At-Risk Children and Youth

Resiliency Explored

Niall McElwee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136450990
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Discover strategies to reinforce the strengths of the youngest members of society

What assistance can be provided to a disadvantaged youngster to help them bounce back to conquer challenges while growing up? At-Risk Children and Youth analyzes the results from accumulated research on the risk and resiliency of children and youth in Ireland. Niall McElwee shines a crucial spotlight on the challenges facing children, including poor literacy and numeracy skills, poverty, distrust, and other difficult issues. Practical strategies are presented to help disadvantaged children and youth to overcome societal and self-imposed barriers for improvement. A detailed review and assessment is provided of the efficacy of Ireland's Youth Encounter Projects. This important resource focuses on what works and what does not in youth services.

At-Risk Children and Youth closely examines at-risk factors and what it specifically means to be 'at-risk'. Going further beyond the standard risk factors usually considered such as drug use or dropping-out of school, this probing text explores the full range of factors and coping and healing mechanisms. The author challenges several of the views and beliefs about risk and resiliency generally held by many in child and youth services and in society. This book is extensively referenced and includes helpful figures tables to clearly present information.

Topics in At-Risk Children and Youth include:

• detailed breakdown of terms for risk behaviors and predictors of risk
• the issues of social class and social exclusion
• the impact of school difficulties on students, including truancy and poor academic standing
• building on student strengths
• the quality of the entirety of the school experience as a determination of success
• strategies for intervention
• a review of various literature on risk and resiliency
• a relational research model, including methodology and ethical issues
• description and functions of Youth Encounter Projects—and an assessment of their value
• at-risk youth perceptions of risk, in their own words
• results of risk studies over the past decade
• recommended changes in policies

At-Risk Children and Youth is a valuable addition to the libraries of educators, students, and child and youth service providers everywhere.

Chapter 1
Snowflake Children

SUMMARY. Taking account of the needs and views of children is problematic, particularly in Ireland where children have been "owned" by their parents and social policy has been directed at the family rather than the individual child. The 1980s and 1990s may be said to be the decades where abuse, in its many forms, reared its head and Irish society was forced to sit up and take notice of our distressed children and young people. In particular, we became interested in children and youth at risk. Child and youth care practice, as with other caring occupations, forms a vital element of both the voluntary and statutory social and health care provision systems in Ireland and is in constant evolution. Partly because of this new interest in risk, it came under a public lens of examination that tended to focus almost exclusively on the negative. Broadly at the same time, social scientists in Europe had become interested in what Beck labelled the "risk society" with parallels between both discussions.

My research for this book took place in the context ot Ireland emerging from a history of neglect towards vulnerable populations of at-risk children and youth. Moreover, there has been a breakdown in trust in expert systems at a time when "the public's knowledge has become radicalised and they have become experts of sorts" (Giddens, 1991, p. 3). The Irish public is no longer prepared to blindly trust in expert systems or past powerful organisations, such as the Catholic Church, and society has begun to think in whole terms. It is a tragic paradox that many public policy makers have lost confidence in their ability to provide for children and youth at-risk when scientific knowledge has never been more advanced and we should be more able to protect them. This deeply affects child and youth care, doi: 10.1300/J024v29n01_01 [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: l-800-HAWORTH. E-mail address: <[email protected]> Website: <http://www.HaworthPress.cam> © 2007 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved.]

KEYWORDS. Children and youth at risk, resiliency, child and youth care, Youth Encounter Projects

In our times, birds fall down hardly noticed in the world.

—John Ennis, Goldcrest Falling (2006)

There is a widespread sense that everything has been tried and has failed and that nobody is very clear about how to advance into an increasingly bleak future.

(Langan, 1995, p. xv)

My cell phone rings incessantly but I smile when two numbers come up on it. The first is my wife, Susan's, number because I am guaranteed to hear something positive and affirming and my four-year-old son, Conor, usually wants a chat with his Dad about such important matters as the goldfish tank needs changing, the birds have eaten all the nuts, or Darth Vader is really a "goodie" not a "baddy." Those two voices make my day. The second number belongs to St. Augustine's Youth Encounter Project, and I know it is my friend, John, calling to fill me in on the latest educational developments for youth in Ireland. Ironically, I met both my future wife and John in a child and youth care centre in Limerick in the early 1990s and since then we have worked together, researched together, and lobbied together for over a decade. And this past decade has seen many changes.

In that time, there have been profound shifts in the social typography of our country. Ireland was for centuries one of the highly traditional agrarian, poorer, underdeveloped and small countries of Europe, but this has changed utterly over the past couple of decades. For more than a century and a half, we experienced constant out-migration. When we joined the European Union (EU) in the mid-1980s things started to get better, and we became less insular as a people in every respect. We now have a booming high-tech sector, the return of thousands of our citizens who once could not locate work at home, tens of thousands of migrant workers from the new Europe, and a youthful population recently coined as the "expeetocracy" so high are their expectations for life (McWilliams, 2005). Our unemployment remains low in a European context (some 4.1 %), but Limerick is one city that has had to suffer high unemployment rates and poverty over the decades. It is also a city that has received more than its share of negative coverage in the media.

Locating Limerick

Ireland's principal river is the Shannon, which begins in the north central area, flows south and southwest for about 386 km, and empties into the Atlantic. At the end of the Shannon lies the City of Limerick with a population of some 80,000, made famous by the short poems (Limericks) and, more recently, by one Pulitzer Prize winning book that divided the country: Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt. It is ironic that Angela's Ashes is fundamentally about risk and resiliency, for it is in this city that the fieldwork for my own study took place. Limerick has a tough reputation in Ireland and, as with all tough places; there are pockets of those who thrive and do well and those who do not. Why is this? What can be done to assist children and youth to achieve their potential? How can the community respond instead of simply leaving it to the individual?

A Connection with Rivers

St. Augustine's School began as a Youth Encounter Project in 1977. It is a mixed school. It is situated app. 300 meters from the Lock Gates of the new marina in Limerick City. We are a small Post Primary school. We have a huge interest in the Shannon "River of Dreams" project. We are greatly influenced by our proximity to the river and our programmes have a strong outdoor and marine connection. Our picture shows our sailing boat "The Little Mermaid" with some of our students and Pat Lawless, the well known round the world sailor, (http://www.riverofdreams.ie/schools/19587Q/fs_og_main.htm)

Snowflake Children

Alter fifteen years involved in child and youth care, my experience is that most parents take their parenting roles very seriously. A new arrival in the family is a time of great excitement and wonder for all involved. Generally, the new child will be afforded every opportunity to progress and prosper in life and, although sacrifices will have to be made, in the long term it will be worth the considerable effort. These fortunate children are not the ones discussed in this study. Instead, my argument focuses on children of a lost generation. I call them snowflake children.

The metaphor of a snowflake seems particularly appropriate for this study, as snow is a commodity we tend to remember for either the pleasure it gives us or the significant disruptions it causes. A snowflake evokes for most Irish people images of purity, uniformity, transience, and isolation. For children, it presents an opportunity to play with homemade sleighs and, generally, a school vacation for a couple of days. Snowmen can be built, rubber tyres can be used to hurtle down slopes at death-defying speeds, and snowballs can be thrown at innocent passer-bys.

Where the metaphor fits well with my study is that a snowflake's shape (called "habit" by meteorologists) is determined by both temperature and the amount of water vapour in the air at any time. As snow crystals descend, they may meet up with one another, forming aggregations. If a snow crystal encounters cooled water droplets on its descent, it can become grouped into snow pellets, A two-foot square of snow ten inches deep contains about a million snowflakes. It is difficult for meteorologists to predict snow falls with any certainty, because the heaviest snow amounts fall in surprisingly narrow bands that are on a smaller scale than observing networks and forecast zones. A second complicating factor is that there are extremely minute temperature differences defining the boundaries between rain and snow.

It is widely held that every snowflake that falls is unique. This is also certainly the case with each new infant that is born, but where the snowflake falls will overwhelmingly determine what will happen to it. If an individual snowflake is fortunate enough to fall in a country field, it will probably remain white and pure until the weather changes and it melts or a wandering farm animal tramples on it changing its texture, shape, and colour. If a child is born into a family that is already experiencing severe problems, stresses, and chaos (what may be termed a negative family climate) the child, like the snowflake, is statistically more likely to be swept away, to have its identity changed, to become blemished, dirtied, and trodden on than a child born into a family unit that is secure in itself. Unfortunately, few people consider a blemished snowflake beautiful. And yet they have their own beauty.

It has long been accepted in child and youth care literature that families with very many problems to contend with face discord (Garfat, 1998; Garfat & McElwee, 2004; Maier, 1979; McElwee, 1996a; McElwee & Monaghan, 2005; Redl & Wineman, 1952). Such families are often termed "multi-agency units" where the quality of life within the family, because of the vast amounts of stress, may be poor and inconsistent. For me, family is key but families cannot merely "dismantle the integrity of past experiences and instead must seek to integrate sets of already interwoven biographies" (Anglin & Glossop, 1987, p. 3). Thom Garfat and I have argued that family is what you consider it to be (Garfat & McElwee, 2004) and, in this case, family is St. Augustine's Special School, Limerick City, Ireland. More of this later.

We all experience positive and negative phenomena in our lives, making each of us special and unique. Various child and youth care authors suggest that the more positive experiences we have as youngsters, the more likely we are to be positive adults (Maier, 1979), and the more negative experiences we have the more likely we are to be resentful and bitter about a system that we perceive has failed us (McElwee, 1996b; McElwee & Monaghan, 2005). Essentially, this book suggests that many Irish children and youth find it extraordinarily difficult to thrive because their personal and familial lives are overly preoccupied with adversity, they consistently receive the (subtle and unsubtle) message that they are unproductive, and there are too few protective factors in place in the community for them which allow them to develop the necessary skills and knowledge to be resilient.

But, of course, it is more complicated than this and many children and youth prosper despite their total environments. This is crucial in attempting to understand the resiliency perspective as it plays itself out in Limerick housing estates, lanes, and apartment blocks.

Indeed, 30% of Irish children have been identified as having a high risk of living in poverty and, by the mid-1990s, Ireland had the highest rates of child poverty of any EU member state (Nolan, 2000). Childhood means different things to different people and this is only too obvious when one travels around the world. In some countries it is normative behaviour for a twelve year old to work in leather shops, in other countries in it is normative behaviour for a child to sit in school for eight hours a day and in other countries, twelve year olds are in armed militia. It is my contention that many of the young parents in this and related studies have never been allowed to experience childhood themselves (in the sense of making sense of the world through normal exploratory play and being free from what we might loosely term adult concerns and responsibilities). They subsequently fail to engage fully in what are understood as effective parenting roles when the time comes for them to parent. It seems to me that if we are to reach children and youth who are at-risk, we must engage on a much deeper level than heretofore with their parent/s and caregivers.

The Breakdown in Trust in ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Irish Association of Social Care Educator's Lifetime Achievement Award Presentation to John Hanna
• Chapter 1. Snowflake Children
• Chapter 2. From Risk to At-Risk
• Chapter 3. A Focus on the Personal and Structural: Resilience Explored
• Chapter 4. Riding the Juggernaut in the Risk Society
• Chapter 5. Putting the Study Together
• Chapter 6. Now Is the Time: A Toxic Era for Child and Youth Care
• Chapter 7. "Learn What You Like and Like What You Learn": The Youth Encounter Projects and St. Augustine's Special School, Limerick City
• Chapter 8. Listening to At-Risk Youth
• Chapter 9. Framing the Future for Children and Youth in the Risk Society
• Chapter 10. Children and Youth: The Evolution of At Risk to "High Promise" Youth
• Index