What did Residential Youth Care work teach us about Simple Interactions?
By: Junlei Li
Simple relational moments of transition at the residential youth care campus. Photos blurred in compliance with privacy regulations.
It was well over a decade ago that our colleagues and friends at the Residential Child Care Project at Cornell University reached out to discuss the 2012 “Developmental Relationships as the Active Ingredient” paper. Over the years, we have found kindred spirits in each other’s work and numerous concrete connections. We traveled three years in a row to Edmonton, Canada to explore what “simple interactions” looked like in the Oak Hill Ranch youth care program with our colleagues and youth social work professionals Anton Smith, Stacey Charchuk, and Sam Mammen. It not only added one more developmental context to our exploration of human relationships, but it also taught us important lessons that we did not learn clearly elsewhere.
This past summer, all these streams of collaboration converged in Brisbane, Australia, as I joined the “Building Caring Communities” conference pulled together by Martha and her Australian residential care colleagues. Like the United States and Canada, Australia has its own dark history of using residential facilities and child welfare laws to remove indigenous children from their families and communities. Today, the voices of indigenous leaders are prominent in the child welfare sector. At the conference, our first keynote was an indigenous woman and advocate named Brenda Matthews, the focal point of the documentary “The Last Daughter”, which documented her history of being removed first from her indigenous family, and then from her adoptive white family (who did not know about the first removal), and eventually going through a long journey to find and love both of her families. While she spoke precisely and movingly about the historical wrongs and ignorances, she spoke about hope most of all- for herself, and for all the children and families involved then and now in the child welfare system. She was followed by a panel of youth who were either recently in care arrangements or “graduated” from care systems, who received a standing ovation from the audience for their candor, humor, and hard-earned wisdom. Each of them spoke about various aspects of the broken system and the importance of connections with other human beings who supported them. This work was much bigger and deeper than “Simple Interactions” – it weaves together culture, history, race, and law. Yet, the incredibly human experiences of those who survived these systems and rose to make them better embodied a true community-supported resilience. Reflecting on losing, finding, and loving both of her families, Brenda Matthews shared a wish and a trust for all of us at the conference: “Our hearts can grow big enough to hold the hurt, the healing, and the hope.”
What a powerful vision, not just for child welfare work, but for the world in which human beings continue to struggle to “grow our hearts” in that way. Simple Interactions shares in the mission of just this kind of growing, one small moment at a time.
- How do you build relationships with young people who have grown to distrust relationships with adults based on their past experiences of trauma and abuse? (... through simple, ordinary interactions even in residential care.)
- How do you weave together relationships with not just one primary trusted adult, but multiple adults who come across the lives of these young people in residential care? (... strive for “congruence”, not “sameness”, in multiple adults’ interactions with youth)
- How can you remain authentic to yourself, and still meet young people where they are to match their developmental needs? (... two words: “smell real.”)
This past summer, all these streams of collaboration converged in Brisbane, Australia, as I joined the “Building Caring Communities” conference pulled together by Martha and her Australian residential care colleagues. Like the United States and Canada, Australia has its own dark history of using residential facilities and child welfare laws to remove indigenous children from their families and communities. Today, the voices of indigenous leaders are prominent in the child welfare sector. At the conference, our first keynote was an indigenous woman and advocate named Brenda Matthews, the focal point of the documentary “The Last Daughter”, which documented her history of being removed first from her indigenous family, and then from her adoptive white family (who did not know about the first removal), and eventually going through a long journey to find and love both of her families. While she spoke precisely and movingly about the historical wrongs and ignorances, she spoke about hope most of all- for herself, and for all the children and families involved then and now in the child welfare system. She was followed by a panel of youth who were either recently in care arrangements or “graduated” from care systems, who received a standing ovation from the audience for their candor, humor, and hard-earned wisdom. Each of them spoke about various aspects of the broken system and the importance of connections with other human beings who supported them. This work was much bigger and deeper than “Simple Interactions” – it weaves together culture, history, race, and law. Yet, the incredibly human experiences of those who survived these systems and rose to make them better embodied a true community-supported resilience. Reflecting on losing, finding, and loving both of her families, Brenda Matthews shared a wish and a trust for all of us at the conference: “Our hearts can grow big enough to hold the hurt, the healing, and the hope.”
What a powerful vision, not just for child welfare work, but for the world in which human beings continue to struggle to “grow our hearts” in that way. Simple Interactions shares in the mission of just this kind of growing, one small moment at a time.