residential care
In addition to work in China, collaborations with Cornell University’s Residential Child Care Project and network of CARE Program Model Providers, we have adapted the Simple Interactions approach to residential care settings for youth. Field work in residential care includes partnerships with St. Mary’s School for the Deaf in Buffalo, New York and Oak Hill Boys Ranch in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Recent field work, observing youth staff at Oak Hill Boys Ranch, led the SI team to rethink the notion that daily interactions must amount to an enduring attachment in order to have meaningful impact on development. In these settings, the adult-child human relationships are not equivalent to the standard parent-child attachment relationships since the interactions are typically infrequent (compared with parent-child norms) and take place in “spurts”, from a few seconds to half an hour for Oak Hill staff. The overall duration of the relationships is highly variable and does not always have predictable starting and ending points. Adult-child relationships in such settings cannot be considered to be equivalent to what we traditionally describe as “attachment relationship” between stable caregivers and children. However, there are striking similarities in the underlying features of daily interactions in these more temporal relationships and their more enduring counterparts. There are numerous ways to examine such similarities, whether via the lens of the dimensions of Simple Interactions (connection, reciprocity, inclusion, and opportunity to grow), or overarching concepts like psychological safety, sense of belonging, mattering (“to be seen”, “to be heard”). From such observations and reflections, it occurred to us that everyday moments and interactions could be sufficient to have positive impact without necessarily having to result in enduring attachment relationships. Simple Interactions can be helpful in the “here and now”, long before (or on the way towards) the formation of a longer, more stable relationship. Even if the circumstances do not allow the formation or persistence of an eventual longer-term relationship, the impact still matters.