Good Residential Child Care Starts With Understanding Pain, with Professor James Anglin

“Problem behaviour” is a label that can make adults defensive, punitive and quick to control. We wanted to slow that down and ask a different question: what if the behaviour is pain, showing itself the only way it knows how? For the 50th Secure Start Podcast conversation, I am joined by Professor James Anglin, one of the world’s most influential voices in children’s residential care and therapeutic group home practice. 

We talk through Professor Anglin’s journey from philosophy and Gestalt training into frontline child and youth care, then into the research that shaped his landmark framework. He explains grounded theory in plain language and why building theory from practice gives workers something they can actually use at 2 am when a young person is dysregulated. At the centre is a struggle for congruence: aligning decisions across funders, leadership, supervision and frontline care so the whole system acts in children’s best interests, not just the words on a policy page. 

We dig into three major processes: creating an extra-familial living environment, responding to pain-based behaviour, and helping young people develop a sense of normality and dignity. Along the way we unpack the interactional dynamics that make change possible, the real harm of repeated placement breakdown, and how the Cornell CARE model has scaled these ideas across countries and cultures. 

If you work in child protection, residential care, foster care systems, trauma-informed practice or therapeutic care, this is a concrete guide to doing the work with clarity and humanity. Subscribe to The Secure Start Podcast, share this with someone shaping policy or practice, and leave a review. 

Professor Anglin's Bio:

Professor Anglin began his career as a child and youth care worker in a mental health centre in Vancouver, after which he developed a 6-bed group home for adolescents in Victoria Canada.

He then pursued graduate studies, worked in social policy in Ottawa and Toronto, and returned to British Columbia in 1979 to join the faculty of the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria.

He served as the School of Child and Youth Care Director for three terms, after which he became the University’s Associate Vice-President Academic and Director of International Affairs.

From 1995 to 1999 he was an international advisor to the South African Inter-Ministerial Committee on Young People at Risk involved in the country’s Transformation of the Child and Youth Care System.

Currently, he is President of FICE-Canada, Chair of FICE Americas, Asia and Australia Region, and a member of the FICE-International Coordinating Committee. He also serves as a member of the International Work Group on Therapeutic Residential Care,

His major research interests have included parent education and support, quality assurance, professionalization of child and youth care, and what constitutes quality residential care for children and youth. James is a Research Affiliate with the Bronfenbrenner Centre for Translational Research at Cornell University advising on the development and implementation of the Cornell CARE Program Model that is now being delivered in 7 countries..

He has published widely in international journals and texts, and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care, the Residential Treatment for Children and Youth journal, and the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies.

Links:

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Podcast Blog Site: https://thesecurestartpodcast.com/

Disclaimer: Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce. Finally, all references to case examples are anonymised to the extent that the actual case could not be identified, or are fictional but based on real-life examples for illustrative purposes.

Transcript

Opening And First Reflections

Colby 0:00

Welcome to the Secure Start podcast brought to you by the Secure Start Aura apps, supporting trauma-informed care and practice at home and in school.

James 0:17

I can hear your soft and mellifluous voice.

Colby 0:22

Well, it's never been described in that way, I have to say.

James 0:39

And one of the managers told me after I had made a presentation to the staff, he said, the staff are walking taller since you were here. And I said, What do you mean? He said, Well, you told them you're coming here to learn from them how to run a good program. And you're a professor at a university. So it made them feel valued and important. And they were, they were important to me. I discovered something called grounded theory. Now I don't know how many listeners would be familiar with this approach. But what I loved about it was that you actually develop your theory from practice. There's nothing so theoretical as good practice. In other words, if I could understand why this is good practice, that would give me the elements and dynamics of a theory. Paradoxically, one of the strengths of a group home is it is not a family. Because for many young people, a family is a very threatening environment. They have a lot of triggers from their past. And I heard children say things like, I don't need another family, I have a family. Yeah, it may be dysfunctional, but it's still my family. When I analyzed my data, I realized the good programs actually look past the pain, look past the behavior into the pain. And I came up with the term pain-based behavior to try and redefine what people were calling problem behavior. The problem with calling everything problem behavior is that you take it you react to it personally. If you understand it's pain-based, you actually are much more empathic towards what's going on for the child. I need to understand where this pain is coming from. One of the best programs I ever visited in Connecticut. The head nurse, after a few years of implementing this new approach they had, realized that the amount of medication they were using on children had dropped significantly. Like by half. And when she gave a talk recently about this, she credited to the notion of pain-based behavior. She said, we totally changed our mindset from wanting more drugs to control the kids to actually being effective in responding to the children, so we didn't, they didn't need these drugs anymore. The reason you want a good framework or theory is it gives you a way of managing complexity. Yes. In fact, I I once I once read a fellow who said, Sam Keane, I think it was, a poet, who said, basically our job is to help people get in touch with disowned parts of themselves and to bring them home and welcome them. So we've all got pieces that are missing or that we've rejected that we need to re-own or reintegrate. So that's another way of saying, I think, what you were saying about filling in some gaps and contributing to the future.

Colby 3:42

Yeah. Welcome

Guest Introduction And Acknowledgement

Colby 3:44

to the Secure Start Podcast. I'm Colby Pearce, and joining me for this 50th episode of the podcast is one of the most influential voices in children's residential care in the world. Before we begin this episode, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I come to you from, the Ghana people of the Adelaide Plains, and acknowledge the continuing connection the living Ghana people feel to land, waters, culture, and community. I'd also like to pay my respects to their elders, past, present, and emerging. My guest this episode is Professor James Anglin. Professor Anglin began his career as a child and youth care worker in a mental health centre in Vancouver, after which he developed a six-bed group home for adolescents in Victoria, Canada. He then pursued graduate studies, worked in social policy in Ottawa and Toronto, and returned to British Columbia in 1979 to join the faculty of the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria. He served as the School of Child and Youth Care Director for three terms, after which he became the University's Associate Vice President Academic and Director of International Affairs. From 1995 to 1999, he was an international advisor to the South African Interministerial Committee on Young People at Risk involved in the country's transformation of the child and youth care system. Currently he is president of Feature Canada, Chair of Feature America's Asia and Australia region, and a member of the Feature International Coordinating Committee. He also serves as a member of the International Work Group on Therapeutic Residential Child Care. His major research interests have included parent education and support, quality assurance, professionalization of child and youth care, and what constitutes quality residential care for children and youth. James is a research affiliate with the Bronfon-Brenna Centre for Translational Research at Cornell University, advising on the development and implementation of the Cornell Care Programme model that is now being delivered in seven countries. Professor Englin has published widely in international journals and texts and serves on the editorial boards of the Scottish Journal of Residential Childcare, the Residential Treatment for Children and Youth Journal, and the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies. So welcome to the Secure Start Podcast. Professor James Anglin. So I'm really excited to have you here and to uh talk about all things your life's work and uh with with that particular focus that you've had on children's residential care and therapeutic care for children and young people.

James 7:27

Well thank you. You you've interviewed a number of my favorite people, so it's uh a bit of an honour to be included.

Colby 7:34

Well, the honor I think the honour is mine, but um but thank you for for saying so. And if you've got others, there might be one or two names that I'm still chasing that you might know. And I might enlist your um help with that if if if uh you're um happy to to do to oblige in that way. I thought we'd start. I mean, your name is is very well known in around the world, and even you know, here in South Australia, South Australia is um not the most prominent part of Australia that people think of, and when when they think of Australia, um but your your work, I've been working here for over 30 years, your work is well known to me um for most of that time. And in particular, you wrote a book that um was published a little while ago now, but um, but has been very influential in the area of children's residential care and residential communities. Um I'm wondering if we just start there, if you can tell us a little bit about yourself, how you came into uh working in this field, and um yeah, and we'll get into uh uh various other things, including talking about your book as well.

From Philosophy To Group Homes

James 8:58

Well, I'm I'm always interested in the uh the origin stories of child and youth workers because it's not a profession you grew up learning about in school. Um most of us have never heard of it um for most of our our childhoods, um, unless, of course, you came in contact with child and youth care workers uh in your school or you had friends who lived in uh group homes or something like that. Um I I went to university uh thinking I was going to become a journalist. Um I loved writing, I did well in English in school, and I thought that would be an interesting thing to do. So I went off to uh what I considered the best program in the country in journalism. But in the first year of university, we had to do some compulsory courses outside our area of particular focus. So one of them was an introductory course to philosophy. Well, I just fell head over heels for philosophy. We had components on logic, on uh logical analysis, on uh Greek philosophers and uh and ethics. And I just thought this was the most fascinating thing I'd ever done. And most of my friends hated it and couldn't wait to get out of the course. But I decided to major in philosophy. So I finished my undergraduate degree, and then when I was trying to decide what to do next, I went into a graduate program in philosophy. And but after two years of my master's work, when I was faced with doing my thesis, I was talking to one of my professors and I said, Well, what do you do with a degree in philosophy? He said, Well, you get your PhD and then you teach it. And I suddenly realized in that moment that I enjoyed studying it, but I would not want to spend my life teaching it. So then I had to start looking around, and I was intrigued by um one of my professors who did training in gestalt therapy with Fritz Pearls. Wow. And so I ended up doing some training at the Gestalt Institute of Canada, which I found just fascinating and very much what I needed because philosophers are kind of you only deal with the eyebrows up. Whereas in Gestalt, you've got to bring together your whole being, right? So little did I know it, it actually was a transition preparing me to do child and youth work because you can't do child and youth work just from the eyebrows up. You can do philosophy that way, but you can't do child and youth work. So, um, and at that point, I got a call from a friend of mine who I'd known in university who did a degree in psychology. And he said, What are you doing, Jim? And I said, Well, I need to look for a job. I'm running out of money. And he said, Well, they're hiring at a mental health center where I've just been hired. I think you'd be good. And I said, What do you mean? I've never worked with children. I don't even know if I like children. And I've I've, you know, what would I have to offer? He said, Well, just do the interview. You know, come and have any, I'll set it up for you. So I I went over to Vancouver. I was on Vancouver Island at the time. I went to Vancouver, was interviewed, and they were very intrigued by my uh gestalt psychology training. They thought that could perhaps be useful in the uh in the program with, and these were called emotionally disturbed children in those days. So they hired me. Well, I can tell you the first month or two I was totally confused. I just I had no idea what I was doing. And a number of the other workers didn't know what they were doing either because there wasn't any training program for child and youth care workers. We got on-the-job training, but that was bit by bit over weeks. But there were some workers who were very experienced, and one in particular uh was from the streets of Chicago, and he knew how to read kids. So after a shift, I'd say, George, I'm gonna take you out for a beer, and you gotta tell me how you did what you did. So, anyway, I spent uh I spent a year and a half working in the mental health center and learned a great deal from people like George. And I just got hooked on the fact that these were fascinating young people. Um, one of the family therapists that I I met later in my career um referred to delinquents as Cadillacs with their steering gear out of whack. In other words, they're powerful and they have lots of energy, but you they don't know how to steer themselves. And and so I was trying to figure out how to help them learn how to steer themselves. That was a good image. Um, and then I met my wife at the center, she was another child and youth care worker, and we got married and moved to Victoria on Vancouver Island. And again, not knowing what else to do, I actually got hired to start a group home for young people. Yeah, uh, there were not a lot of trained people around to do that work. So I developed this six-bed group home, and these were six adolescents, four boys, two girls, uh, who had to make it in my home or they'd end up at a mental health center or a juvenile corrections facility. They were on the edge, right? And that was fascinating. Again, I worked 100 hours straight each week because it was a combined parent model and staff model. So I had relief for two and a half days a week, but the rest of the time I was on all the time. Yeah, it's not a sustainable way to work, but I can tell you it's a great way to learn.

Colby 14:43

Yeah.

James 14:44

So I learned, you know, how that I have to earn the trust and respect of these young people if anything is going to if it if this home is not going to be chaos. We had to, I had to form relationships. So it was a great grounding for me. And then I went on and and decided that the job I wanted was to actually supervise group homes. That would be a lot more fun than actually working in them. And but they said you need a master's degree to do that. So I went back to university and did a master's degree in social work. But after that, I moved on to other jobs in social policy and developing standards and all kinds of government type jobs until I decided to move back to Victoria and was looking for a job when government had a hiring free zone because of austerity. And those this was the 70s when there were financial crises happening. Um, so to end that story, I saw an ad in the newspaper for professors and instructors in child and youth care, and I didn't even know there was a child and youth care program at the University of Victoria. It was a quite a new program. So I was hired to work there, and uh I started out doing research on parent education and support because I really said, you know, if we can keep those kids at home, that would be far better.

Colby 16:04

Yeah, absolutely.

James 16:05

So I did research on that and you know, developed some some uh perspectives on parent education support. But then

Researching What Good Care Looks Like

James 16:14

after a number of years, when I had a sabbatical coming up, I thought, now what do I really want to research? You know, this is a great opportunity to go into something. And I thought back to my my days in residential care, and I said, you know, I did the best I could based on what I knew, but I'm not sure I knew what I was doing, and I'm not sure what I was doing was good for kids. I really wanted to go out and see, you know, what was good practice all about.

Colby 16:42

Yeah.

James 16:43

So I just I conceptualized the study as studying good group care and trying to develop a theory for how group good group care works, because I also looked around for I couldn't find any theories about what makes good residential care.

Colby 17:00

Yeah.

James 17:00

There were a lot of practice guides, there were a lot of, you know, case studies of programs that people loved and stories from youth and care, but I couldn't find a theory. And being trained in philosophy, I thought, you know, we need a framework here. We need something that's going to guide us in into good practice because it's not intuitive.

Colby 17:22

Around about what year was were you was this happening?

James 17:26

Well, the the the time I started this research was the mid-1990s. Right.

Colby 17:31

Yeah.

James 17:31

Um, and it took a long a bit, a fair bit of time because I was working at the same time. I was actually director of the department for part of the period. And so I had to fit this research in between, you know, teaching and and administration. But I did get funding from the uh Ministry for Children and Family Development, which covered my travel costs and you know, all that kind of thing. My time was my research time, so there was no charge for that. So I I asked around the province to people I knew and contacts and said, you know, what are the best programs in the province that you know about? And I had to find at least two people who said, This is a really good program. You know, the kids do well, um, they have good outcomes, the staff are great, whatever criteria they wanted, because I my job was to find out why they were good. And and so I didn't really care why they thought they were good. I was gonna go and do research. So I ended up with 10 programs across the province. Um, they ranged from four to fourte children in size. Um, their ages were 10 to 17. These were adolescents or young adolescents. Um, I I got permission from every home, and I had to go out to each home and get permission from every staff member and every child to come and research their programs. So that was a fascinating process. I had to get 100% buy-in. If one person said no, I I wouldn't go. And one of the managers told me after I had made a presentation to the staff, he said, the staff are walking taller since you were here. And I said, What do you mean? He said, Well, you told them you're coming here to learn from them how to run a good program. And you're a professor at a university. So it made them feel valued and important. And they were, they were important to me, you know. Um so I spent 14 months, and what I would do is is I usually would call them just before I would come for a visit to make sure there was no, you know, infectious disease around or that they weren't out on a program or something. But I could drop in basically any time, day or night, which I did. I'd go at breakfast time and watch them during wake up, uh, seeing them going off to school. Um, I would go in the evenings. I usually bring a dessert for dinner just because I didn't want to be a parasite. I could drop in when they were meeting with parents, and if the parents gave permission, I might sit in. So I really immerse myself, and I can still remember kids meeting me at the door saying, Oh, it's Jim. And I became part of the furniture, basically, you know, and and that was fantastic because I got to see the home in operation as if I wasn't there really. They weren't putting on a show for me, I was immersed in in what was actually going on, and that was the intention was to listen, to observe, and and I did some for a lot of formal interviews as well. But often the most important part was just being around as things happened. Um I ended up doing 85 formal interviews with children, former youth in care, parents, staff, managers, and people who supervise the homes. So I tried to get all the perspectives. Um, and there were, I think, 18 residents that I talked to, um, or former residents. Um, so anyway, that was the next and so why did I do this study? Well, number one, I wanted to see if I could develop a theory of what makes a good residential group care program because I couldn't find anything. I could find program descriptions, but nothing really theoretically grounded. And when I looked around at the methods, I discovered something called grounded theory. Now, I don't know how many listeners would be familiar with this approach. Yeah, perhaps six or two. But what I loved about it was that you actually develop your theory from practice. You don't develop a theory and then put lay it on practice. And what I found is people tended to pick up other theories and imply them in residential care. So they would pick up attachment theory, or they'd pick up reality therapy, or they'd pick up Gesolt therapy, or they'd pick up whatever, you know, uh behavioral theory. And they would Then use that to guide their programs. But I never felt they really fit well because they weren't developed for that setting in particular. And people had a lot of trouble translating those theories into effective practice. So when I found grounded theory, it fit perfectly because it it aligned with my belief that uh Kurt Lewin said there's nothing so practical as a good theory. And I really like that phrase. And I can tell you, most of the workers, if you talk to them, would say, I don't want theory, I want skills, I want practical things, right? There was a real distrust of theory amongst practitioners. And I think there often is amongst practitioners because they see theories that don't really make sense to them, or they're being asked to do things that don't really fit, you know, from their experience. So that was part of it, is there's nothing so practical as a good theory, and I really believe that. And I have examples which I could talk about later, which illustrate this, but I won't go into detail at this point. The other side of it is, though, is that I reversed it and said there's nothing so theoretical as good practice. In other words, if I could understand why this is good practice, that would give me the elements and dynamics of a theory.

Colby 23:22

Yes.

James 23:23

Right? So it was important to me that I find programs that were well functioning. And fortunately I did. Now they weren't well functioning all the time, but when you look at 10 different programs over 14 months, you begin to piece together the things that really do make a difference. Yeah. And I'll talk about that in a few minutes about what I discovered, right?

The Struggle For Congruence

James 23:46

Um so I guess the core and grounded theory, you're looking for a core variable around which everything else can be made sense of. So I kept searching for this core variable. It took me a long time to be confident that I discovered it. But what emerged, and and when it emerged, you begin to test all your data against it, and if it fits and works, then you know you're on track. So what I discovered, what at the heart of a good group program is uh working in congruence with the best interests of the children. And I called it a struggle for congruence because I realized you never get there. You're always trying to get better, but there's always more to do, and there are always things that get in the way, like funding or resourcing, or children keep changing, staff keep changing. So it's really hard to be consistently focusing on every child's best interest.

Colby 24:49

Yeah.

James 24:50

But that's the goal, right? Um, so the struggle for congruence became a really central aspect. And of course, in the literature, I realized that other people had used terms like harmony or balance or even concordance, you know, but they hadn't really developed the theoretical aspects of this. What does that really mean in practice?

Colby 25:12

Yeah.

James 25:13

So that that helped me make sense of everything, but then I'll give you the other components that emerged from the study, and then we can talk about it some more.

Colby 25:22

Yeah.

James 25:23

So there were three what I called key psychosocial processes that I discovered. The first one I'll articulate is at the level of the manager of the home, and that's creating an extra-familial living environment. That's a very complex thing to do. Um, and the reason I use the term extrafamilial was because paradoxically, one of the strengths of a group home is it is not a family.

Colby 25:52

Yeah.

James 25:53

And in this time of deinstitutionalization and family first and all that kind of thing, people do not understand that the reason we need good group homes is because they're not families. Yes. Because for many young people, a family is a very threatening environment. They have a lot of triggers from their past. And I heard children say things like, I don't need another family, I have a family. Yeah, it may be dysfunctional, but it's still my family.

Colby 26:23

Yeah, could not be a good one.

James 26:24

And there was a sense of being disloyal if they had to fit in with another family. Another way a child put it, which I found really helpful, he said, he'd been in foster care and then was in a group home. He said, The problem with a foster care is I have to fit in with them. He said, the group home fits with me. And so I kept hearing these kinds of things from the children about how they much preferred living in a group care situation. And I did a bit of analysis, which we can talk about later, about the differences between foster care and group care, but I'll leave it there for the moment. One of the things that I discovered, of course, is and I heard um your interview with Bruce Henderson, who's one of my favorite people. And Bruce talked about the number of placements that children went through, right, before they ended up in group care, because the the mantra of social work when I entered the field was try everything else first.

Colby 27:24

Yeah.

James 27:26

And and foster care is better than residential care. Residential care is a last resort. And so children go through 20, 30, 40 placements before they might end up in a residential group setting. Well, what a waste of time and energy, and you're burning out 20 or 30 foster homes. When when uh so my worst example was a child who was placed in 32 different foster homes in six years.

Colby 27:54

Yeah.

James 27:55

And so the first thing she tried to do when she was placed was to break it down because she said, That's not what I need, it's not what I want. So I have a slide I use in presentations that says, okay, who's the slow learner here? A system that was not learning that these kids, that's not what they need, and it's not what they want. I I'll pause there because I think you've had you look like you've got some thoughts about this.

Colby 28:23

Oh, certainly. I think um there a lot of damage is done. Perhaps once children come into care, the the most damage is done through placement breakdowns. The breakdowns of of the foster care arrangements for the children. The most harm, I would say, that children experience comes from that. And there are children who, as you say, well, they've all been hurt in a family context. The psychologist in me who who still remembers all my training around behavioral and cognitive behavioral uh therapies, um is saying to me, well, you know, the most effective way to um treat anxiety and trauma associated with with uh um an experience or experiences, um, adverse experiences is exposure. But none of us, none of us believe in flooding anymore or just chucking kids in at the deep end and hoping they they swim. Yeah. So it's gotta be graded. It's gotta be, you know, you've got to build up. Children have been hurt in a family environment. Um, we need to build the build back up to them feeling comfortable in a family environment again. So we've got to totally around the wrong way.

James 29:59

The goal is to get those children back into their family or into another community-based situation. Absolutely. But as you say, there's a period of time where they have to learn the knowledge and skills to be able to do that, to cope with that uh new reality.

Colby 30:17

Richard Rawlinson said it beautifully when he said, and this is Richard Rawlinson from from the Mulberry Bush uh in the UK. He said, uh, children come into the mulberry bush to learn to live with themselves and live with others.

James 30:34

Absolutely. So they need a period of time to do that before they can re-re you know, re-engage with the family, which was very dysfunctional for them. It's not an easy job. No, I have good stories about that too, about children I talked to and about them reintegrating and and what they told me. It's fascinating. Um, but let me tell you a story, a dramatic story that happened to me while I was doing the research. So

Pain-Based Behaviour And A Turning Point

James 31:01

one day I was walking across a snowy and I'm gonna read this because it's the way I wrote the story about my experience. I'm walking across a snowy and frozen landscape. I'm admiring the beauty of the snow laden evergreen trees and the light patterns and the curves on the snow mounds between the trees. Just a really blissful thing. I'm traversing a wide and flat expanse of snow, surveying the scene with an inner sense of curiosity and tranquility. Suddenly I find myself falling downward, and I realize that I have broken through some thin ice. I have been walking across a frozen body of water without realizing it. My entire body was plunged into the frigid water. Terrifying experience, as you can imagine. I have it on several sheets here because I have some photos too. And air bubbles were streaming from my mouth, and I gasped at being submerged and unable to breathe. It was a really scary experience. But then I woke up, still feeling the after effects of a shock-like reaction in my body. So I wrote that up on November 13th, 1999. It was towards the end of my research, and it was a very, very powerful dream. It was I can still remember it vividly because it was that strong a dream. And what I realized very quickly within minutes, when I kind of you know woke up with a shock, was that what I what I what the water was, that frozen water was pain. It represented pain. And as I lay in bed reflecting, I had been through a particularly challenging day the day before in a home which was going through some real turmoil. And I thought what that did was trigger in me a sense that these people are all in pain. And then I thought back and I said, actually, every single child that I've met is in pain. And yet the programs aren't talking about pain. They're talking about behavior. They're talking about how do we manage this children's child's behavior, and what do we need to do to control this child, or what boundaries do we need to set, or whatever. But they never used the term pain. They talked about, you know, the challenging behavior, the troubling behavior, and even the literature generally talked about troubled and troubling children, right? Occasionally there were mentions of pain, but no one really was exploring it. And so that really overtook me. And I realized that at the heart of what I'm studying is pain. And the what I when I analyzed my data, I realized the good programs actually look past the pain, look past the behavior into the pain. Yeah, it didn't happen a huge amount of times, but when that happened, kids started to respond differently. Yeah.

Colby 34:16

Yeah.

James 34:17

So I said this is a really important thing that that, and I came up with the term pain-based behavior to try and redefine what people were calling problem behavior. Right? The problem with calling everything problem behavior is that you take it per you react to it personally. If you understand it's pain-based, you actually are much more empathic towards what's going on for the child. I need to understand where this pain is coming from.

Colby 34:45

Yeah, yeah. Well, I the question that popped into my head is if you see it as problematic behavior, like who's got the problem? Exactly.

James 34:55

Exactly. And and so anyway, that was a that was a huge insight for me, and it's proven to actually be a huge insight for many. Um, I've I've been quite surprised that I mean it's entered the literature. Pain-based behavior is uh I have a whole special issue of a journal I did with people talking about how they're using pain-based behavior.

Colby 35:18

Yeah.

James 35:19

Um, and and Laura Steckley is one of those. When she wrote a book, two chapters I think were on pain-based behavior. Martha Holden at Cornell has a couple of chapters on pain. New York State Training talks about pain-based behavior now, and that was a word that didn't exist before. So I I feel really gratified that some that that insight has actually proven to be really helpful. And I'll end up with one other story. There's a one of the best programs I ever visited in Connecticut. The head nurse, after a few years of implementing this new approach they had, realized that the the amount of medication they were using on children had dropped significantly, like by half. Wow. And when she gave a talk recently about this, she credited to the notion of pain-based behavior. She said, we totally changed our mindset from wanting more drugs to control the kids to actually being effective in responding to the children, so we didn't, they didn't need these drugs anymore. Because the the reason the doctors would give drugs is the staff would be complaining about these behaviors.

Colby 36:30

Yes.

James 36:30

But if the staff came in and said, no, actually things are going really well, and yeah, he had a difficult time. Um, they don't if they don't have to prescribe medication.

Colby 36:39

The rascal in me thinks um if the if the staff had the problem, maybe the doctor should have prescribed them the medication.

James 36:48

Well, I think uh what what what was being prescribed was a course in how to respond to pain-based behavior. That's really what they needed.

Colby 36:56

Yeah.

James 36:57

Not how to control behavior, but to respond to the pain. And many programs are now doing this, I think, really effectively. So, yeah, so that was a real wake-up call for me, literally and figuratively, in my study. So responding to pain-based behavior was the second core psychosocial process, that if I could put it that way. And that's the worker's main challenge. So the the manager's main challenge is creating the the environment for an extrafamilial program. The worker's main challenge is to learn how to respond effectively to pain and pain-based behavior. The uh the third one, and that's why my own book, it's got a very awkward title, Pain, Normality, and the Struggle for Congruence. But it needed to have pain as the first word because that's what the children were showing me. What this is really all about is my pain, and no one's paying attention to it. So I had to have pain up front.

Normality And The Need For Dignity

James 37:57

And if yeah, now the third thing that I realized is that what these kids wanted more than anything was to be to feel normal. They they were placed in group homes, they'd been through various mental health or juvenile correction systems, and they were labeled by many people, and you know, they knew they were bad kids and all that sort of stuff. They're aching to feel they were being treated normally. So, develop what I call developing a sense of normality is something that can happen in a group home. Now, this is a bit of a paradox, as you can see, because there's nothing normal about a group home in our communities or our societies. You know, a family is very different from a group home. But paradoxically, children who spend a period of time in a good group home, one that understands their pain and how to respond to it, help them to cope with getting through life, learn to be more successful in their everyday interactions, in those programs, they begin to develop a sense of normality. Now that has to be carried on after they leave. It's just planting seeds, is the way I see it. But if one person, for the first time in your life, treats you with respect or actually cares about you in a very deep way, or helps you to solve a problem that you have that no one else has ever paid attention to, you begin to develop a sense of trust, a sense of dignity, a sense of caring, a sense of all kinds of things. I have a whole list that I developed based on my research. Yep. Um, and maybe I'll just go through quickly. Um what what I this was one of the other major elements of the of the framework that I worked on. Yeah. And um what I called interactional dynamics. So I had hundreds of pages of notes based on conversations, observations, etc., interviews. And the grounded theory method, you go you keep combing through your data to say what's going on here, what is happening, you know, how do I understand the lives of these people that I'm studying? And it's a very, very powerful method, but it's very rigorous, and you take a lot of time to try and tease out things from the data that you gather. And what I found was that all of the positive changes that I experienced, whether it was observation in the group home or in interviews with the children, or just overhearing conversations, I made notes of things that really hit me as positive interactions. There were 11 dynamics that I that that that explained all the changes that were happening in a positive way. And I went, oh, this is fantastic, this is amazing. I mean, if we can if these 11 things are at the core of good group home work, we need to help people focus on these things, right? And it wasn't just the children changing, given the notion of congruence, staff had to treat each other according to these dynamics. The manager had to treat their staff according to the, and they had to treat the families they worked with, and ultimately they had to deal with the programs around them according to these dynamics. So these are very generalized dynamics about how you help positive change. So um, and I know that a number of programs have used these to do an evaluation of their program to have people come in and observe and to use this as a bit of a, you know, are you seeing these things? Are we doing these things or not? So uh if you don't mind, maybe I'll just go through them.

Colby 41:58

Absolutely.

James 41:59

So the first one is, and they they may sound pretty straightforward, but in the context of a group home, they're not always easy to do. So the first one I've got is listening and responding with respect. Do the children feel really listened to? Do the workers feel their supervisors are listening to them? Do the do the supervisors feel their managers are listening to them and respecting what they're saying? Those aren't small things, as you would know from organizational experience. But if you are listened to and responded with respect, you really begin to develop a sense of being valued and a sense of self-worth. And whether you're a child or an adult, that's important. The second one was communicating a framework for understanding. What I discovered is that many of the kids couldn't tell me why they were there. Now they may have been told when they first came into care, or they may have had they all thought that it's because I'm a bad kid.

Colby 43:00

Yeah.

James 43:01

Right? No one had really, or if they had explained it to them, they didn't explain it in a way that they really integrated it. So children need to understand why they're there, you know, and what what am I, what's supposed to be happening here? The staff need to know what am I expected to do, you know, as a staff member. If people say, oh, just love the kids. Well, no, that doesn't help me, you know. What are the expectations by which I'm going to be judged as a worker? Um, and the homes need to understand what we are being funded to do, right? Are we all on the same page? Do the funders understand what our program is about? And are we communicating that effectively to the funders, for example? So this communicating a framework happens at all levels of daily life, really. And it fits in with my thinking about you know, there's nothing more practical than a good theory or a good framework.

Colby 43:55

Yeah.

James 43:56

The third one is building rapport and relationships. And I think that's well known now. You know, I think every profession has woken up to the importance of whether they talk it up talk about um, you know, engagement or whether they talk about therapeutic relationships or whether they talk about uh trying to think of the different terms. You know the different terms. There are many different terms for this that professionals use in different professions. Um, but the notion comes down to are you connecting with the kids in a way that you develop trust and caring between you and respect. And I use the term rapport because one of the programs that I studied was only three days long maximum. It was an emergency shelter.

Colby 44:40

Oh.

James 44:41

I learned a lot from that program actually about how you welcome and how you say farewell to children, even after a short visit. And within within hours, they developed rapport with the children who came in. They were extremely good at connecting with young people who were very distraught and often, you know, very traumatized. Yeah, because they were placed in emergency shelter for various reasons. The fourth one was establishing structure and routine. Now, I think again, child youth care has always talked about the importance of normalizing the environment, having regular bed times, regular feeding, you have regular meal times, um, clear expectations for what happens, you know, in various situations. So, that of course is always going to be important. And that helps the children to relax and feel there's some predictability in their world. Because, as you would well know, is many of these children coming into care have never had routines. They don't know if they're going to eat tomorrow or not, or if their parents are coming home or not. You know, their lives are very often chaotic. And that kind of sense of trusting the environment and the reliability of other people is really important. And that's true at all levels of the staff. You know, if your manager comes in and suddenly flies off the handle at you, that's not very helpful. No, you need to have some predictability and reliability in your relationships. The fifth one is inspiring commitment. And this is a this is an interesting, and I had to have the word inspiration in here because one of my favorite theorists um talks about the essence of organizations is spirit. You know, uh, you want we talk about esprit de corps, we talk about team spirit, but we seldom really look at it. What does that really mean? And you know it when you see it, right? When there's a sports team where everybody comes together and they're all making sacrifices for each other, you feel it, right? And they always perform much better than if each individual tried to maximize their own stardom, if I could put it that way. So we know about that from many other areas, but it's really important in a group home, and that we would gotta inspire the children that there is a better future, you can do better, you are doing well in these areas, and I know you can do better. I remember one uh worker, the child was complaining about oh, you don't know the pain I've suffered, you don't know my family, etc. etc. etc. Um, and the worker said, Yes, I know that, and I also know you can make good decisions. It just stopped the child in his tracks. He never had an adult trust to say that about him. That you I know you can make good decisions, and you could just see in that moment that he was getting a new appreciation of himself. So I'm just these are little little examples, only a few more. Offering young people emotional and developmental support. Well, I don't have to say more about that. We know that trauma requires that. Um, developing a sense of caring and and for mastery, you need that kind of uh relationship, set of relationships, challenging the thinking and actions of young people. Um okay, these two things go together: offering emotional support and challenging. And it particularly came out to me in supervision. If you're gonna supervise frontline workers, you have to first develop a strong relationship, which will allow you to challenge them when they're not doing well. But you can do it, they will know you're doing it in a supportive way rather than trying to undercut them. So the best supervisors I saw, they didn't they didn't insult the staff, they would say, explain to me why you you made that choice, you know. Do you think you could have made a different choice? You know, so they would challenge very gently the person to come up with a better way of thinking or a better way of doing things. So offering developmental uh and emotional support and challenging thinking and actions is really critical. If we don't challenge each other in the care situation, then bad things will happen and continue to happen. Three more sharing power and decision making with young people. Um, we all know, I think, from the research, that if you involve children in developing the rules for your program, they're far more likely to follow them. Right? And often the rules they come up with are far more stringent than the ones you would ever come up with.

Colby 49:29

That was exactly what was going through my mind.

James 49:32

It's really interesting. Now, and sometimes you have to temper it and say, well, maybe that's a little more than you know. So, but having that dialogue and actually having them have genuine input into what's going on makes a huge difference. Respecting personal space, and I have terrible stories about when people's personal space wasn't respected, things go badly wrong. And sometimes all it took was a worker to say, a child comes in totally out of control, yeah, and he says, I'm gonna go up to my room. You don't suddenly say, No, you're not, you're gonna sit here and talk to me. You say, Fine, when you're ready, let's talk. Right? So giving them some space to actually deal with what's going on, but letting them know you're there, you're available. You know, discovering and uncovering the potential of young people. That's so important. I guess you and I probably both have examples of people in our past who saw more in us than we saw in ourselves, whether it was in the elementary school or you know, high school or university or or just in work. I can tell you two or three stories where my career would have been over in child and youth work if it hadn't been somebody who believed in me and believed in me more than I understood I was capable of myself. Uh, and so we need to do that with children too. We need to help them see that actually there's a lot that you're doing really well. You're very close to actually achieving some goals that you probably didn't believe you could achieve, right? And they do that. They respond, you know. And the last one is just simply providing resources. And my favorite story about this one I mean, sometimes a kid who wants to play basketball just needs good basketball shoes to fit in with the team, right? Don't want them to go in old tattered sneakers, and everybody else has these Michael Jordans or whatever, you know. Um, so one of my favorite stories, and I tend to cry when I tell this story, so fair warning. Um, one of the children who I had been observing in the program was was leaving to go back home. And they had a little cake and and saying goodbye, a little farewell. And I happened to be there for that. No, actually, I wasn't there for that. He told me the story about it. I mean, I knew everybody involved, but I I he told me the story. He said, He said, Jim, they gave me a cake, which was really nice. But the director, I used to go fishing with my favorite thing in the group home was to go fishing on Saturdays. He would take me fishing with him. So when he was being discharged from the group home and he was leaving, the director gave him a fishing rod as a present. And he said, Jim, that was the best present anybody had ever given me in my life. Because it connected with that relationship, it gave him the ability to go out and have that experience on his own. So sometimes just giving children what they need at the right time can have a huge impact, and just so it's it's a way of loving, actually, is you pay enough attention that you give a gift that fits with exactly where they are. So

Eleven Dynamics That Create Change

James 52:57

those are the major elements. And what I realized also, and this is where the congruence came up, is that the five levels of group home operation that I identified one is the extra agency level, the funders, and the schools and all the system that surrounds the group home. There's the management, there's the supervision, there's the care work, and then there's the children and the families. So the notion of congruence has several dynamics. First thing is it has to be congruent across all five of those levels. And I also discovered, and this is actually, I think, echoed in the management literature, is that the congruence flows from the top. In other words, you have to have strong leadership that lives by the principles and values that you want the program to represent. Because you can't have them being SOBs to their staff and expect the staff to care for the kids. So that's where leadership is so vitally important. And so some of the programs that I've helped develop, they all start with training the board and the senior leadership of the agency first. You don't just train the line workers, the leadership has to know the principles and the practices that are important at all levels of the organization. And be behind them. 100% behind them, or it's not going to work. So those are the elements, and I have a schematic which is really using a Rubik's Cube. And I hadn't really thought about a Rubik's Cube a lot, Rubik's Cube, except that I thought it was a good way to demonstrate the interaction between all these various elements. So on one dimension, you have the five levels of the organization, another level you have the three basic psychosocial processes that I mentioned. On the other dimension, you have the 11 interaction dynamics, and all those have to be situated within a circle of congruence. And and and I think it illustrates very well the complexity of group home work. Because, yes, there are only about 20 elements, but do you know how many combinations of a Rubik's cube there are?

Colby 55:12

Yeah, yeah. I died.

James 55:15

It's 47 quintillion. I mean, it's got like 12 or 14 zeros in it, and that's just a simple Rubik's cube, six by six, whatever it is, six by six by six, I think it is. Or no, is it four by four by four actually? And it's got six sides. But the number of combinations you can make of colors and and positions is in the quintillions.

Colby 55:39

Wow.

James 55:40

But do you know how many moves it takes to solve a Rubik's cube, no matter how complex?

Colby 55:46

I have I have this is something that I struggled with a lot when I was younger. I've moved on from it. I couldn't do it, but tell me, tell us.

James 55:58

A Rubik's Cube never takes more than 20 moves. Right. If you know what you're doing, you can solve it in less than, and most of them, 80% probably in less than 10 moves. The world record now is about three and a half seconds on average to solve a Rubik's cube from any position. When I first did this study, I think the record was seven seconds. But the the point I'm trying to make is that the reason you want a good framework or theory is it gives you a way of managing complexity. Yes.

Colby 56:33

Yes.

James 56:34

So the way that you solve a Rubik's Cube is you have an algorithm or you have a formula that that you follow because you know that this is going to lead to the outcome you want. Well, I'm saying if you've got a framework like the one I'm proposing, it doesn't have to be this one, but something like it that guides your practice, you can make good decisions quite quickly because you know what the major dynamics are. You know what you're trying to achieve. You know? What does this child need from me right now? Well, there's not an infinite number of things. You can reduce that to a number of dynamics, and then if you respond appropriately, then they lead you to where you need to go.

Colby 57:18

Yeah.

James 57:18

Right? That's the difference from reacting to behavior to understanding pain. Is that the children will then guide you to what is going to soothe their pain. What's what kind of relationship they need to begin to relax and to trust. Anyway, that's that's a quick overview of of my entire book. I hope it wasn't too overwhelming.

Colby 57:44

I think well, I it certainly came across as very accessible to me. And I I agree that um a good a good theory, a good good organizing theory um in this space, um Laura Steckley, who you mentioned, um, I've had on the podcast, and uh and she's uh just between the two of us, uh she's the next one I'm editing and putting up for a second appearance. But she talks about different types of containment, and one of those um I can't remember who she said the the name of the person who came up with these different types of containment. One of the the one that really shame home to me was epistemological containment. Right. That that idea, that having that um a guiding framework to that helps you make sense of the work, that helps you manage complexity. And I reflected on my own career, and uh, you know, when I started uh as a clinical psychologist straight out of university, my first job was in child protection, and the location was um in in the outer suburbs, outer northern suburbs of Adelaide, the most disadvantaged population with most most um complexities in their life um in Adelaide. And I hadn't I had an interest in attachment theory, but I hadn't I hadn't done a placement, a work placement as part of my training in in child protection. Most people who most of my peers who went into uh or most who of my peers who subsequently went to work in child protection had done a training placement in often enough under my supervision, but anyway, but I had an interest in attachment theory, and and that became my working framework and was and was a containing framework, if you like. So you know that's I'm when I'm listening to you talk, I'm thinking about in containment terms. So containment

Leadership Congruence And Managing Complexity

Colby 1:00:06

being something that helps you manage the unmanageable, right? Having a good theory as you talk about it, or is is something that helps you manage what could easily become the unmanageable in in the circumstances, um, and it's a form like I'm hearing and using the word in my head epistemological containment.

James 1:00:32

Yes, yeah, I think I think it does fit very much uh with what I I was discovering um and wanting to discover uh was that and and partly I I accredit that to partly to my philosophical background. I I just need to have an understanding of what I'm doing, not just do it. You know, I want to have a cognitive way of of making sense of what's happening, not just experiencing it, but actually making cognitive sense as well as effective sense.

Colby 1:01:05

Yeah. So can I ask then? Um you very early in your professional life, you set up a group home for six young people, as you as you mentioned, and at that time, I guess I'm paraphrasing what you've talked about uh during this conversation, but at that time and subsequent, at least immediately subsequent to it, you you were of the of a mind that you just did the best you could with what you knew at the time, yeah. Um, but you didn't, it sounds like you didn't really have a theory at that time, you didn't have a uh an epistemologically containing theory that that reassured you that made sense of it. I do wonder after you did your research and you looked back, how much of what you did in that first group home was aligned? I use the word alignment as well as congruence, um, was was actually aligned with what what you what you discovered in the research.

James 1:02:15

I I I I'd answer it by saying the things that I did well aligned with the theory, and the things that didn't go well were not aligned with the theory. In other words, the problem is it was too hid and miss. I was learning by trial and error. And I that is not a good way to learn to work with children because they're the ones who pay the price. And that's that's a big criticism I have of, you know, when I first started working in a mental health center, there was far too much hid and miss, and the children had to suffer as a result from us not really knowing what we were doing. Um, these were the days before there were university training programs or college training programs. Um, and so that's one reason why I was happy to join the university was to create a training program which would prepare people so that they could enter the practice without going through all that hit and miss. They would have frameworks, they would have some practical experience that was supervised before they entered into a work situation.

Colby 1:03:20

And that's I guess what I you know immediately came to mind was that um at the time that you did this, um, there wasn't the level of preparation for people that there is now. But it also, you know, some people say, well, look, you know, raising kids isn't that hard. I mean, it shouldn't be that hard for us humans because you know any number of of members of the animal kingdom raise their offspring um to independence without guidance, without you know, theories, um, without psychologists and psychiatrists and social workers and others you know guiding and and giving advice on how to do it. Like how hard can it be? That's I think that's something that you come up you can come up against in this sector and and even in in other uh parts of the social care spectrum. But but what what what I'm thinking about is the importance of congruence, the importance of what other people refer to as a primary task, but uh the the importance of actually getting some having some learning as part of the job.

James 1:04:39

You know, when I look back, I wish I'd had more child youth care training before I became a parent, or my early years of being a parent. I mean, there's no better way to learn about something than to teach it, right? Um But yeah, I miss I think I missed a lot of opportunities when I look back through my theory. Let me tell you one story. Uh maybe just this I know one of the things that you were you and I talked about is the powerful moments in child and youth care, right? And living with children. And this applies, I think, to parenting as well as to alternative care situations. One of the stories that one of the young people told me, which was it stuck with me, and I've actually used it in the foreword to another book uh by someone else, um, illustrating, I think, that we never quite know what impact we're having on these kids. So I was interviewing this young boy, and he said, Let me tell you a story. I said one morning, Saturday morning, I came downstairs, and I could hear there are two workers. There was a male and female worker on the shift that Saturday, and they were arguing in the kitchen. So we sat down on the stairs. And he was terrified. He said, Because when I was growing up, when a man and woman argued, the man beat up the woman. I listened and listened, and suddenly the arguing sort of stopped. So I went into the kitchen and they said, Oh, you know, good morning, welcome. We've made pancakes. Do you want to have some pancakes and maple syrup? And he said, You know, it was the first time in my life where I'd seen a man and a woman argue without the man beating up the woman. And I realized there's a different way for men to treat women, and I decided that's the way I wanted to be. And I went, Oh my gosh. And those workers had no idea that he had that insight. I mean, they may well have laid the seeds for breaking a cycle of family violence in that moment. And they have no idea that he had that experience because he told it to me, but he wouldn't have told it to them. And I think that's happening around us all the time. How we interact, that's the congruence. How we interact with each other as staff, as manager and supervisor, is being observed by these children. Yeah. And they're going to absorb those lessons. And there's far it's far more powerful to see two adults work through a problem than to be told not to fight. So, you know, I think those moments, that's why we have to be on our toes all the time. And when you ask me, you know, how I look back at how I was doing, I miss so many opportunities like that. Because I wasn't really tuned in to the importance of every interaction being congruent with certain principles of healthy relationship.

Colby 1:07:57

And I guess, yeah, I mean, I can also look back early in my career, and although I, you know, I was master's level trained, which is the highest level here in Australia at the time. Um I haven't I'm not the practitioner now that I was 31 years ago. Yeah, I I I I I like to think that I've come a long way, not least of which, because I I see practice as its own form of grounded uh theory, um, you know, it's its own sort of uh ethnical uh ethnographic research. Um you do pick stuff up, pick stuff up. You learn as you go, right? You do you learn such a lot, and um yeah, but but I guess um this is you know, this is one of the reasons why I have a podcast, right? And why I want to you know, I want to talk to the Professor Anglins of the world, is um I think it's it's really important to I guess get through what I observe as in in some quarters is a degree of resistance around um training first and foremost. And secondly, about um understanding your task in residential care.

Defending Residential Care With Real Evidence

Colby 1:09:22

I I think so I'm just gonna on my hobby horse, my concern is that so long as people are all levels of the social care system, from the minister to the chief executive to the the leadership and so on, so long as they see residential child care as an option of last resort, they will treat it as an option of last resort. And you said something very profound to me that that stuck with me when when we met prior to the recording of this podcast, which I've written up here, um, which is if if you don't believe in good quality residential childcare, then you won't have it. And my concern is that, and and I think this is some of my guests have talked about this struggle to make sure that um that residential care is not seen as an option of last resort, and that there is there's actually an understanding of the worth of residential childcare and the and and in having that understanding in investing in it, investing on making sure that we have good quality residential childcare, that staff are adequately educated and supported in in the work that they do.

James 1:10:43

Yeah, I um you're you're you're triggering in me. I did a series of presentations in Australia uh not quite a few years ago now, where I was in I guess Brisbane and Sydney and Adelaide and Melbourne. And I think it was South Australia where I gave a presentation and it was the the thank you was being given to me by the director of residential care for the state. And actually, I think it was before, I think she was welcoming me actually. Yeah, I think it was before my talk. But she'd obviously been well briefed because she stood up and she said, Well, I can assure you that the department is trying to act in a way congruent with the way we want our programs to operate. And I went, Whoa, she's got the notion of congruence. She's admitting that that's what they need to do, is for the the way that the state decision makers and funders work needs to be congruent with the relationships you want for the children that you're responsible for. And I went, whoa, if we could have systems that congruent, I mean, actually striving to be congruent and being willing to be held accountable to that. How different, I mean, then the whole system becomes a container, not just the home. Right. There are various there's another person that talks about the holding organization.

Colby 1:12:17

Yep. Yep.

James 1:12:18

Right? And that whole notion of somebody has to embrace the chaos and to give a sense of safety and support. That you know, the emotional and cognitive support to the people who are embroiled in that. Because there is nothing, I can tell you, and you know, Colby, nothing more complex that I've ever done in my life than working in a group home for a hundred hours a week. Nothing. I mean, a vice president of university, heading a research project, working in government at a senior level, nothing compares to the complexity of living with six kids 24-7 and having to make good decisions. So that's good training for any any any organization, I think.

Colby 1:13:08

Yeah, yeah, but you need a uh you need that epistemological containment as well. You need you that the holding environment and the theoretical model, the practice, you know, the practice model. I I wonder what what do people who are working in children's residential care make of? You know, the the Minister for Child Protection, for example, saying we we need to save children from being placed in residential care. Yeah. What do they make of this, you know, the the the reporter in the newspaper talking about um you know residential care as being uh of such low quality that no child you know it should be in there, and certainly younger children of certain age shouldn't be in residential care. What do they make of a of a Royal Commission that comes out and says that as that we should be striving to end residential care of children and young people?

James 1:14:11

Well, I mean, there are poor residential care settings, absolutely, and there have been horrendous things that have been done in the past, and I know well because I've been involved in several cases involving historical abuse. At the same time, there are really good programs for kids, and we need to hold those up. And and as I say, we need to have the, as you say, this theoretical frame or epistemological framework which makes sense of all of this and actually communicate. I think part of the problem that we've had as a profession is we haven't communicated the complexity well, and that's what I hope my theory started to do is to cut through the complexity and to give us some landmarks that we could share with people that they would understand. You know, listening and responding to a child with respect when they're throwing a chair at you, that's not easy to do. No, but that's our job. You don't just grab them and put them in isolation, you realize that these this kid is really in that moment feeling pain so strongly that what he needs is somebody to help him contain it.

Colby 1:15:26

Yeah. Yeah.

James 1:15:27

Right? He doesn't need somebody to start yelling at him and fighting him and all that. I mean, uh you know that as well as I do, but how do we communicate that to decision makers and to people who think that residential care is too expensive and a waste of money and it doesn't work anyway?

Colby 1:15:49

Yeah, yeah. What are your thoughts about that? How we do that?

James 1:15:53

We need to hold up more examples of of when it does work. And one of the best things we can do is if you have a good program, invite people to come and have dinner at the house. That I saw that in my own research. There was a social worker who believed that residential care was bad for all kids, yeah, and it was responsible for this home. And the worker would go and meet with them and meet with them, and she just wasn't buying it. And the so she said, Look, I'd like you to come to dinner at our house next Friday. And reluctantly, she agreed. Well, when she spent the evening with those kids and some of the kids she knew from the case files, she said, Those kids are nothing like the case files that I read. These kids are great. And she said, Well, we're working with them to help them, you know, change some of those behaviors. She became the strongest supporter of that program in the ministry because she firsthand experienced the power of therapeutic care.

Colby 1:16:58

Yeah.

James 1:16:59

In her head, she she had been taught this is bad, this is last resort, avoid it. But when she spent time there, she said, wait a minute, these kids are getting better here in a way that I never imagined could happen in such a short time.

Colby 1:17:18

I

How The Cornell CARE Model Scales

Colby 1:17:19

know you're associated with the Cornell program. I I wonder if you might um just speak a little bit about um their model, um, the care model, and how it really aligns with your work and and the outcomes that they achieved with that model.

James 1:17:39

Well, I I have you really do need to interview Martha Holden, who worked with a team. She was the head of the team that developed the care model. And after I'd published my research, I gave a presentation in Scotland that was attended by a researcher from Cornell. And he took my book back and asked all the people in the residential care project to read it. I then got an email from Martha saying, would we be able to use your framework? Because we've been asked to develop an organ. Originally they were asked to develop a training program for workers, but they said, the more we read your book, the more we realize we actually have to do an organizational development framework.

Colby 1:18:26

Yeah.

James 1:18:27

In other words, we need the leaders on board, we need the supervisors, we need everybody trained. And we were you've got pieces that we didn't have, you know, in our toolbox. And I said, Well, of course you can use it, that's why I published it, right? But they then invited me to be part of the group that was actually developing the program and then implementing it and then evaluating it. And it went, it took 12 years from the first meeting to create the framework, to start creating the framework, to actually having the program accepted as an evidence-based practice. Because you have to you have to implement it, you have to evaluate it, you have to publish about it, you have to demonstrate, you know, what the impact is. And it takes 12 years to do that. I didn't believe it when I was told it was going to take 12 years. It took almost exactly 12 years. So it's been extremely gratifying to see people of the caliber of the people at Cornell pick up my theoretical framework, add to it, translate it into a practice framework, which is now being used in seven countries in hundreds of programs. I said to Martha, can you guarantee that all the programs are using this are high quality? And she said, What I can tell you is they're all getting better. In other words, some start not so far along, some start being pretty good. But all of them get better using this approach. And they have they need training, they need technical support, they do evaluations. I mean, there's a whole system built in to try and sustain the model. Because, as you know, the difficulty is to take something that's exciting for a few years and to sustain it for 10, 20, 30 years, and to keep the spirit alive amongst the staff and you know, the belief in the importance of of this way of working and this way of living. So I think Cornell is doing a really effective job in making this accessible and sustainable in across cultures. It's proven the principles that they've developed appear to have to apply across cultures. It's being used in Taiwan, in Chile, in Spain, in the USA, in Canada, in Ireland. I mean, those are diverse cultures.

Colby 1:20:56

Yeah. Yeah.

James 1:20:57

Um and uh so I think I would really suggest you talk to Martha Holden because she's the one who worked uh and is still guiding, um, although she's beginning to move back now. She's m getting other people to take over because she's near retirement. But the the care model I think builds in the kinds of principles that you and I have been talking about uh as well as any I've ever seen.

Handing Over The Work And Closing Thoughts

Colby 1:21:25

Speaking of retirement, what's what's the future hold for James Englin?

James 1:21:34

Um I'm reaching the point where I'm looking to hand a lot of things over to younger leaders, right? Um I'm president of FITSE Canada, which is part of FITSE International, which is an organization that was started in 1948 to support children's villages after the Second World War. It's morphed over the years into a much more broad and you know, but it is the one of the major organizations that supports quality alternative care. In fact, we issued a statement just last fall on uh what the importance of quality alternative care, including residential care, as part of the spectrum of services. So that organization has never stopped believing in quality residential care. Um, so I'm I formed a group in Canada which is now having a national meeting in June in Newfoundland, and I'm hoping that more young people can step in and take over some of the responsibilities. I do take on projects like uh advising class action lawsuits that are dealing with historical abuse. Um, so I I do that. It's not easy doing those, but I think it's important that we hold systems to account for what's happened and what needs to be done differently in the future. I still write chapters occasionally for books and for journals, uh, as I'm asked or as I feel moved and things. So um I I've never understood work-life balance, really. I mean, to me, my work is my life, and my life is my work. And you know, I to me it's just there's just no separation between I mean, I I probably work seven days a week, at least a little bit, you know, and and not because I have to, but because I love to. Yes. Um, but I don't work a full day anymore. I tend to work half days and uh do a little bit of help around the house and go on outings with my wife and take my dogs for a walk and things like that. So yeah, I'm very much at the I mean, I've been doing this work for almost 55 years now. Yeah, in one way or another, right? So I think I am I am losing some of the stamina that I had. There's no way I'd want to run a group home again right now. It isn't stamina to do it.

Colby 1:23:58

Stamina is the word, isn't it? That that's what you don't lose the knowledge necessarily, but you yeah, but the stamina wanes.

James 1:24:09

Absolutely, and uh yeah, so aging has its consequences, I'm afraid. Um, but you know, when I see people like Laura Steckley and uh you know others coming along who are doing such brilliant work, uh Ruth Eamon, I don't know if she talked about Ruth Eamon's work, I can't remember. Uh I met Ruth Eamon when she was doing her PhD work, actually. She was living in a children, or it was just after she'd stopped living in a girls' residential program. So, I mean, there are people around the world who are doing who believe in this work and are contributing to the knowledge base in very important ways. So that gives me a lot of hope for the future because certainly the deinstitutionalization movement around the world now is very, very disconcerting. It's dispiriting, it's uh devaluing, it's uh it's leading to very poor care for children. And we're gonna, I'm afraid it's gonna have to get really bad before people will wake up and realize that they've gone too far, yeah, that they need to rebuild quality residential care. Uh, because some children just can't be coped with in a family-based situation. Yeah. At least for certain periods of time, right?

Colby 1:25:23

Yeah, yeah.

James 1:25:26

So, you know, I continue to try and uh do what I can to move things forward, but uh yeah, I'm I'm more and more aware of of being more generative. I I want to help others to to do the work. Oh, yeah. And that's what your podcast does, right? I mean, I love that you do this podcast. I've actually recommended you already, I think I told you, to another young woman who's starting to do podcasts for the first time. Uh, she's gonna interview me in the next two weeks as her first podcast. Yep. Uh just because she trusts me to kind of work it, work things out with her. Um, so yeah, I think I think the kinds of things you're doing make knowledge and inspiration, I hope, available to many, many more people.

Colby 1:26:13

Yeah. It's a bit like um you you try to be the parent you wish you had, you try to write the book that you wish you had when you were starting out. You I guess I what I'm wanting to do with this, one of the things I'm wanting to do with this podcast is to uh create uh um someone referred to it as a reservoir of knowledge. It was Tom Ellison, one of my guests. But uh, you know, something this is a a place it that um people in the sector can dip into and dip out of, but you know, it's the the knowledge that I guess I would have liked to have had access to um 31 years ago when I I started. Um so that's and you know I have guests who uh you know who really see this this medium as an important way of handing over and passing on yeah, passing on decades of of experience.

James 1:27:16

Well, this is the first podcast I've ever done, so um I hope it's useful to somebody. Um, but certainly I've loved watching some of your podcasts. I mean, some of the pioneers in our field, you know, uh from Mulberry Bush and from other places, it's it's really I really enjoy uh hearing some of those stories and uh it re-inspires me to listen.

Colby 1:27:39

Yeah, thank you. I think I'm getting better at it. Um I think uh uh I'm happy, yeah. Um I'm just very pleased and thankful that you agreed to come on to the podcast. Um and uh we wish you well. Thank you, it's good to you, you know. Yeah.

James 1:28:00

Yeah. Right. May you do may you live long and prosper, as they say.

Colby 1:28:05

Yes. But it's not there's no point living long and and not prospering, I think.

James 1:28:12

But but I understand what you're saying about wanting to to fill in some of the voids that maybe are in fact I I once I once read uh a fellow who said, Sam Keane, I think it was, a poet, who said, basically our job is to help people get in touch with disowned parts of themselves and to bring them home and welcome them. So we've all got pieces that are missing or that we've rejected that we need to re-own or reintegrate. So that's another way of saying, I think, what you were saying about filling in some gaps and contributing to the future.

Colby 1:28:51

Yeah.