Sometimes all it takes is something small.

I mentioned in my last post that I'm a child care worker. I have a part-time job supervising (I refer to it as babysitting) adolescent boys in a group home setting who have been placed there by the court because they've broken the law or because they need to be removed from their home due to a lack of supervision or parental control. Currently I'm relief staff so I just fill in small gaps in the schedule where the full-timers are unavailable. This also means that the kids know I'm not entirely up to date on all of the current rules and attempt to take advantage of my lack of knowledge at every turn. I have to be on my toes, they're a manipulative bunch.

I've had this job for about three months and I've worked on average one shift a week. The pay is AWFUL. I chose the job not for the pay, but for the experience. The experience has been less than rewarding the majority of the time. I have a difficult time discerning what I should offer these kids. Since my ultimate goal is to go into therapy, my instinct is to seek out the reasons for their moods, try to offer them alternatives to bad choices, and attempt to reason with them respectfully. However my job, really, is to make sure they follow rules. Basically, as I mentioned before, I'm a babysitter. It's not very rewarding. I want to offer them more than my position permits but I'm not there enough to give them more than guidelines. If I'm too nice they walk all over me, if I'm too strict, they dismiss me as cold and uncaring. I still try to walk a fine line between nurturer and enforcer as I think they really need both.

The other night I felt like I made a miniscule impression, but it felt great. One of the kids asked me to help him with his vocabulary. I helped him once before, and he got a 100%. He was thrilled, so he asked for my help again. I must add here that I helped, I did not do the work for him. He's behind his grade level in reading comprehension (among other things) so the sentences he has to complete are somehwhat over his head. I go about helping him by translating the sentences for him. He then scours the list looking for the best word to fill in the blank. I found that if we do it this way, he seems to retain the definitions rather well. While we were muddling through he complained that he was never going to use these words. He felt that this was a huge waste of his time as he is never going to travel in circles with people who use words like zealous and pandemonium. I told him that at the very least he could use these words with someone who looked down upon him in his future. I set up a scenario wherein he goes back to his neighborhood and uses one of these vocab words in the presence of this person. He could then quiz the hypothetical jerk as to whether or not they know what the word means. When they don't he can say something like, "At least I'm educated, why don't you go back to the ghetto?"

I realize this may not have been the best textbook approach, but I tried to offer him something that would be motivating to him personally.

It worked.

He got this big grin on his face and said "Yeah, that's a good point, now that you put it that way". I couldn't believe how his eyes lit up. I stirred something in him with that simple hypothetical that didn't involve anything more than wit. He completed the homework without complaint and with new zeal. I was amazed. It felt like something out of the movie "Dangerous Minds" or "Lean on Me". They don't teach you things like that in therapy class. They say things like, "meet the client where they're at" (called the Iso principle). Aside from the terrible grammar, this saying has always been a mystery to me. But that day I think I got it. I could have gone on and on about his potential, about all of the things he can accomplish if he sets his mind to it, but he would have scoffed. He's a 17 year old kid whose girlfriend is 13, his mom is a drug addict with a revolving door of boyfriends, and his older brother was in placement before him. By the age of 9 he had dealt drugs with his mom's boyfriend and stolen cars. He lives in reality and knows he's not going to Harvard, he'll most likely be in placement until he ages out. He plans to be a mechanic. He loves cars. He has a plan to make an honest living staying out of trouble. I think that's amazing in and of itself.

I don't mean to act as though he doesn't have potential, but I believe in being realistic. There is nothing wrong with having a desire to be an auto mechanic, and if I can motivate him within the realm of where he wants his life to go (as long as it involves good choices), that's what I'll do.

Right or wrong, I'm proud of what I offered him. I've never seen his eyes light up like that. I've never seen him that interested in his school work. I left that night with a little more of a skip in my step.

It may be self serving, but helping him really helped me. It gave me a reason to keep trying to walk that line between confidant and disciplinarian. I think we both had a new glint in our eyes that night.