I wonder if the field of Child and Youth Care is falling for the sultry deception that if something looks good, it must be good. I’m going to use the next few paragraphs of this blog to make some comparisons between North American food philosophy and CYC relational practice trends. I’m going to compare our overfed and undernourished bodies to our overfed and undernourished CYC relationships. Physically we have traded nutrients for taste, allowed ourselves to call unhealthy food treats, and have misguided concepts of what is acceptable as comfort foods.
Dr. Alejandro Junger, in the documentary Hungry for Change, states: “We are not eating food anymore, we are eating food- like products, and they are adorned, they are made to look better and smell better so that people are attracted to them.” Our North American society has accepted the lie that food that looks good is healthy. We have capitulated to an industry whose sole motivator is profit and the consequence is our health. In our hunter/gatherer days, humans had diets that consisted of high nutrient, low calorie food. With diets high in protein and vegetables and low in carbohydrates, humans were lean and strong. We were active and spent nearly our whole days outside. Our new lifestyle consists mostly of empty nutrient, high carbohydrate diets (breads, pasta, and starchy snacks) and is combined with indoor, sedentary lifestyles where we sit to work and sit to relax. This has led to a well-documented obesity crisis in Westernized countries. We have physical bodies that are overfed and yet we are starving on a cellular level.
In our house, we have begun to change our vernacular. We once referred to food that was sweet to the palate but not nourishing to the body as a ‘treat.’ We could have an ice cream treat before bed or grab a chocolate bar at the convenience store for a ‘treat.’ It became a sort of break from eating nourishing food and led to a belief that we needed the respite. We started calling these snacks ‘junk food.’ ‘Treats’ became things like blueberries or healthy smoothies and fun physical activities like bike rides or trail walks in nature. Treats started to encourage and facilitate our creativity and helped us be healthy instead of just feeling good for a short time. While ‘junk food’ in the evening still sounded appealing to our taste buds, it lost some luster when referred to as ‘junk.’ It became a sort of naming a thing for what it was rather than how it made us temporarily feel. It was an important shift.
Another shift that is needed is around the idea of comfort food. Ordinarily, when people have a rough break-up, or face some bitter disappointment, they find solace in ‘comfort foods’ like ice cream, doughnuts, chips, and pop while watching a mind-numbing television show. It becomes a type of permission to indulge in nutrient empty food and revolt from healthy discretion. This comfort strategy works momentarily as these sugar laden foods hit peoples blood stream and a burst of energy is released like a New Years fireworks show. It works, that is, until the sugar wears off. What follows is a demoralizing crash that leaves the body starving of nutrients and altogether lacking satiation. This seems hardly comforting at all, yet highly intelligent people continue to follow these practices and the question is: why? We continue to refuse our body what it craves and simply bend to the will of our palate. If the only things I eat are things that taste sweet on my tongue, I am making a colossal mistake, one that will have physical ramifications in the future. Obesity, then, is not the problem; it is simply indicative of the deeply rooted struggle of stress, anxiety, and pain. Comfort food habits are trying to fill an emotional void with food and this strategy cannot possibly succeed.
So what do diet and CYC have in common? If an apple must be chemically altered to be blemish free so that I will buy it in a grocery store, what nutritional value is lost in the chemical process? The same can be said of CYC, if we have altered the meaning of words like relationship, caring, and trust when interacting with youth in practice, we have bastardized the meaning of the words and left them empty of life-giving power. What if these have become CYC’s proverbial doughnuts?
CYC uses the phrase ‘relational practice’ as a sacred set of words clutched to our collective bosom. But what do we mean by it? Not long after uttering our revered phrase we talk about putting on a professional face, ensure we are adequately protected by our policy and procedure manual, and enlist a set of child development frameworks from which to establish the context for our relationships with youth and families. This looks like no other meaningful relationship that I have ever been involved in. As a field we have deftly side stepped this discomfort by talking about the myriad of relationships that define us. We think of it as a spectrum with a relationship defined by a confrontational meeting like receiving a traffic ticket from a surly police officer, to the intimate exchanges we have with our lovers that nourish the very fibers of our souls. We solve it by placing CYC relationships with clients somewhere on the spectrum under the heading of therapeutic relationships. This absolves us of the need for reciprocity, tenderness, and vulnerability. After all, we are the ‘professionals.’ And just like that, a power imbalance is established that once again leaves vulnerable and embroiled spirits feeling incapable and enervated. If we are only establishing these roles to purport our importance, we do so on the backs of astonishingly beautiful people who have been told they are worthless their whole lives. We have simply confirmed what they had previously begun to believe.
Every precious youth, family, and child that I have ever encountered in my practice has shared a common theme: they are all starving on a physical and spiritual level for meaningful relationships. I have disappointed many of them with ‘comfort food’ practice rather than the nutrient rich, healthy substance that they crave. The light of hope, so easily extinguished from eyes that revealed the desperateness of the soul, can yet be rekindled but it requires CYC practitioners to rethink the use of our language and subsequent practice. We are not divided into categories of whole and broken people, we are all broken people travelling together though life and this humility of spirit will begin to shift our focus away from saving to sojourning. The only thing we stand to lose is ego, recognition, and acknowledgment.
It is much easier to take a critical stand than it is to offer an operational suggestion and often I am hesitant to do so as it risks coming off as trite and simplistic. Nonetheless, I will attempt to name the key ingredients that are vital to restoring health to relationships within CYC practice. Behind every action we do and word we say there is a dynamic tension between a selfish need we are fulfilling and an altruistic virtue we aspire to. It is more important to simply embrace this concept through critical self-examination rather than try to minimize selfishness and risk becoming sanctimonious.
Three concepts that are necessary for transformational relational change are: love, listening, and leadership (alliteration unintentional but potentially helpful for retention of the concepts).
The concept of love hints at unmerited recognition of the astonishing beauty and preciousness of the intrinsic value of people. What is lost is meritorious reciprocity and acceptance through recognizable familiarity. Of celebratory worth is difference, diversity, and a sense of wonder of the vastly socially complex wonder of a human being. Love sees worth and potential and carries an inherent blindness to socially constructed norms of lack or want.
Listening is one of the foundational building blocks of love. To truly listen is to recognize and relinquish preconceived notions or expectations. Listening sees a presenting behaviour, forgives it, and hears the muffled cry of the soul underneath it. It hears the moans of the spirit and recognizes that the faltering words of the lips are infinitely incapable of expressions that are deep and profound. People who can listen constantly articulate their own incapacity to truly hear because they recognize that they are hearing everything through a shrouded lens of their own minute experience. They continually struggle to push through their own fog to grasp a tiny piece of clarification that is not tainted by their own narrow history while admitting that the chances are small. It is in these moments of unpretentious humility that they instead share a new experience created in space that is neither solely the listener nor the speaker but one of mutual creation.
Finally there is the concept of leadership. In a field rife with contested dialogue and complex theory, I consider leadership to comprised of a combination of three elements: influence, doing what needs to be done without being asked or told, and stewardship of the human spirit. If each of these three pillars of leadership are firmly planted in love and listening, there is an opportunity to lead from an altruistically noble and humble place. There is, of course, much more to be said on all three of these topics and my briefest of descriptions can only hope to inspire you to delve further into the concepts alluded to.
If Child and Youth Care’s principles can be shifted to reject the need for junk food practice and can be replaced with the richness of love, listening, and leadership, there may be hope for restoring the concept of ‘relational’ back into relational practice.
PS. I watched the documentary ‘Hungry for Change’ on Netflix but I’m sure it is available on ITunes and other rental platforms. However, if you only are interested in the documentary about food after reading this blog post then I have failed to inspire you to consider how this is analogous to the amazing field of CYC, and that will be a great tragedy! I hope not, I hope you are truly hungry for change.
Dr. Alejandro Junger, in the documentary Hungry for Change, states: “We are not eating food anymore, we are eating food- like products, and they are adorned, they are made to look better and smell better so that people are attracted to them.” Our North American society has accepted the lie that food that looks good is healthy. We have capitulated to an industry whose sole motivator is profit and the consequence is our health. In our hunter/gatherer days, humans had diets that consisted of high nutrient, low calorie food. With diets high in protein and vegetables and low in carbohydrates, humans were lean and strong. We were active and spent nearly our whole days outside. Our new lifestyle consists mostly of empty nutrient, high carbohydrate diets (breads, pasta, and starchy snacks) and is combined with indoor, sedentary lifestyles where we sit to work and sit to relax. This has led to a well-documented obesity crisis in Westernized countries. We have physical bodies that are overfed and yet we are starving on a cellular level.
In our house, we have begun to change our vernacular. We once referred to food that was sweet to the palate but not nourishing to the body as a ‘treat.’ We could have an ice cream treat before bed or grab a chocolate bar at the convenience store for a ‘treat.’ It became a sort of break from eating nourishing food and led to a belief that we needed the respite. We started calling these snacks ‘junk food.’ ‘Treats’ became things like blueberries or healthy smoothies and fun physical activities like bike rides or trail walks in nature. Treats started to encourage and facilitate our creativity and helped us be healthy instead of just feeling good for a short time. While ‘junk food’ in the evening still sounded appealing to our taste buds, it lost some luster when referred to as ‘junk.’ It became a sort of naming a thing for what it was rather than how it made us temporarily feel. It was an important shift.
Another shift that is needed is around the idea of comfort food. Ordinarily, when people have a rough break-up, or face some bitter disappointment, they find solace in ‘comfort foods’ like ice cream, doughnuts, chips, and pop while watching a mind-numbing television show. It becomes a type of permission to indulge in nutrient empty food and revolt from healthy discretion. This comfort strategy works momentarily as these sugar laden foods hit peoples blood stream and a burst of energy is released like a New Years fireworks show. It works, that is, until the sugar wears off. What follows is a demoralizing crash that leaves the body starving of nutrients and altogether lacking satiation. This seems hardly comforting at all, yet highly intelligent people continue to follow these practices and the question is: why? We continue to refuse our body what it craves and simply bend to the will of our palate. If the only things I eat are things that taste sweet on my tongue, I am making a colossal mistake, one that will have physical ramifications in the future. Obesity, then, is not the problem; it is simply indicative of the deeply rooted struggle of stress, anxiety, and pain. Comfort food habits are trying to fill an emotional void with food and this strategy cannot possibly succeed.
So what do diet and CYC have in common? If an apple must be chemically altered to be blemish free so that I will buy it in a grocery store, what nutritional value is lost in the chemical process? The same can be said of CYC, if we have altered the meaning of words like relationship, caring, and trust when interacting with youth in practice, we have bastardized the meaning of the words and left them empty of life-giving power. What if these have become CYC’s proverbial doughnuts?
CYC uses the phrase ‘relational practice’ as a sacred set of words clutched to our collective bosom. But what do we mean by it? Not long after uttering our revered phrase we talk about putting on a professional face, ensure we are adequately protected by our policy and procedure manual, and enlist a set of child development frameworks from which to establish the context for our relationships with youth and families. This looks like no other meaningful relationship that I have ever been involved in. As a field we have deftly side stepped this discomfort by talking about the myriad of relationships that define us. We think of it as a spectrum with a relationship defined by a confrontational meeting like receiving a traffic ticket from a surly police officer, to the intimate exchanges we have with our lovers that nourish the very fibers of our souls. We solve it by placing CYC relationships with clients somewhere on the spectrum under the heading of therapeutic relationships. This absolves us of the need for reciprocity, tenderness, and vulnerability. After all, we are the ‘professionals.’ And just like that, a power imbalance is established that once again leaves vulnerable and embroiled spirits feeling incapable and enervated. If we are only establishing these roles to purport our importance, we do so on the backs of astonishingly beautiful people who have been told they are worthless their whole lives. We have simply confirmed what they had previously begun to believe.
Every precious youth, family, and child that I have ever encountered in my practice has shared a common theme: they are all starving on a physical and spiritual level for meaningful relationships. I have disappointed many of them with ‘comfort food’ practice rather than the nutrient rich, healthy substance that they crave. The light of hope, so easily extinguished from eyes that revealed the desperateness of the soul, can yet be rekindled but it requires CYC practitioners to rethink the use of our language and subsequent practice. We are not divided into categories of whole and broken people, we are all broken people travelling together though life and this humility of spirit will begin to shift our focus away from saving to sojourning. The only thing we stand to lose is ego, recognition, and acknowledgment.
It is much easier to take a critical stand than it is to offer an operational suggestion and often I am hesitant to do so as it risks coming off as trite and simplistic. Nonetheless, I will attempt to name the key ingredients that are vital to restoring health to relationships within CYC practice. Behind every action we do and word we say there is a dynamic tension between a selfish need we are fulfilling and an altruistic virtue we aspire to. It is more important to simply embrace this concept through critical self-examination rather than try to minimize selfishness and risk becoming sanctimonious.
Three concepts that are necessary for transformational relational change are: love, listening, and leadership (alliteration unintentional but potentially helpful for retention of the concepts).
The concept of love hints at unmerited recognition of the astonishing beauty and preciousness of the intrinsic value of people. What is lost is meritorious reciprocity and acceptance through recognizable familiarity. Of celebratory worth is difference, diversity, and a sense of wonder of the vastly socially complex wonder of a human being. Love sees worth and potential and carries an inherent blindness to socially constructed norms of lack or want.
Listening is one of the foundational building blocks of love. To truly listen is to recognize and relinquish preconceived notions or expectations. Listening sees a presenting behaviour, forgives it, and hears the muffled cry of the soul underneath it. It hears the moans of the spirit and recognizes that the faltering words of the lips are infinitely incapable of expressions that are deep and profound. People who can listen constantly articulate their own incapacity to truly hear because they recognize that they are hearing everything through a shrouded lens of their own minute experience. They continually struggle to push through their own fog to grasp a tiny piece of clarification that is not tainted by their own narrow history while admitting that the chances are small. It is in these moments of unpretentious humility that they instead share a new experience created in space that is neither solely the listener nor the speaker but one of mutual creation.
Finally there is the concept of leadership. In a field rife with contested dialogue and complex theory, I consider leadership to comprised of a combination of three elements: influence, doing what needs to be done without being asked or told, and stewardship of the human spirit. If each of these three pillars of leadership are firmly planted in love and listening, there is an opportunity to lead from an altruistically noble and humble place. There is, of course, much more to be said on all three of these topics and my briefest of descriptions can only hope to inspire you to delve further into the concepts alluded to.
If Child and Youth Care’s principles can be shifted to reject the need for junk food practice and can be replaced with the richness of love, listening, and leadership, there may be hope for restoring the concept of ‘relational’ back into relational practice.
PS. I watched the documentary ‘Hungry for Change’ on Netflix but I’m sure it is available on ITunes and other rental platforms. However, if you only are interested in the documentary about food after reading this blog post then I have failed to inspire you to consider how this is analogous to the amazing field of CYC, and that will be a great tragedy! I hope not, I hope you are truly hungry for change.