THE LIVE-IN...LIVE-OUT DEBATE......CHILD AND YOUTH CARE IN SOUTH AFRICA.

From 1982 to 1996 as a child and youth care worker and from then to 2006 as a clergy person I lived on the premises of the workplace. We used to say "Living above the cafe". It was part of the package.  The contract was "the accommodation goes with the job. The job goes with the accommodation."..Leave the one, you leave the other. The benefit of this to the employer started as a creeping realisation. Then in the child and youth care setting exploded into dispute. Outcome?... Living -out .was a non-negotiable.

It wasn't only the well being of me and my family that raised the debate but, for me, it came also the possibility that the best interests of the child were not served by being contracted live-ins.

Lets start with the so-called "staff benefit.'Firstly the financial implications. It looks very attractive at first. But when accommodation is part of the packaged deal, the cash portion of the child and youth care worker/manager/director's monthly income is considerably reduced....small. Because the accommodation and meals are calculated to have "value" This is often calculated at least roughly close to the going cost of renting similar accommodation in the market place. The big staff benefit debate for me, started when the South African Revenue Service ( SARS) taxed me on a calculated then-called, "value" to me. The cash portion of my package took yet another knock.

Having a reduced cash salary has many disadvantages for a child and youth care practitioner. The pension contribution was calculated as a percentage of the cash portion. It means, and here I talk from very real, present day financial struggles. It's obvious, the smaller the contribution the smaller the on retirement pension.

One of the compensating ideas in the mind of live-in staff and certainly in the church was the driving motivation to acquire your own residence , initially to rent and then to have somewhere to go if the wheels came off the child and youth care job. And where do you go when you are on leave? I saw some child and youth care workers lock themselves in their flatlets when obliged to take leave. So you explore the surrounding marketplace only to find that the bank will calculate the bond amount granted based on the cash portion of your income. For my 5 years in East London, as plan B, I bought a caravan. 

It was when the tax thing, the bond thing and the pension thing hit home that I realised the other, further benefits to the employer.

When budgeting, most organisations have to calculate what the call "cost to company" If the accommodation has been paid for as building costs, this can be kept quite low especially if meals are provided from the central kitchen. Same for everyone, no overtime costs, no "on call costs". I started to see my cash component as something more like a retainer than a salary. A type of forced overtime.

Now the non-financial issues. A cost to staff is seen to be a reduced experience of "normalisation". At a discernment interview I was put on my backfoot by the question "Why have you spent most of your life in institutions?" I tried to defend myself but found it hard to do. I tried calling it "community living", "living in community","group communal living". The discernment interviewer was unimpressed.  The suggestion was that I had become reliant on institutional life. At very worst, a risk of institionalisation. I did want a life that was normal. For me and my family, to live in my own house, socialise in the broader world, cook my own choice of food my way 

The live-in idea goes a long way back. There is a sneaky possibility that the Bowlby Attachment Theory may have influenced the child care models of care. You know. Children develop multiple connectedness by having made an attachment to one essential primary figure. He suggested,....the mother. So we had "housemothers" live-in alternative mothers, alternative parenting. Rutter 1972 however reassessed the maternal deprivation theory. He found that children and young person's connecting behaviours with others in the ever widening social spectrum will happen even if there are 5 and more primary connection figures. So, the live-out, shift system had for itself a theoretical basis to happen.

Yet the question is pervasive. Do children and young people get benefit in their best interests by having live-in child and youth care workers 24/7?  I know of no published research on this. Maybe there is, but I've not seen it. I have to rely on experience to attempt some kind of assessment of the positives of live-in child and youth care practitioners for children and young people in shorter term residential programmes. I must say that in the latter years when there were both live-in and live-out staff there was always tension between the two. Can't help but wonder why.

There was a time with live-in staff only when I called it "Alice in Wonderland". It happened as a result of a particular incident involving one boy, I applied a  perfectly logical consequence firmly based on an outcome as would be in the real world.Then came the delegations. "We don't do it like that here". Here we just ..........". And the in-here at that time was corporal punishment or transfer. Suddenly it became apparent that there was an out-there and an "in- here".

I wonder if this helps explain something of that tension referred to.

The live-outs always suggested that the live-ins were somehow protected from the real out-there and created an in-here culture, Put bluntly they said they were out of touch. shielded and to some extent protected. Hmmm a formula for tension.

The live-in staff said that shift staff know nothing of the tiredness, the fatigue of the reality of child and youth care and so, they were shielded, protected.

Live-out staff said they brought into the residential lifespace of children and young people, a richness that comes from living shoulder to shoulder exposed to the noise and life, colour, buzz of the township, city, neighbourhood, They said that they and the young people in care benefited from that. That the rub-off effect of living out contributed to help young people to be more coping and more appropriate.....not "Alice in Wonderland " kids.

So was the debate. So I see and hear is yet the debate.

Bring on the research.!!!!