SAVI minded Residential Child Care
Approaching each day a Residential Child Care workers needs to be packed with resilience.
Every day is full of attunement, attentiveness, compassion, empathy, mindmindedness, reflection, solidarity, and lots more. These are the unseen things that make up Residential Child Care. To redraft Naomi Stadlen ‘What Residential Child Care workers do: especially when it looks like nothing’. We are working all the time. Thinking, feeling , reflecting is working.
Residential Child Care comes with the understanding of delayed gratification of our input, maybe after months, maybe after a child has left and rehabilitation has gone well, maybe years later when a young adult comes looking for you to say ‘Thank you’ and brings their children to meet ‘the person who changed my life’.
NCERCC are looking forwards to reading a book called Social Work is Not Self-Harm by Nadine Boyne. It looks like it will have some transferable anecdotes and professional insights as well as things to do, that’s what the promotion says.
Certainly the SAVI approach ( a good acronym seems essential for such books) – Self-Aware, Authentic, Valuing, Intentional – is something that the research literature into Residential Child Care such as the excellent Compassion fatigue, compassion satisfaction and work engagement in residential child care that has so much learning about how Residential Child Care workers and their providers can structure life and work to sustain all of those qualities and activities that open this blog. Keeping our curiosity, creatively meeting previously unmet need, is a must. We need to believe in our caring, not just behave as carers. People making is relationship making. Remember it is the grown ups that make the Attachments and the children who take them.
Authentic – see also
Emotional Warmth Parenting CYC-Online April 2021
Thempra Introduction to Social Pedagogy
Hertfordshire County Council trauma informed care programme – awareness training.
The SAVI approach of Nadine Boyne uses the Appreciative Inquiry process – decide, discover, dream, design, do. decide, discover, dream, design and do. These phases connect who with what and how. We are always starting again with a young person, as where we got to yesterday is where we start today and we need to know where we are going to go. Everyday we need to reimagine Residential Child Care and this is a structure to do so. It involves reimagining ourselves.
Importantly Nadine Boyne does not omit boundaries. Do we need to reconnect with the concepts of Holding and Containment? These are relevant not just for homes, but for individuals. It is an emotional psychological holding and containment that prevents the need for the physical.
