Listening to Children and Young People - Term Paper Example

 Listening to Children and Young People Introduction Children are an important part of any society, and it is necessary to look after them. Unfortunately, it is not all children who are lucky to get the amount and kind of care they deserve from their families. This has led to surrogate methods of taking care of and looking after these children. Looked-after children are those who are under the care due to any of the various reasons. It is crucial to understand how to handle these children. This is because of a number of significant factors as follows; Key issues with looked after children Most of these children have diagnosable mental problems and the best way to understand their problems is by listening to them. Professional listeners who will be able to understand the problems the children are having should be able to interact with the children and young persons who are under the care. This will not only help in diagnosing their problems but will also help these children to be able to overcome their issues as they are looking for a way to let out their frustrations. Most of the problems that these children have can be addressed by listening to them and giving them an opportunity to convey their emotions. As Richardson and Joughin (2000) say, there is therefore a need to know how the children and young persons with a psychiatric disorder can be helped to live their lives positively with their disorder while at the same time using their competencies and experiences to live normal lives. The local authorities work with designated teachers to be able to help looked after children, especially those with mental problems (Golding, 2006). Looked after children usually are children who don’t have families or they may have families that are not adequate in the way they support this children. In this case, those who are mandated with looking after these children should offer the parental support that such children will require. Each year, the number of children under the care increases, and this is increasing the social problems in every society. Looked after children are also part and parcel of the society and it is increasingly crucial to look at their issues so as to ensure the society has less people with social and mental problems. Context Schooling is not about going to school and acquiring academic and professional skills, but rather is also a process for building social and personal skills through making friends and creating personal relationships which will help the student to be a well rounded person. Schooling also provides for a way for them build their self esteem while at the same time receive encouragement from their peers as well as their educators. Children in high school are in the care of their educators and how they are handled will determine how they will be successful in the future. Aspect: helping high school looked after children to gain self esteem as they grow. Explanation of aspect According to Duggan and Pole (1996), the formative years are hugely influential in a person’s life. During the high school years, the children are going through their formative years where they are actually forming an image of who they are. This is the time most people create their identity, and there are way more things that matter to them than the basic needs. For a teenager, it is not just pertinent to be dressed, but the kind of cloths that one wears matters a lot in terms of defining who they are. Most looked after children in secondary schools may not have the luxury of wearing fancy cloths and having fancy items and this can have a fundamental impact on their emotional development and have a lasting negative impact on their self esteem. The issue is that it may not be possible to provide these students with all the things they need to feel like their friends who come from families. While trying as much as possible, it is necessary to monitor their emotional mental growth with an aim to help them to overcome the turbulent years of teenage and prevent such things from destroying them forever. In this regard, policy development with regard to looked after teenagers would be geared towards not just helping these young adults with material things but also with as much emotional help as possible. Experts argue that adolescents are more likely to recoil to traumatic experiences during these formative years if they don’t have a good source of emotional support to depend (Lanyado and Horne, 2009). Looked after children in secondary school Children in high school have a lot of issues that should be considered n order for them be successful in their academic work and their lives. In most cases looked after children in high school are those who were looked after children during their elementally school time. Secondary school looked after children who were also looked after children in their primary school times are more likely to be affected more during the secondary school time. Looked-after secondary school young persons are not only likely to perform poorly in their secondary school education but are also likely to perform poorly in their tertiary education. This sets a trend for these students, and they are as well highly likely to fail in life. Listening to looked after in high school Meaning of listening Listening in this case refers to being able to understand these children by observing them and their behavior with the intension of helping them and correcting them. Listening can be done by a specialist, who will understand their mental and emotional issues with the intention of giving them the best possible help they can get. Over the last two decades, psychiatrist have resorted more involvement of the child patient in the process by listening to them, and this has shown significant improvement of the treatment of child patients (Hastings, 2010). At the same time, all parties concerned are supposed to be involved in the process of listening to these children. This includes teachers, care takers and guardians who may be involved in taking care of these children and young persons. The concept of listening to these children comes from the fact that these children will need to have a way to vent their feelings and express their emotion. Traditionally, people never used to listen to children or paying attention to their feelings because children were regarded as not having emotions that were beneficial or that needed to be taken care of. However, this has proven not to be the case because children can have hugely powerful emotions that need to be let out. Importance of listening to high school looked after children Listening is crucial for all children, whether they are looked after children or not. However, with regard to looked after children, they need listening a lot more because as explained above, there are various problems that must be looked at given their emotion history. According to Müller (1999), children who spend their lives in care are more likely to display an impoverishment of their personality in later life. More so, secondary school looked after children, are even more prone to emotional tides, and they need all the support they can gain from those near them. Like all teenagers, these teenagers are no longer children and due to the physiological processes they go through, they are more likely to have emotional instability. This is even worse where the secondary school children are also former looked after children because it affected a number of their development issues. As already discussed, these teenagers have numerous issues with regard to their emotions and this has a bearing on their behavior. Listening to these teenagers involves understanding them in terms of what they are going through and helping them to understand life. It includes offering a way for these teenagers to express their emotions and to be able to have someone they can trust and talk to. In other words, listening to them involves not just listening but also understanding them and giving them the kind of comfort they need. Significance of listening to them Studies have shown that looked after children at high school level perform significantly poorer than the other students. It has also been established that the gap between the academic performances of looked after students widen even further as they move from primary to secondary education. It means that a looked-after child is likely to be affected more when in secondary school than when in primary school. The main factor that can be attributed to this deviation is the fact that these students are at a particularly decisive stage of their lives. Being able to support them and reduce the emotional and psychological burden can be of considerable use to them not only to help them perform better in school but to help them to become better adults later in life. Policy change As time goes on, there is a change in the policy on how these children are taken care of. In the beginning, such children and young persons were only entitled to financial and material support from the government, and emotional support was not primary. However, time has shown that these children need emotional support as much as they need material support and care takers of these children have to be able to keep up with this new need. As things change and more economic and social burden is placed on the society, there are a number of things that continue to happen. First, there is the issue of increased poverty among the families where these children come from. In this regard, it has been established that looked after children are at an increased risk of failing to support their children in the future this firming a streak of repeated low attainment and poverty. Putting children under foster of substitute care has been there for centuries and in the beginning it used to be the work of philanthropists. However, as time went on, and more children needed substitute care after their families could not help them, either because these children were abandoned or orphaned, the government took interest in the matter. With the children and young person’s act of 1963, the role of the government to take care of such children was increased (Cocker and Allain, 2008). The use of foster care has been favored over time as opposed to the use of residential homes (Hayden, 1999). According to Guishard, Hamilton and McCall (2007), the earliest history of foster care dates as far back as the 14th century where orphans were placed with nurses. While child services have been criticized a lot in the past, Sheerman (2010), reports that a greater number of child and young person offenders are those who have not enjoyed any form of care from child services. This implies that child services are tremendously beneficial in helping those children who need this care to live their lives more healthily and without involving themselves in risky behavior. Material support Material support was the initial intention of taking children under care. This was especially in the 1970s and 90s. The original roles of care takers of looked after children were not therefore geared towards giving these children material and education care. In those early days, not only were there less social problems, there was also few children who needed government care. The concept of looked after children was not exceptionally well understood, and most policy developers depended on highly scarce data and knowledge about these children. However, time has changed things and the way these children are understood. As more and more studies were done, salient facts were revealed about these children. First of all, it emerged that these children were increasing by day and their conditions were deteriorating by the day. This increased a need to ensure that these children don’t just get care but that the government was able to minimize the amount of children who needed care from the government. This was a fundamental change, and it affected policy development with regard to the way these children were regarded. As the policy making shifted towards reduction of looked after children, other issues continued to emerge, and this also affected the way policy development was made, especially in the 1990s. Towards eradicating child poverty Policy about children and young persons changed over time and taken different shapes. In the 1990s, policy development geared towards looking after children revolved around eradicating child poverty. By this time, policy developers had realized that there was a need to understand the way in which poverty can be eradicated. Looked after children with families were helped in the context of their families as a way to improve the family and thereby reach to the children. This attitude in policy development was informed by the fact that more and more children were being brought up in highly poor environments thus making it harder for these children to be able to achieve in life. It has been suggested that the best way to help these children achieve self efficacy is by involving them in their own care and education (Soan and Lee, 2010). Towards understanding childhood as a social phenomenon, as opposed to a natural phenomenon Over time, researchers have identified that the way childhood is understood make a hugely significant impact on policy development. There are various issues with the way looked after children have been treated in the past. One of this is that Legislations about looked after children have not been thoroughly adhered to (Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Children, Schools and Families Committee, 2009). There are a number of critical issues that are relevant with regard to the way children are understood and how they are given the opportunity to be successful in their later life. Currently, policy development is done around the fact that childhood is not just a natural phenomenon but also a social phenomenon. This is unlike in the past where childhood was mainly referred to as a natural phenomena and child development focused in the chronological development of the child. Conclusion Currently, studies have indicated that it is increasingly necessary to understand the fact that the cognitive and emotional development of a child is just as pivotal a factor to consider with respect to the manner the child is developed. Therefore, there are various factors that must be taken care of when delivering care to children and especially when dealing with looked after children. This new attitude has helped a lot in developing a model in which the child is able to develop properly. It has also helped in ensuring these children do not get affected by their poor background once they become adults. In this regard, policy building concerning the problems of children and young persons has shifted from just providing material help and started focusing on helping these children to be in a position to deal with these troubles and achieve a better life for these children as well as their future families. References List Cocker, C and Allain. (2008). Social Work with Looked After Children. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publication. Duggan, R. and Pole. (1996). Reshaping Education in The 1990s: Perspectives on Primary Schooling. London: Routledge. Golding, K. (2006). Thinking Psychologically About Children Who Are Looked After and Adopted: Space for Reflection. Boston, MA: John Wiley & Sons. Great Britain: Parliament: House of Commons: Children, Schools and Families Committee. (2009). Looked-after Children, Volume 1. London: The Stationery Office. Guishard-Pine, J. H. (2007). Understanding Looked After Children: An Introduction to Psychology for Foster Care. London Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Hastings, M. (2010). Listening to Children and Young People in Health Care Consultations. Milton Keynes: Radcliffe Publishing. Hayden, C. (1999). State Child Care Provision: Looking After Children? Volume 1. London, UK: Jessica Kingsley Publishers. Lanyado, M. H. (2009). The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy: Psychoanalytic Approaches. London: Routledge. Müller, J. (1999). Nursing Children: Psychology, Research and Practice, 3rd Edition. Cheltenham, UK: Nelson Thornes. Richardson, J. and Joughin. (2000). The mental health needs of looked after children. RCPsych Publications. Sheerman, B. (2010). Looked-After Children: Third Report of Session 2008-2009. London: The Stationery Office. Soan, S. and Lee. (2010). Improving Outcomes for Looked After Children: A practical guide to raising aspirations and achievement - eBook. London: Optimus Education eBooks. Read More