Ray Hoskins Blog

Personal Life Coaching, Youth Development, General Youth Advocacy

Posterous theme by Cory Watilo

Filed under: Youth Advocacy

Crazy Perceptions on Age and Competence

There is a common statement in youth development work "If you expect young people to do great things, they will do great things."  Young people around the nation have proven this time and time again, and it has helped reduce the stigma that young people aren't contributors.

Since we, in the United States, created adolescence in the 1950s, we have developed societal perceptions of young people in which they aren't very competent, have very little to contribute to the home and society, and have primary functions of becoming good repositories of information (school), and great consumers.  As this has evolved, it has tended to become self fulfilling prophecy.  Young people, especially teens often have few expectations of contribution.  Instead, their lives are centered on learning to pass their states graduation test, and responding to the lastest advertisements about the things they need in order to fit in, survive, or have fun.  The truth is that those things do very little to develop global competence, life skills, and to feel a sense of significance in the culture.  Young people who could make our lives a lot easier by doing useful work around the home, in the community, and other environments are learners and consumers.  Some are lucky enough to be involved in faith based organizations where there are mission projects in which they can make contributions, but that isn't usually a normal, weekly expectation.  So people on the young end of the age spectrum become marginalized by the culture.

During about the same time frame, we have marginalize older adults.  At first, after the creation of Social Security, it was mostly a subtle perception that people were done with contribution at age 65, and would retire and move to sunny places like Florida.  Organizations even developed mandatory retirement ages reflecting that discriminatory perception. In the last 20 years, this has expanded and we now find that people over 50 experience age discrimination, incredibly long times between employment, and, when they do find jobs, employment in positions far below their job skills.  

Throughout history, and in most of the world today, these would be laughable perceptions.  Most cultures have both relied on their older populations to lead, guide, contribute, and have honored their elders.  Of course, if the work of a culture is physically challenging, people move on to other work.  Most cultures also conscript young people into being contributors as soon as they have something to contribute.  Historically, we have known that it is our job to develop competence in young people and to start early enough to develop as many skills as possible at early ages.  The idea of young people primarily being containers of information and consumers of things would have been alien to most cultures.  People who were lucky enough to live past 50 and still be able to contribute received gratitude for their contributions.

It is really strange to live in a country in which the perception seems to be that competence starts about sometime between graduation from college and thirty, and starts to degrade magically once someone turns fifty.  I really don't know how this perception evolved, but it marginalizes both those with the most energy and the most wisdom to contribute to our country at a time when we need real contributions from everyone.  

I would appreciate the thoughts of others on this topic.

Children Who Refuse to Be Raised

I am reading Raising Children Who Refuse to Be Raised by Dave Ziegler, Ph.D..  The author has worked for years with some of the most traumatized children in the country, and offers some of the best insights I have seen for raising children who have been abused and/or neglected.  This is one of the most accurate books I have read for those who want to better prepare themselves for raising these children.

I like the title, because children who have been deeply traumatized and hurt are changed by that process, in very specific and well researched ways.  Often, people who decide to foster and/or adopt traumatized children underestimate the challenges they face in having their children lean to feel safe, heal, and learn to trust them.  Part of this is simply people being trusting and naive.  Part of it, however, is the responsibility of those who work with adoptive parents.  In my experience those who work closely with people who have an interest in adopting from a child welfare system work very diligently to help those families understand the possible issues they will face with their children.  

The same can't be said to be true of some of the political leaders of child welfare systems.  More than once, I have seen Directors of state systems, Governors and others in leadership make statements that these are "normal" children and minimize the effects of trauma and the challenges involved in raising them.  There are often similar experiences with international adoptions.  Children who have been removed from their mothers, and their countries are traumatized by that experience to some extent, even if that happens when they are infants.  Children who have been in orphanages will almost always have difficulties bonding with adults and have challenges in families.  Families need to know the challenges they face.

Those of us who are working with adoptive children and the people who foster and adopt them can benefit from reading authors like Dave Ziegler, who do a good job of explaining what the children need, and what parents and therapists can do to help them succeed.  I recommend it highly.

Hanging In There

Periodically, I simply want to run from what I do.  I have been working with child serving systems for most of my adult life, and the knowledge that my efforts, and the efforts of my colleagues, are being overwhelmed by things beyond our control is very painful.  

There are things it is impossible to expect ourselves to control.  We can't, for example, control what happens in a home where a child is being neglected or abused, especially if that neglect or abuse hasn't been reported to anyone.  We can't control the family chaos that comes when a family lives at poverty level due to a number of causes.  We can't make people help their children with homework.  We can't even keep young people from committing crimes.

We should, however, be able to consistently keep children safe once neglect and/or abuse has been reported.  We fail to do so.  We should be able to work with families in poverty to make it easy for their children to stay in the same school while the family has to move.  We fail to do so. We should be able to create urban schools which engage young people and help them succeed.  We fail to do so. We should be able to keep young people who have been locked away due to the commission of crimes from being beaten and raped while incarcerated.  We fail to do so.  

As someone who cares about children, that kicks in my fight or flight syndrome, and given that I often can't figure out who to fight or, when I know who to fight, how to fight them, I want to run.  I know I am not alone.  There are many thousands of youth advocates, child welfare workers, educators, juvenile justice workers and others who feel overwhelmed, helpless, angry, and scared.  Several of them do quit each year.

In my opinion, our culture is a child neglecting culture.  We have a high percentage of abusing and neglecting families, and our state and local governments are often child neglecting governments.  A parent who knows that another parent in the family is abusing a child is neglecting that child when not taking protective action.  Unfortunately, people deny that others in their world are evil, and fail to accept that it is abuse.  Likewise, failing to provide adequate food, shelter and protection for children in your care is neglect, and when we are in a position to do something about neglect and don't, that is participation in neglect.  Most states are now underfunding basic needs of children in their care to such a degree that it can only be described as neglect.  Currently, since we are a democracy, that means almost every citizen in the United States is knowingly, or unknowingly participating in child neglect.  

Nationally, states have responded to the current recession by cutting the largely inadequate budgets of programs who are charged with taking care of abused and neglected children.  They have cut already inadequate education budgets, especially in urban areas.  They have made changes in juvenile justice practice which has led to overwhelming levels of juveniles being raped and sexually abused while incarcerated.

As many of these programs were barely able to meet the needs of their children prior to the cuts, these cuts have created situations in which children who were removed from homes due to abuse and neglect are being cheated out of what they need to heal.  This is just one example.  Children in schools and juvenile justice programs are also being cheated out of basic educational and safety needs.

The politicians who do this deny that their decisions negatively affect children, but everyone who works with children knows that is untrue.  One of the latest trends is to justify decisions by claiming that what was being done prior to the cuts wasn't working anyway.  At least this is partially true, but what they fail to say is that one of the reasons some things didn't work were that they were already underfunded.  Frankly, I have never before seen this degree of willingness to tell "The Big Lie" to cover up what states and local governments are doing to children.

There are fixed costs in doing anything.  The fixed costs of caring for a child do not change when a state imposes a 17% across the board cut in payment over two years. (Several states have cut more than this)  Instead, some area of need will not be adequately addressed.  For youth in care, that usually means that needed therapeutic services are cut, and that will lead to higher levels of incarceration due to criminal activity later.  There are similar consequences for education and juvenile justice.

Oh, we make progress sometimes.  We might get a new governor or mayor who really cares, hires and listens to those who know, and puts things in place that make improvements.  This keeps our hopes alive that we can benefit children.  For the most part, however, we get governors and mayors who pretend to care, hire and listen to those who either don't know or don't care and who do damage to children in the process.  I have seen far too much of the latter for the past three to four years.  As a result, I am tired, my flight response has kicked in and I want to run.  

But I won't.

Schott Foundation, Yes We Can Report

A few days ago I posted about an article referencing the Schott Foundation Yes We Can report, which outlined the horrible high school graduation rates for black males in the country.  Since that post, I have downloaded the report, and have continued to be saddened by our failure with the graduation of black males.  Also, as I reviewed the report, it became obvious that Indianapolis Public Schools is second to Detroit Public Schools in having the overall lowest rate of male, (black and white) high school graduations.  Detroit graduates 27% of black male students and 19% of white male students.  Indianapolis graduates 36% of black males and 26% of white males.  In fact, while states have much higher rates of graduation for white males than black males, the urban picture is one of schools that can't graduate males of either race.

While the report makes an incredible case that we under invest in black males across the board, another obvious conclusion is that many of the urban school districts do an abysmal job of graduating males, period.  Only one urban area, Newark New Jersey graduates as high as 75% of its black male students.  

One interesting part of the study is Fort Bend Indiana.  It has pretty good numbers, but I can't figure out if it is Fort Wayne Indiana, or Fort Bend County Texas.  If it is Indiana, then the contrast between Fort Wayne and Indianapolis is striking.

The authors draw their conclusions, and I would like to see the graduation rates for black and white females added to the report.  It is a wakeup call for many of us.  In an economy in which 60% of the jobs require post secondary education, and almost all of the ones that support a middle class standard of living are included in that list, we can't afford this problem. Of more importance we don't need to have over 50% of the males in our urban areas unable to enjoy their lives, support their families and contribute to our cities.

Thinking About "Young People"

Last Friday, I was listening to a taped presentation of H. Stephen Glenn, and he made the point that prior to 1955, the word Teenager didn't appear in our language.  Teenagers as a class of being was created as a side effect of the Baby Boom, and having such an large contingency of young people in the 13-19 age range.  This led to social scientists studying them, and the label teenager.  

Unfortunately, this labeling process has resulted in a culture which thinks largely in stereotypical terms when it comes to young people in this age range.  We have some lock step ideas of what thirteen year olds are like, and how nineteen year olds are more mature, or should be than thirteen year olds.  

If we pay attention to our experience, rather than the stereotypes, we will notice very mature thirteen year olds and incredibly immature young people who are nineteen.

Steve encouraged us to abolish the term teenagers from our minds and adopt the much more respectful young people for young people of all ages.  I agree, though it is a challenge for me to maintain this discipline.  I find that when I do succeed, each young person I meet can be seen as a unique person

Foster Care Until 21 and Other Youth In Care Issues

Yesterday, I posted a link to the Midwest Outcome Study by Chapin Hall.  When those of us who work with young people discuss this study, we find nothing surprising.  The 23 and 24 year olds have about a 50% unemployment rate, 6% college graduation rate, and about half have been homeless.  This in spite of the fact that the majority of them have reconnected with their families, have permanent connections and most feel they have an adequate support system.  

The majority of them also reported they could have used additional life skills training, especially in money management, housing, etc..  This is consistent with what I have seen nationally for the last eight years reviewing thousands of Ansell Casey Life Skills Assessments.  These outcomes are very consistent with the recently published outcome study funded by Casey Family Programs and others.  The Chapin Hall study targets the kind of results we get since the Chafee Program was put in place in 1999.  So we have been funding programs to address these issues for eleven years, and these are the Midwest results so far.  

I believe if we had done this study prior to Chafee, the outcomes would have been worse.  One recommendation made by the study is to extend time in care, (it is called foster care, but for many young people it is institutional care) until age 21.  The most consistent factor in improved outcomes is the length of time a young person received support.  States can now do this with federal support, but most haven't because it requires matching funds, and I doubt that many in leadership perceive a need.

Most of our leadership grew up in a time when it was possible to transition to life on our own at age 18.  We could get a job and work our way through college.  Grants and loans were available that would supplement our costs and help us succeed.  That is no longer true.  The average age of becoming self sufficient for young people who aren't in the child welfare system is about 26 or 27 in our country now.  So the idea that these young people should be able to age out of care at 18 and succeed is simplistic, and unintentionally sadistic.  The economy has become much more complicated, requiring more refined and specialized skills, and, given a 6% college completion rate, these young people are being left out of that economy.  

Extending foster care until age 21, while allowing increased flexibility past 18, would be a start at reversing these painful outcomes.  We also have a long way to go in working with these young people to develop capability.  If extension of foster care is the only approach, it will only make a marginal difference.  The data is also clear that Permanency, in the guise of reconnecting with families is also an inadequate strategy.  

Most of the young people had reconnected with their biological families, but still had the same poor outcomes.  In my experience, families which neglected and/or abused these young people as children are often too chaotic to be major positive supports to them as young adults.  In addition, the issues within those relationships are very complicated and painful.  There has been a very naive faction within the Child Welfare professional community which has advocated that this reconnection would be a major solution, and it isn't.  In fact, with extremely violent families there can be tragic outcomes.  

So, states need to consider extending foster care until age 21 as soon as it is possible from a budgetary standpoint.  However, we need to realize that young people need a number of other quality services in addition to this change in policy.

For future discussions, the life skills assessments I have reviewed over the last eight years indicates that youth in juvenile justice systems have far more life skills issues than those in foster care, and there seems to be no study on the horizon which will help us look at those outcomes.  I believe that youth who end up leaving juvenile justice systems each year at 18 have greater issues than youth in Child Welfare.

Thinking About "Young People"

Last Friday, I was listening to a taped presentation of H. Stephen Glenn, and he made the point that prior to 1955, the word Teenager didn't appear in our language.  Teenagers as a class of being was created as a side effect of the Baby Boom, and having such an large contingency of young people in the 13-19 age range.  This led to social scientists studying them, and the label teenager.  

Unfortunately, this labeling process has resulted in a culture which thinks largely in stereotypical terms when it comes to young people in this age range.  We have some lock step ideas of what thirteen year olds are like, and how nineteen year olds are more mature, or should be than thirteen year olds.  

If we pay attention to our experience, rather than the stereotypes, we will notice very mature thirteen year olds and incredibly immature young people who are nineteen.

Steve encouraged us to abolish the term teenagers from our minds and adopt the much more respectful young people for young people of all ages.  I agree, though it is a challenge for me to maintain this discipline.  I find that when I do succeed, each young person I meet can be seen as a unique person and I stay curious to discover who he or she is.  When I think in terms of teenager, I fall into the rut of filtering through all the assumptions I have programmed in my head.  That becomes a barrier to getting to know the person in front of me.

Explore this in your own experience.  How does your brain filter differently when you choose to see all people younger than say 27 as young people?

Concerns And Thoughts About Today's Youth and Political Decisions

Working in any area of government or foundation-sponsored endeavors presents unique challenges.  Today, those challenges are much more daunting than in almost any point of my career.  How services are funded greatly determine the types of challenges we face, and funding is really critical today.

Some foundations, not most, have leaders with years of experience in the areas they fund, are able to set tight priorities for their funding, and stick to those priorities over time.  The challenge is usually that their funding cycles are too short to allow programs to make impacts.  So they improve things for a while and then things return to a lower level of quality after they leave.  Another weakness is a tendency to become too narrowly focused, and to miss it when there are barriers which won’t allow their theories to work.

Well run United Ways, especially if they partner with foundations, are in a better position to make community impacts.  They set priorities with a good deal of community input, form partnerships and collaborations, and stay in it for the long haul.  So the areas they prioritize are likely to improve pretty consistently over time, until they change priorities, then the results will usually decline in the older areas of priorities.

Both of these funding mechanisms have in common tendencies to be research driven and to be consistent with mission. 

Government sponsored initiatives have very different dynamics.  Federal initiatives have some of the same strengths and challenges as foundations.  Some of them tend to be research based, and time limited in their funding.  So they come at their work with some knowledge and even wisdom, then fund initiatives and demonstrations which produce results, but little continued change.  The priorities also change, though usually slowly, with new administrations, and things that work often fall by the wayside. 

Some administrations come in with catchy phrases and poorly thought out strategies, and implement them without regard to outcomes.  In my opinion, the “Just Say No” campaign was a great example of this type of strategy.

Once we get to state and local initiatives, we are much more likely to see initiatives which arise out of campaigns and distorted perceptions of reality.  People are likely to be appointed without regard for true expertise, and given mandates to make changes that don’t benefit the population served.  Of course this happens at the federal level too.

For example, Education and Child Welfare are frequently political ping pong balls in state elections.  They are very difficult areas of practice, especially in urban areas and other areas of poverty, and every state has areas of quality and areas of deficit in both these arenas.  Also, the possible strategies in both areas are greatly defined by federal law and federal funding. 

So the new candidate for office picks out the areas of weakness in these areas, uses them as campaign issues, and gets elected.  He or she appoints someone, usually a political crony, to “change” the department, and follow through on the campaign issues.    Because the mandate is narrow, and the focus is change, rather than systematic improvement, these changes rarely work.  There isn’t the kind of coherence in strategy, adapted to local populations, that is required for success, but rather a campaign-driven, often ego driven initiative that does at least as much damage as good.  Often, these initiatives destroy most of what was working in attempts for positive change.

Meanwhile, we have families who want their children to succeed, communities and parents who want their children to be safe, children who need both education and safety, and those educators and human services who alternate between hope and despair until they “burn out” due to the stress of caring without things getting better.

Currently, we are in a recession.  Recessions really hurt families and children.  First, families who are in or close to poverty levels are more likely to have their breadwinners lose jobs, and need assistance which is cut due to the same recession.  Funding for very critical child welfare services are cut. 

Often the services that are cut are those which have a good research basis because people with little training in child welfare are making decisions behind closed doors under a mandate from a Governor.  Very rarely is there any consensus building on priorities before these decisions are made.  During recessions, citizen input usually goes away.

An example is reduced funding for youth aging out of care.  These cuts are national at this time, and children in several states are being discharged to homelessness in spite of federal laws requiring services until age 21.  States are developing policies which deny needed services, and we are seeing more children who leave child welfare and end up on the streets, proving to them that society doesn’t care about them.  The most publicity about this has been in California, but if you care about children, check on what your state is doing.  To discharge youth from child welfare to homelessness in this economy is to abuse them yet again.

In education, standards remain, but money doesn’t.  Classroom size increases, the quality of food given to children decreases, music and other enrichment programs go away.  At the same time, education systems and educators are scapegoats while their means of succeeding are taken away. 

It also isn’t our local governors’ fault that we have a recession.  It is, however, their responsibility to make decisions based on priorities which reflect the deepest concerns of their citizens.  I don’t think that is happening in most states. 

I know, for myself, my deepest concern for any political decision is the welfare of my grandson.  Second is the community of families and children in this country which need education and protection.   If you share these priorities, then hold your elected officials accountable to cut education, child welfare and other youth services last.  Publicize decisions which hurt children, and volunteer for their opponent the next election.  Keep doing this for years, so that each new office holder understands that youth are your priority, and there will be consequences for abusing them from positions of power, no matter what their economic pressures.