In Residence

A brief word about the setting in which I live and care for children and young people before getting on with the substance of the column. Mill Grove is the name of the place where my family has lived for four generations. Since 1899 it has been a family home where children unable to live with their own parents have been welcomed. We recently celebrated our centenary and reckoned that over 1,000 children have lived with us during that time. Seen as an ordinary extended family there isn't much difficulty understanding what goes on. We live as a big foster family. Placing Mill Grove in the categories currently on offer in the formal social care system in Britain is more difficult. We are a family, a voluntary home as defined by The Children Act 1989, a residential community with six distinct family groups within the whole, a family centre, a family support service, a nursery school, a school for children with cerebral palsy, a Christian charity, and a centre for the local neighbourhood. Just try registering and inspecting that! What's happened is that we have stayed in the same area for a century with a commitment to help children and families in need. If you stick around long enough with that objective, the rest follows without anyone having to plan it!

So as I write the first of these regular columns I'm sitting looking out on our garden, from the room used by my grandparents, with chickens to my left, and the vast intersection between major roads and motorways straight ahead. We're on the East side of London, within easy reach of the centre of the great city in one direction, or Epping Forest, in the other. The children and young people are at school, college and work. I'm the husband of Ruth and we have four children of our own. Ruth is nearby, our youngest is at school and the other three have flown the nest. My background is in social work, community development, sociology, literature and theology. I hope that helps to set the scene. Yesterday evening I had a long chat with a colleague who has just completed a masters' dissertation on residential child care in India. He's networking Christian initiatives among children in need in South Asia, and I'm doing research in Western India so we've quite a lot in common. Russell House Publications are distributers of specialist books aimed at those employed in or with an interest in the care and education of children. Click below to see their extensive range of publications

The main focus of our conversation was a debate about how far western child care theory, values and policies could be applied to Indian contexts without ceasing to be irrelevant or even counter-productive. What struck me again was how many of our very fundamental assumptions simply won't do as they stand. Books like Aliens and Alienists (a textbook on cross-cultural psychiatry) recognise this as a major practical as well as a theoretical issue. Misdiagnoses are rife according to the authors. So what sort of issues arise in child care? Basic concepts like good-enough parenting, attachment-theory, child protection, what we mean by "individual" and "group", group care and the like are all problematical. If a family or community is oppressed by acute poverty and malnutrition, for example, might a good parent place a child in "group care" where there is some hope of development and even education? Where all the adults in a family have died of, say, AIDS, and there are eight young cousins left how do we conceptualise their relationships in terms of attachment theory and how do we define their group? Can we assume we mean the same thing by "individual development" in a society where arranged marriages are the norm? You get the gist of the issue from these real-life stories. When I tried to introduce some of the principles of the Children Act 1989 to a conference in India (of practitioners, I should add), I quickly realised the difficulty. At first I thought it was a matter of technical terminology, but now I see that there are huge social and paradigmatic differences. I recall the audience challenging me on the notion of "child-centred" practice. "Surely you mean, child-focussed?", they commented. In case you hadn't considered the difference, I invite you to see the very contrasting worlds the terms reflect. But the process of engagement with another culture and tradition does not leave the original concepts undisturbed. The gaze is returned on western ideas and ideologies. We must leave that line of thinking for subsequent columns, but let me leave you with the thought that current professional thinking cannot accept Mill Grove as a family although manifestly that is one of the things it is. Could it possibly be that even concepts as basic as "family" or parenting need re-casting? That really would set a bomb under contemporary British policy and practice in child care! For centuries "family" has been the touchstone of the whole process. Every alternative should be as good as a good-enough family? Which type of family, or which example, did we have in mind? Western or Eastern? Extended or nuclear? Look at the way SOS Children's Villages are seen in different parts of the world and the underlying values quickly become clear. In the UK they have tended to be seen as inherently inferior to family models. Have we paused to think why? Keith J. White.

Nothing to do with Child Care

He begins to notice that the people are paying more attention to the lion in the cage next to his.  Not wanting to lose the attention of his audience, he climbs to the top of his cage, crawls across a partition, and dangles from the top to the lion's cage. Of course, this makes the lion furious, but the crowd loves it. At the end of the day the zoo keeper comes and gives the mime artist a raise for being as good an attraction as the gorilla. Well, this goes on for some time, the mime artist keeps taunting the lion, the crowds grow larger, and his salary keeps going up. Then one terrible day when he is dangling over the furious lion he slips and falls. The mime artist is terrified. The lion gathers itself and prepares to pounce. The mime artist is so scared that he begins to run round and round the cage with the lion close behind. Finally, the mime artist starts screaming and yelling, "Help, Help me!", but the lion is quick and pounces. The mime artist soon finds himself flat on his back looking up at the angry lion and the lion says, "Shut up you idiot! Do you want to get us both fired?"

One day an out of work mime artist is visiting the zoo and attempts to earn some money as a street performer. Unfortunately, as soon as he starts to draw a crowd, a zoo keeper grabs him and drags him into his office. The zoo keeper explains to the mime artist that the zoo's most popular attraction, a gorilla, has died suddenly and the keeper fears that attendance at the zoo will fall off. He offers the mime artist a job to dress up as the gorilla until they can get another one. The mime artist accepts. So, the next morning the mime artist puts on the gorilla suit and enters the cage before crowd comes. He discovers that it's a great job. He can sleep all he wants, play and make fun of people and he draws bigger crowds than he ever did as a mime artist. However, eventually the crowds tire of him and he tires of just swinging on tyres.