Do young people need parents?

In some recent work I did on serious youth violence interventions, I was struck by the comparative poverty of support for parents whose children are at risk of, or are becoming involved in, serious youth violence. There certainly are some projects out there, and they are fantastic. For example, Mothers and Against Violence (in Manchester) – set up in response to the violent crime amongst young people,  http://mavuk.org/, is incredibly inspiring.

But what seemed particularly tragic to me was that the area where there was most funded support for parents was in bereavement services. If that isn’t the very definition of too little, too late, I don’t know it is.

For the parent-led projects that work on prevention, and which are about social action to change the issue of serious youth violence in general, they tend, sadly, to be set up by parents who have lost a child. Some are very small and very grass-roots (one mum or dad and a few friends), while others become fully-fledged charities over time.

It got me thinking beyond the immediate issue. I wonder what we could do to get parents and adults in communities fully involved in the fight to prevent serious youth violence? What do they do if they feel their child is in danger - or at risk of becoming involved? How can they support young people across their communities - and other parents - in a sustainable way?

One of the things I have started to wonder about is why parents in a community are not, as a matter of course, involved in ‘youth work’. We say that trusted relationships with adults are vital to help young people thrive and develop - it’s one of the key parts of the youth work model. Like any other field, professional youth workers are often parents in their private lives. But the idea that parents, perhaps voluntaristically, within their community, could be encouraged and supported to be more involved in the process of helping, developing, and supporting young people, is rarely raised. I don’t mean by this that they become ‘volunteers’ - a whole different question. I mean how can a whole community of adults be involved in supporting. welcoming, and integrating its young people?

In a BBC documentary I saw recently about the history of social housing, one of the things that people who grew up on an estate noted was that, in the past, all the adults on an estate knew all of the children/ young people, and their parents. They thought that the fact that this is no longer the case - in some cases unavoidably - only contributes to the oft-remarked sense of young people being ‘out of control’, of the streets becoming ‘no-go’ zones, and of adults becoming frightened of young people. (Sometimes with cause, and sometimes without.)

I think we need to start focusing again on the idea that whole communities need to come together to care for their children - and by that, I mean teenagers, and young adults, as well as the smallest.

A whole village

It’s rarely remarked about the history of youth work that the practices were born out of the need for educational provision for ‘destitute’ children - most often orphans, or those with absent parents. Institutions like the Ragged Schools were set up to deal with this problem. Later, the model for the modern youth club was the the ‘Rainbow Club’ (and related ventures) set up in wartime Britain for American GIs, many of whom were barely shaving - who needed supervision, leisure, and support, 2,000 miles away from their parents and communities. (Alongside the pinball machines and cream sodas, there was also always a pastor on hand to make sure there was no hanky-panky with girls. Good luck with that.)

Most young people who need help in our communities are not orphans. Most are not 2,000 miles away from their families and communities (although work with migrants and refugees is absolutely vital). Some of the young people who become involved in serious youth violence come from average, loving, families. So why are we uncritically using a model developed for orphans and those thousands of miles away from their communities?

The point is, even if young people’s own parents are not supportive, there is a wealth of other adults in local communities who can support them. What could be done to start mobilising this resource? Again, by this, I don’t mean simply training them all up to be youth workers. I hesitate to use a well-worn phrase/ cliche, but surely it does indeed take a whole village to raise a child - and doesn’t this continue to apply when they are a teenager?

The youth club

The related question is about the place-based, centre-based nature of youth club spaces. Very often, we talk about young people needing ‘their own space’ - that is certainly true; we all need to spend some time with people who are like us. But to what extent? Are we sometimes separating young people and treating them as a separate category, segregating them completely away from their wider community, rather than working to improve relationships between adults and children?

The youth centre and the youth-only space is sometimes a strange idea. It sometimes looks like we have decided, alongside the development of the idea of a teenager as a category of person apart from others in the post-war period - that there needs to be a period of total separation from family and community. In this period, young people will ‘develop,’ with a handful of professionals.

I have no doubt that it plays a strong role - but I also worry that at the core of this idea sometimes lurks the idea that young people are, per se a problem. My sense is that the growth of this particular model especially after the second world war speaks as much about moral panics and the massive social changes in that period as it does about the specific, unchangeable needs of ‘young people’ as if they were a category all of their own.

Much as we have started to ask whether educating children in a production line and factory model is a very 19th century, industralised mode, and whether it is the best way to care for and educate children, it should be okay to ask whether the youth club alone is the right model - at least, on its own - for caring for, supporting, and developing teenagers.

A question I have often asked myself is how we expect teenagers to spend all day in school around other children, and then all night in a youth club around other youths, and still eventually develop the skills for adulthood. I think we all need community, and we all need to be able to spend time around people of different ages as well as our peers - especially as we grow and develop. This model of separation is very Anglospheric, very post-war, and yet has become treated as a natural fact in the youth sector. Even in the UK, faith groups often take a different approach - and there may be much to learn from them for the secular sphere in this area of work.

Overall, there is plenty of room for classic, specialist ‘youth work’, but there needs to be a much wider approach taken to community work that engages with, and integrates young people, and makes use of the amazing resource of the adults and parents in their community. Indeed, when I started as a youth worker, it was as a ‘youth and community worker.’

Additionally, ‘trusted adult relationships’ which are not with our own parents don’t have to only be with ‘professionals’. We often talk about young people not having adult role models - yes, youth workers, or teachers, can fulfil that role, but surely there are many other adults who could do so? It sometimes seems rather sad that we assume it takes a specially trained professional adult to relate to a young person. I think we need to start to talk about what a whole community of adults can do to support young adults - and how we can start to build trusted adult relationships which extend beyond immediate family and a few professionals.

That can start with supporting parents to come together to deal with some of the issues their children, and their communities face. I would love to work on this with someone.