group is usually seen as a threat or risk to the welfare of the individual young person, and one can understand why that is. But properly understood and with a good grasp of group dynamics the group itself can be a creative factor in the establishing and internalisation of boundaries. The place and its environment are important, as well as the relationship with local communities both neighbourhood and interest based.

4 Community
This leads very naturally to the fourth need: the desire and longing of the individual for relationships beyond family and the one-to-one. There is in all of us a deep desire to join and belong to groups. You might say that we are not created to be alone or to be content with each of us forming a human island “entire of itself”. There is a vast array of interlocking human groups and communities, with every sort of focus, emphasis, worldview and way of life. These include the local neighbourhood, schools, peer groups and gangs, teams, churches and faith groups, ethnic communities and so on.

Sadly, the young people we are alongside have often had unfortunate or even destructive experiences in one or more of these groups. Some may have suffered so much in their nuclear family that they are fearful of any belonging or attachment that requires give and take, mutual respect and trust. And that is where the residential setting can model relationships and groups, as well as begin the process of supporting the young people as they engage, however tentatively or clumsily, with other groups.

It is important for each residential setting to reflect on the nature of the community as a whole, and not to be content with assuming that if every individual placement plan is implemented the whole group will therefore fall into place. Nothing could be further from the truth! It is equally important that the residential unit has healthy relationships with a range of local groups so that it can help with introducing children to them.

At Mill Grove for over fifty years we have had a badminton club on Friday evenings. From the start it has comprised those of us who live at Mill Grove as well as others from the local neighbourhood, churches and schools. It’s not something we’ve thought very hard about and I don’t ever recall mentioning it in my writing or lectures, but I am now beginning to realise that it has been a unique resource in the lives of many children, introducing them to other people, to the ways a club and committee are run, to the acceptance of rules and responsibilities. Several of the young people who have been members of this club have learned through it attitudes and behaviour that are vital for social awareness and development, and it is hard to imagine where else they would have found the combination of acceptance and stability, safety and friendliness of this club.

And as I write this I realise, perhaps for the first time, how many groups have grown up in the past century in and through Mill Grove that have provided this bridge between our residential community and the wider world.

5 Creativity
Last but not least is a need and gift that is often neglected in well meaning plans and policies.
You may have noticed that I have not included a section under the heading of education or learning. This is because I see the whole of life as a learning process and the environment in which we all find ourselves as a learning environment. It is also because I have come to see that play, formal and informal, is at the core of human development. It is the very best way for a child or young person to learn. (I would be happy to argue that it is also how the very best science, art, and teamwork is achieved, but that is for another day!)

Everyone of us is born with the desire to make, to shape, to influence, to imagine, to create, to dance: to interact with our social and physical environment nor just by kicking it or accepting it, but in a meaningful, instrumental and enjoyable way. This insight has helped me to see that some of the greatest anger, frustration and violence in young people is a demonstration of this longing turned in on itself or against other people and things. Graffiti are for me a sign of hope, however tiresome!

Every aspect of life from cooking and home-making, to games, gardening, lovemaking, travel, school and work, is full of potential for creativity. I began to see this for the first time in a very poor farm in rural Switzerland: life for the children was basic and hard, especially in the winters, but they told me that they made everything, including milking the cows and cutting wood, into games.

We have tried at Mill Grove, with ups and downs and variable success, to create an environment that encourages creative engagement. One of the greatest challenges is dealing with the negative effects of television, Gameboys and the armchair culture epitomised by Homer Simpson. In London and North Wales we have been blessed with either plenty of land of our own or plenty of countryside to explore, but it is not about land or facilities so much as an attitude to life that sees how vital play and playfulness is in human development. This means that every mealtime (especially parties), household tasks and chores, shopping, and meetings can always be times of lightness, fun and enjoyment. I don’t want to paint a false or sentimentalised picture, but I have seen it happen in all sorts of settings.

Summary

So there you have, very briefly, the five needs or gifts that constitute the essence of the child and the heart of growth and development. I hope you can see how they provide a starting point or framework for thinking and discussion that is focussed on the needs of the child, and relevant to the settings in which we operate.

But there is a special insight with which I close. When using this model in different cultures and parts of the world I often use my five fingers to represent each of the five points. It’s a simple way of checking with the listeners and the interpreter that we are synchronised! But it also means that I have one hand spare to represent something else: and that is you and me.

We, that is, the carers or residential social workers, are human beings with the same needs and gifts as the young people. And this model provides us with a way of recognising and focussing on our own needs. If these needs are not addressed in our own lives than we may well be relating to children at their expense, unconsciously or consciously meeting our own needs rather than theirs (whatever we may say in our records and plans). The residential unit may be a setting in which the needs of the carers predominate over the needs of the young people. Our employing bodies need to take this to heart: so do the legislators!

But where there is a healthy acceptance and recognition of needs and gifts of both the young people and the carers, there is the possibility that the capacity to love and receive love is being nurtured and created. That is where the real dance is. For our setting is not a place where one group does something to or for the other group, but a place where our mutual humanity is recognised, whether needs or gifts. It is not a self-contained world but a place where we interact for a time, contributing in the process to each other’s well-being. And often it may not be until many years later that we really understand the significance of what was happening, both for those for whom we care, and ourselves.