Oregon daily emerald., May 30, 1973, Page 5, Image 5

Youth center
great help for
troubled kids
By PETER GRANT
Of the Emerald
From the outside a Youth Care Center appears to be
an ordinary residential home in an ordinary residential
discrict. Nothing about it suggests it is the most
progressive step Lane County has recently taken to deal
with children who are in the court’s custody.
Nothing on the outside of these houses even begins to
suggest the amount of inter-personal relation which goes
on between the walls.
Everyday the problems inherent in the develop
ment of adolescents are tackled by a team of social
workers dedicated to the idea that children from poor
backgrounds can become functioning members of
society.
Three Youth Care Centers were established in
Eugene in July 1971, as a subsidiary of the Children’s
Farm Home program which has been operating in
Corvallis since 1921. On July 1 the centers will no longer
be connected with the Farm Home and will become a
private non-profit child caring agency.
“Don’t mind the confusion, it’s always like this,”
said Suzy Barnett, a group worker at the home for boys
between the ages 12 to 15. Between distributing
allowances, talking with boys about missing school, and
keeping an eye on a water fight waging in the back yard,
she managed to explain some of her views on the caring
of eight boys.
“None of these boys are hard core delinquents,” she
explained. “They’ve just gotten the shaft somewhere
along the line, They don’t have many more behavioral
problems than anyone else. And I’m not just saying
that.”
The poor backgrounds the children come from are
the greatest obstacles the group workers must over
come. A history of trouble with school, trouble with
families, and sometimes trouble with the law put the
children in the courts’ custody. Coming out of these
backgrounds the child feels unloved, inadequate, and
without purpose or goals. The group worker has to show
the child more to life then fighting, failures, and fan
tasies.
And the way they accomplish this, the only way it
can be accomplished, is be showing the children
someone actually exists with some feeling for them. This
feeling radiates out of the group workers like sunshine,
basking the children in what everybody needs: a feeling
that someone cares for you.
“I put too much into this for me to consider it a job,”
Suzy said, “It really hurts when one of the boys runs
away.”
When the frustration level reaches a certain point in
the family many children resort to the one way they
know of relieving the pressure; they split. While
discussing this problem, Dan Cadaback, a group worker
at the girls home was interrupted by a call from a girl
“on the run.”
“Look, the longer you stay out, the longer you’re
going to be jeopardizing yourself,” he told her. “Yes,
you probably will be put on restriction when you come
back. You have to be responsible for what you do. I
really don’t think that someone’s putting her clothes on
your bed was the only reason for your running...”
He placed the phone down with a sigh.’
Restriction is one aspect of the free time program
which all the houses implement. A child’s free time is
determined by how well he or she is doing in school,
whether or not they have a job, and whether or not they
are having any discipline problems.
Restriction means you are restricted to the house.
The next step up is two-hour leave, and then the open
Photo by Peter Grant
Social workers discuss their work at one of three Youth Care Centers operated by Lane
County. The workers are dedicated to the idea that children from poor backgrounds can
become functioning members of society.
program; when you are free to come and go as you
please.
“But we modify this system for certain occasions,”
Dan pointed out. “We once had a girl who actually en
joyed being on restriction. She didn’t want to go out and
face the world. Naturally we just didn’t let her stay
home.”
The younger boy’s home also uses an allowance
method to encourage the boys to stay in school. An
allowance of $3.50 a week can go pretty fast if many
classes are skipped.
Problems surrounding the children’s education,
group workers agree, are the greatest ones they face.
From hassling the kids up in the morning, to checking up
on attendance, problems in school are never-ending.
“The kids don’t like to go and we don’t like to make them
go,” one worker said, “but it’s priority ‘numero uno.’ A
child must be attending school if he is going to stay at the
home.”
The authority hangups many of the children have
are pushed to the extreme in the institutionalized
structure of school. One girl explained she, “only goes to
school to keep off restriction. I haven’t found anything in
it for me,” she continued, “Once in awhile I do find
something in class I do enjoy, but adverbs and ad
jectives don’t interest me, the moon does not interest
me, track does not interest me.”
Problems from the outside world are rivaled by the
problems which simply stem from a group of people
living together. Issues such as people not doing their
chores, children manipulating and lying to each other,
and any other conflict which arises are brought up in the
group meetings the houses have weekly.
“If one girl has been lying to the rest of the girls,”
Dan explained, “we confront her with it at a group
meeting. We discuss what it feels like to be lied to. By
attacking these issues head on we usually find a
workable solution.”
At the younger boys home the boys are able to make
policy changes at these group meetings. These changes
are subject to veto by the staff, “but so far,” Suzy
pointed out, “The staff hasn’t had to do this. The boys
decided they would like to go to bed a half hour later on
school nights. We told them it would be fine if they
wouldn’t give us any problem about getting up in the
morning. They agreed to this and it’s been working out
fine.”
Along with providing a time for anyone to voice a
grievance, these group meetings also serve the function
of giving the staff and children a chance to screen
newcomers to the house. Though the staff has final say
on the matter, the children’s feeling on whether or not
they feel the new person is compatible with the group
has a lot of weight.
The group meetings are held with the idea that only
through openness and honesty can relationships be
established that mean something to the child. “And this
is really the backbone of our whole program; getting
people to trust people,” said Chris Krenk, a social
worker at the girls home.
Child care has come a long way from “children
should be seen and not heard.” Now it’s more like,
“children should be seen and heard and an attempt
should be made to understand them as people.” A man
who is instrumental in the local attempt to understand
children’s problems is Jim Anderson, the director of the
Farm Home Youth Care Centers.
His feeling for the children is apparent as he has
tried to devise a program which approaches each child
on his individual need.
“I remember one youngster we had who used LSD
frequently,” he said. “Now to her LSD was an escape.
Life was pleasanter to face on the drug. The way we
dealt with her was to provide the natural consequence of
her actions. We didn’t let her spend any time in her
bedroom so she had to interact with people. She saw that
drugs substituted the experiences people could
provide.”
“We have to approach these kids,” Anderson con
tinued, “with the realization that they might not know
many of the things we take for granted. We can’t say go
out and look for a job. We have to teach them how to look
for a job; things like grooming, making eye contact, and
shaking the man’s hand.”
In an attempt to expand the children’s experience
the groups take numerous trips and get involved with a
number of functions. Every weekend an attempt is made
to take the children out of the home environment. “We
look the kids up to the Shakespearean festival last
summer,” Anderson said, “and they really enjoyed it.
Some of them had never seen a play before.”
The children are aimed in one of two directions:
either toward returning home or becoming self
sufficient. Thus, family therapy and work experience is
where the main emphasis is placed.
And it works.
The program boasts a respectable 78 per cent suc
cess rate. 78 per cent of the children who spent time with
the Care Centers last year returned home or were
emancipated. A number of reasons exist for this but the
primary one, Anderson will tell you, is the workers at the
homes.
These workers are the child’s mother, father,
sister, brother, friend, judge, and cook all rolled into
one. They must nurture the child when he’s sick and
discipline him when he’s bad. They must be a good
functioning adult model for the children to learn from.
They certainly have their task cut out for them.
And why is it they seem to enjoy it so much? “That’s
easy,” one worker said, “they’re just a great bunch of
kids.”
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