DEAR YOGESHREE
The place where it all starts is your motivation. Your reason for starting this work in the first place. If your motivation isn't genuinely right then you can be sure that any hurt that you experience through being a child and youth care worker and working with hurting children, can be quite damaging to you personally. If your motivation is right, then you are more likely to stay in the profession through its sorrows and its joys.
The reality is that you CAN get hurt in this profession. Before you actually come into the reality of working with other peoples raw emotions and feelings no-one can really describe it to you. My mentor said to me before I came into the work . "I can't tell you what it is really like. You have to experience it yourself... all I can tell you is that it is not a Sunday School picnic.You don't spend your time just playing with children"
What I found was that my hurt came about when almost everything that I held dear to to me was challenged. My personal values, beliefs and ethics were challenged. Sometimes the children and their behaviour challenged my idea of what was right and important quite directly.......and at other times I found that there was a sort of insidious shift in what I held to be good when I first came into the work... I was part of a new "normality". I found myself defending and sympathetic to what would have caused me to be outraged before I came into the work. When our personally held values are challenged both by the young people in our care and often by the agency itself, then a lot of people leave .
I once had a social worker who left because she told her husband that there were kids in the home that were either into Satanism or practicing it secretly He told her to leave as she couldn't work in such a place.
So whether you stay or leave depends on your motivation for coming in, or your changed motivation once you are in.Some of us bounce back some drop out to nurse their wounds .. Your motivation decides whether you stay focused and effective.
So you have to do some soul searching before you come in. and be prepared to have to face who you really are and what you are about and what drives you.
It is difficult to pinpoint the motives that work for everyone in child and youth care work. A lot of people define them in sort of spiritual terms . Its not a job its a "calling" they say.
I think that you must at least "like " children and youth. You must will be working with some children and young people who make themselves un-loveable" as part of who they are. So you have to be driven to keep on liking them especially when they are at their very worst. You have to be driven to make connections and relationships with children who by their very 'now' nature try to test, avoid, challenge or distort those connections and relationships.
It seems to me that it all has to do with recognising that we all share a common humanity and that we are all part of the valley of tears together and that from the beginning you are motivated, want to be a fellow traveler on the journeys of these children in a very special way no matter what !
This then bring us to the second of the core motivations that seem to drive the people that really make a difference in the lives of children and young people. They want to be really good at what they do. It seems strange that the unselfishness of the first is paradoxically in bed with the second core motivation. They are driven to be the best. The value their practice , the knowledge and skill on which it is founded . They want to be professional and set high standards for themselves in their interactions and interventions. These child and youth care workers often are driven to be super self aware. and reflective so that they can know whats going on inside of themselves personally and yet be "in the shoes", the feelings and the world of the children they work with, They deal with their own feelings later, especially in supervision.
If I can refer to myself. I found that the values and ethics of the profession started to merge with the person I was becoming so that I found it sometimes difficult to distinguish between them. When the values and the beliefs of the profession became my values and beliefs, that is when I started to get hurt less personally.
And finally, another core motive appears to be a drive, a wish to model a new world in which people live in dignity and freedom, with a very strong desire for democracy and a climate of "AGAPE" love... these child and youth care workers stay in the profession because with the other motivations that they have, they appear to be motivated not just to be a facilitator, an agent for change in the lives of children and young people, but an agent and a facilitator who will somehow contribute to building a new world
Love
Barrie
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