NCERCC’s summer season of new insights #2 = Be productive: Go slow: Do less

(The introduction is to be found in Insight #1 here.)

What can be done by each home?

Here’s a way of reframing from a trauma informed perspective: Be productive: Go slow: Do less

Regulate Relate Reflect. Consider these 3 words in your home, not just in the day to day, but in the routines and structures, systems, practice docs.

Think on the juxtaposition of two words: care planning. To construct, attentively, in an attuned way, requires care.

Time for reflection is being squeezed everywhere. People are saying they don’t have time. Make the time for every member of the team to have time to sit, think, reflect. This is an important management task.

Locate the source of any anxiety impinging through the boundary of the home. Remind yourselves of the Primary task – that which cannot be compromised.Then think – is impinging anxiety taking you off task or making you anti-task?   Now identify the source(s).

Wider thinking

One of our surprising insights is the degree of the unmanaged anxiety being imposed into RCC. There’s practical anxiety always but reduce the coping capacity by imposing too many children, too many needs, too many impossible expectations too quickly is exacerbatingbdepletion of a resilience reduced sector burdened by continuous projections of anxiety from outside about increasing co-occuring needs, nowhere for some children, standards, costs, outcomes. Internally these are always of concern but the pressure from outside is intolerable. RCC is having to manage the projections of the unresolved angst of children’s services. And this at a time the sector is being told in impending legislation it is not needed, when it is evidently clear it is needed more than ever.

Across the sector people reflect when they find a moment.’When I get a moment to think.’ This squeezing of time as a result of attending to a multitude of tasks and increasing anxiety is antipathetic to the caring task. Thinking and reflecting require structure, time each week.

The sector is increasingly facing having imported inappropriate models of operation from business. These are towards productivity, meaning activity and throughput. Speed inhibits good relational child care. Pace is determined by need here and now and is not to be programmed from outside.

A reminder of the opening reframing from a trauma informed perspective: Be productive: Go slow: Do less