The Secure Start® Podcast
In the same way that a secure base is the springboard for the growth of the child, knowledge of past endeavours and lessons learnt are the springboard for growth in current and future endeavours.
If we do not revisit the lessons of the past we are doomed to relearning them over and over again, with the result that we may never really achieve a greater potential.
In keeping with the idea we are encouraged to be the person we wished we knew when we were starting out, it is my vision for the podcast that it is a place where those who work in child protection and out-of-home care can access what is/was already known, spring-boarding them to even greater insights.
The Secure Start® Podcast
#20 Challenging Last Resort Thinking: Why Some Children Thrive in Residential Care, with Dr Laura Steckley
What if everything we think we know about residential childcare is wrong? What if, for some children, it's not the dreaded last resort but actually the best option for healing and growth?
Dr. Laura Steckley, who leads the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde, brings three decades of practice, research, and teaching experience to challenge our assumptions. Having worked in both the United States and Scotland, she offers a refreshing perspective on what quality residential care can achieve when properly understood and supported.
The conversation upends conventional wisdom by revealing research showing many children who've experienced both foster care and residential settings actually prefer the latter. For children who find family environments emotionally threatening due to past trauma, residential care offers unique advantages: multiple caring relationships increasing the chance of meaningful connection, natural breaks preventing relationship burnout, and the therapeutic power of peer groups.
Dr. Steckley's groundbreaking research on physical restraint reveals surprising nuance. Rather than viewing restraint as universally negative, she introduces containment theory – a framework for understanding how adults help make "the unmanageable manageable" for distressed children. Her studies found some children reported restraint experiences, when conducted as acts of care rather than control, actually improved their relationships with staff.
Perhaps most powerfully, Dr. Steckley asserts that "in the daily minutiae of good care is where healing and developmental ground is regained." This elevates the importance of residential childcare workers and recognizes the complexity of their work. She also explores how shame, possibly our most "uncontainable" emotion, often manifests as rage in traumatized children, and how staff need proper support themselves to provide effective care.
The episode concludes with a fascinating discussion of attunement, using the famous "still face" experiment to demonstrate how children escalate behavior when seeking emotional connection – offering a radical reframing of how we might respond to challenging behaviors in care settings.
Listen now to gain fresh insights that could transform how you think about caring for our most vulnerable children.
Laura's Bio:
Dr Laura Steckley leads up the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde and so has the very good fortune of doing teaching and learning with residential child care practitioners. She has worked in direct and indirect practice in both the United States of America and Scotland. Her teaching, research and knowledge mobilisation are mostly addressed to residential child care practice and education, with a particular focus on physical restraint.
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.
Welcome to the Secure Start podcast.
Laura:The world needs people who care about these kids and are finding their passion for how they can make a difference in their lives, working in a place that is kind of the receptacle of last resort. I have been attentive to evidence to the contrary Good, high quality residential child care is the best choice for a very small number of children in very specific circumstances. So even for kids who don't end up going back home or back to foster care, some of them go on to build a healthier, more rewarding family life in their adulthood as a result of the residential child care experiences they've had. I think multiple placements is one of the most damaging things that care systems do to children and young people. But to be able to have breaks from each other as part of an alternative experience of care, I think is really valuable.
Laura:Also, having such a range of people with whom that child can have different kinds of connections or there's at least one person there who can start to see the beauty in the child. That Bronfenbrenner quote of one at least one adult who's irrationally crazy about them. We're creating the conditions for children to experience themselves differently, and activities are about the best way to do that. Physical restraint is the most extreme form of containing physically containing then it may also be like therapeutically containing, and that also came through in the data the research did. There were kids who talked about purposely orchestrating events, such so they knew they would get restrained to either let anger out or to be held while they cried In. The daily minutiae of good care is where healing and developmental ground is regained.
Colby:Welcome to the Secure Start podcast. I'm Colby Pearce, and joining me for this episode is a highly experienced academic and researcher in therapeutic residential child care. Before I introduce my guests, I'd just like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land that I'm coming to you from the Kaurna people of the Adelaide Plains, and then acknowledge the continuing connection the living Kaurna 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 Dr Laura Steckley. Laura leads the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde and so has the very good fortune of teaching and learning with residential child care practitioners. She has worked in direct and indirect practice in both the United States of America and Scotland America and Scotland. Her teaching, research and knowledge mobilisation are mostly addressed to residential childcare practice and education, with a particular focus on physical restraint. Welcome, laura.
Laura:Thanks, Corby.
Colby:Now I always like to ask people was there anything else that you'd like to add to that short bio?
Laura:Yeah, I wanted to keep it short and snappy. Direct care, um, training management, um, all of that, um, some of the bureaucratic admin stuff, um. And then came to teach and do research at the university of strathclyde in 2003. So I started working in resi in 1990. It's been at it for quite a while. Hopefully there's a kind filter on the Zoom today, but yeah, I've been at it for a while, but it's yeah, it's still been my main focus and passion really as an adult, you know in my professional from from pretty much the start yeah, yeah, and a concept that we concept or construct, that we spoke about during a pre-meet a few weeks ago was that of pracademic.
Colby:So you, yeah, you fit, you fit the the profile in terms of having significant practice experience and having the good fortune to be able to research, and yeah, further study work and I'm interested in practice Like that would be another way of saying what my research and teaching interests are.
Laura:And yeah, I'm really interested in practice and I think it's a forever rich, complex, rewarding area to support, to study, to try and and develop in terms of workforce in Scotland, and Scotland's been a good place to be doing that for sure yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean people will Scotland, and I did mention that you'd worked in the US as well, but you obviously don't have a Scottish accent.
Laura:Yeah, yeah, no, scotland's been a good landing place for me, so I was already working in residential when I moved here, but I moved here in 1999. So I've been in Scotland. For what is that then? In?
Colby:the beginning of 99.
Laura:So that's 26 years, yeah so. But as I just mentioned a little bit ago, scotland has pretty high aspirations around care more generally the the alternative care, you might say, of children and young people, including residential child care, and I suspect we'll be getting into some of the challenges around that coming forward. But, um, it's not perfect here, most definitely not, but um, but the aspiration is there, which has been a really good landing place for me. It felt like the stars aligned.
Colby:Yeah, speaking to other guests, it sounds very similar. Yeah, yeah, so residential childcare. Tell us about how you came to be working in this really important and, at times, controversial area of childcare practice.
Laura:Actually, before I answer that, I'm going to give a little anecdote On the MSc in residential child care. It's primarily managers but some frontline practitioners, and because there's a big component of the use of self and who you bring to the encounter with a child, or who it is of yourself that you bring um to the class, to the studies, um, we start the whole year with this um activity called river of life um and people choose what they want to share, but they chart what, the key things that have happened in their life that brought them to this day where they're embarking on a master's level.
Laura:For some, like they haven't had good experiences of education in their past, whatever, but what's brought them to have that level of commitment, to be working in residential child care and to be doing this work, this educational work in relation to that, and for many years. Well, we've been doing this for now 20, 22 years maybe it'll be this september. Um, it's extremely rare and most years no one says. I wanted to be a resi worker when I was a kid, right, and many people didn't even know what residential child care was myself included, or residential, didn't know anything about it and, like so many others, I fell into it almost accidentally. And this is a common theme across that and what that does to our workforce in terms of how it shapes professional identity, which we may or may not get into. There's so much we could talk about today, but, um, so I, I thought I was going to be a lawyer, that was going to be an attorney, and I, I like arguments, not like hostile argument. I like building a strong argument. Um, from a young age and I was interested in courtroom dramas as a kid.
Laura:So I did an undergraduate degree and in the United States you do four years undergraduate and three years law school. So I did my undergraduate degree focusing on what would get me into law school, and I did a degree in political science, or a major as we call them, and I found it really just just despairing, actually, the grimness of the political realities of the world, which are only getting worse, I think. But I also took an ethics class that I loved, and so that was in philosophy, and so I took another to get my humanities requirements out of the way. But I just kept taking more and more, and so I did a second major in philosophy and I have to tell you that equipped me more for residential child care than any of the psychology I took, maybe because of the type of psychology that was being taught at my university.
Laura:And when I finished the four years I knew I wasn't mature enough to go to law school like self-discipline and all that and so I thought I need to just go be in the world and work, and a friend of mine had gotten a job in a residential treatment center and she's like we need staff, as you do, and she's like maybe you'd be good at it. And so I'm like I don't even know what that is Like. So I went along and she had told me a bit about the work before I went. So I kind of thought about you know what that might be like and what, how I might approach things. And I did well enough in the interview to get a job, although maybe they just needed a warm body, I don't know.
Laura:And I swallowed the hook, man. I just it was so frightening and intense. But every day was different and it was meaningful and I loved the teenagers. They were difficult and didn't always feel love for them, but overall I loved working with teenagers. I loved working as part of a team and it didn't take long before I realized the world didn't need another lawyer, do you know? But the world needs people who care about these kids and are finding their passion for how they can make a difference in their lives.
Colby:So that was that was the path for me into this work so when you, when you were working initially in residential child care, um, cast your mind back, what, what influenced the way in which you went about the work, would you say. Were they, what? Were there people that had influenced you? Were there? Was there um particular theories or bodies of work that um that you came across that were of influence to the way you went about being a residential child care practitioner?
Laura:It was a bit more theoretical. In the States At least they espoused or claimed to follow, positive peer culture was the first place I was in and I learned about the power of the group and that has influenced me ever since. And Scotland, maybe the UK more widely, is a bit afraid of the group. It feels like afraid of groups of children, especially teenagers, and we don't harness and we've also become much more individualized collectively, I think, at least in western society since my, since the early 1990s. So it's not just the UK probably, but yeah, so we struggle to harness the power of the group, I think now, but it's still there and I still kind of push against it.
Laura:Ruth Eman's work who would be another great person to have on the podcast is brilliant. She um for her phd. She lived in a residential child's home as an adult. She didn't pretend she was a kid, but she also was very clear I'm not a member of staff, I don't have keys. She had a bedroom like the other kids had bedrooms and did an ethnographic study of um the children's culture outside of the staff gaze. She couldn't do it outside of the children's culture outside of the staff gaze. She couldn't do it outside of the adult gaze because she's an adult right and they tested her. You should get her on because she talks about how they tested her to see if she was going to like take things back to the staff. And she was really clear like if it's serious imminent harm kind of stuff, we got to take that back, but otherwise so they would test her and stuff. But she did a brilliant and she's done brilliant work ever since then.
Laura:So, I'll talk more about her with you, maybe after, but anyway. So the power of the group. I think the other big thing was the move from the United States and a treatment focus which was more deficit based, more medicalized orientation to the work. That was so pervasive that I didn't recognize it as such because that's just how we all thought. And that was the wider culture to residential child care in Scotland which felt sorely lacking in theory, not that we were actually using theory as well as we should have, but really understood care well, understood care better than in the United States. And I think care is the way to go. Not that there isn't a place for a treatment orientation, but I think it's where, in the daily minutia of good care, is where healing and developmental ground is regained. And that relationship within which that care takes place and those relationships even John Toronto's work as a political philosopher about the marginalization care and the fact that we need to bring it to the center of society's concerns all have played a big part. And that's just a little bit.
Colby:When you were talking about the difference between what happened in the US and what you were observing in Scotland. It made me think about treatment as being something that you do, too, and care as being something that you do with.
Laura:Yeah, if you're doing good care. Yes, and we didn't always. Even once I got to scotland in 99 and I didn't get a job for about six months and and I think when I had um submitted applications and even did an interview, they were like, they were like I'm not sure about her, you know, because I was coming from it's such a different orientation but a place took a chance on me and um and you know, I worked then in scotland in care um for a few years four years, something like that before then going on to work at the university.
Colby:So yeah, yeah, and and I recall from our conversation, um, during our pre-meet, that you have some things to say about what children say about their experiences in residential care. I wonder if you'd be happy to share some of that.
Laura:Sure, so yeah, so in both the United States and in Scotland and I'm aware from the literature, many places in the world residential child care is very much treated as a last resort and there's this underlying belief that sometimes not even adults are not even aware of, or that they don't scrutinize if they are aware of it, that like that's the worst thing for a child, and so working in a place that is kind of the receptacle of last resort.
Laura:I have been attentive to evidence to the contrary and and there have been some interesting studies, none of which that I'm aware of have focused in on which is better and under what circumstances, and maybe I'll put my cards on the table, to use a poker metaphor I believe residential child care is the best.
Laura:Good, high quality residential child care is the is the best choice for a very small number of children in very specific circumstances, and so, um, in 1998, barry Jim Brody did a really significant study and that wasn't their focus, but that was kind of, and that's how it seems to be coming through in the research. That was kind of a side thing that they included. Jim Anglin, who's a North American, his seminal grounded theory study has a batch of and what's happening in these studies is kids who've experienced both foster care and residential child care have had things to say and often it's been a majority have had a preference for residential child care. Um duncalf in the uk. Um is a care leaver herself and she did a big um quanta or a big um questionnaire type study and quite a lot of people responding had had experience of both and a high proportion preferred residential child care to to nearly half experience. The placement is very positive and 78 preferred residential, 78 percent preferred residential child care and 5% indicated they preferred foster care.
Colby:Why do you think that is the case?
Laura:There's more recent ones, but I'm less on top of them anyway. So I think again, if it's good quality residential childcare and it's the right child's circumstances, certainly the pressure of the more intimate familial relational demands that we naturally make of one another as part of being in relationship with one another would be experienced by some children in a foster home as even potentially intolerable because of the loyalties or ambivalence the loyalties to their family of origin or their ambivalence about these kind of relationships, because of the damaging experiences they might have had in similar type of relationships that haven't yet been cognitively processed, digested, um, and so that's, I think, why foster care goes wrong a lot. I also think foster carers are often put in horrible situations, you know as well, and I think we do damage to adults with this as well as damage to kids by placing them on for ideological reasons that foster care is better because it mimics family more.
Laura:But I think residential child care has more resources, even though it's poorly resourced in most countries, has more resources just in the sheer number of adults. And if there's a good culture or there's good training and ongoing as well as entry-level training, then I think as well as just like activities, the power of the group, all of that kind of stuff, and sometimes it can be a bridge back to either family of origin or back to and I've worked with kids where we provided bridging experiences which England I don't know if he coined the term, but uses that very well in a seminal study experiences that then enable them to access the kind of normal experiences of either going back to their family or of origin and and or foster family and being able to have more normal family life. Um, but I don't think there's enough recognition of what some kids need to be able to do that. And then there are other kids who either aren't able or don't want to have that as part of their childhood. They might go on to have that in adulthood, to have that as part of their childhood. They might go on to have that in adulthood.
Laura:I've had a student who looked at outcomes of the placement that he had worked in, but these people were in their late 20s and early 30s and one of the most significant outcomes that they identified this whole dialogue around the whole way we use outcomes. They were defining outcomes themselves, which was a really powerful but small study, and they said you know, I parent my children differently because of the way that I experienced relationships with the adults in this home and the reparenting they didn't call it that as compared to how my parents parented me Like. So even for kids who don't end up going back home or back to foster care, some of them go on to build a healthier, more rewarding family life in their adulthood as a result of the residential child care experiences they've had. We have some small bits of evidence from small scale study and anecdotal evidence as well, and the reason why we don't have more evidence is because we're not designing research. That's asking the right questions and that's a funding issue, but yeah, anyway. Yeah, I'm not good at short answers, sorry.
Colby:No, no, that's okay. It has often been said of me as well. I can write succinctly. When I used to do a lot of court work, I had a bit of a reputation for giving long answers, but amongst the lawyers, that is, I'm glad I'm not with a kindred then yeah, yeah, so, um, but yeah, you said a couple of things there of of interest to me.
Colby:Um, I've long also felt that there are there are young people who find being in a family, young people in the out-of-home care system who find being in a family emotionally unsafe and threatening.
Colby:They just the level of closeness that we expect of people, and it's tragic to think that they might go through any number of family-based foster placements before, at some stage, someone decides well, they're not really getting on at all in foster care, so we'll have to invoke the option of last resort, as you say. Whereas if you actually thought about the experience of the young person, thought about the experience of the young person, so, rather than making an ideological decision that the best place for children to grow up is in a family environment and that's a general ideology, as you say if you actually just treated each child on a case-by-case basis and thought about the particular characteristics of each child and what their needs might be, there are likely to be a proportion of young people that you would, from the outset, choose residential care for. Yep, and what I also heard you say and I often think of the impact of relational trauma as being like a phobia. Yeah, and what's the best treatment for phobias? Graded exposure. The thing that they're phobic of is relational closeness.
Laura:And so we put them in situations where it's too intense, too fast and we actually deepen the phobia or we deepen the hurt, and I think multiple placements is one of the most damaging things that care systems do to children and young people. Yeah, we're totally in agreement about this. I would add. For that to be possible, though, people who are making placement decisions need to understand what residential child care can offer, understand what can happen or what does happen in good residential child care, and then residential child care needs to be supported to do what it can do so well, and those two things are really precarious at best when they're when both of those things are kind of functioning, but often people have no idea, and so all they have is that ideological thing to fall back on, because they just don't know.
Colby:Yeah, yeah, I am concerned that if we maintain the idea that residential care is the care option of last resort, then it's hard. It's difficult for me to conceive of that. Policymakers would fund it well yeah, exactly so.
Laura:It's this vicious or vicious circle or self-fulfilling prophecy, like it's and, and, yet and. And. This is why, in Scotland, it's a good place to be, because the current Scottish government does have an investment. It can't back up that investment with the kind of resources that are actually required, or it? I mean, there's always money, but who has the money? Like it's not, like they're swimming in it. They have it. They have to make decisions, and I certainly don't think residential child care is the only thing deserving of resources, right, so I wouldn't want to have to be the person making those kind of budgetary decisions, but there is that aspiration in the Scottish government. There is an awareness of residential child care and of care more generally. This has been one of the great things about living in Scotland, especially as compared to the United States, is the Scottish government, and Scotland is small enough that policymakers do really listen and you have access.
Laura:I'm part of CELCIS and the Department of Social Work and Social Policy, and CELCIS has changed its name, so it's no longer the Center of Excellence for Looked After Children, but I can't remember the exact bits now, but CELCIS is one of the many ways that Scottish government communicates, and then I'm part of CELCIS, and so I've watched the Children's Act get influenced by care experienced activists and CELCIS was a bit a part of that in the background experienced activists and CELCIS was a bit a part of that in the background, and that activism informed some of what came out of the Children's Act 2013, I think, such that children's age of leaving care got extended to 21, with support of through care to 26. And there was a very much relational face-to-face impact between the then head, nicola Sturgeon of the Scottish government and care experience people that you know, and the promise also came out of all of that too. So, yeah, yeah, small is better sometimes.
Colby:Yeah, I think so, and you also mentioned before about children going back to birth family, and you mentioned bridging and spoke about James Anglin. There's a name I'd like to get on my podcast as well.
Laura:Oh yeah, wouldn't that be great.
Colby:So we've talked a little bit about how residential care if you think about trauma creating a phobia where the phobic object is relational connection, that's where children feel most unsafe and the best treatment for that is graded exposure. So you gradually re-expose them to relational connection. With birth, family connection. I often think that residential care has the opportunity to lead the way in terms of birth family reconnection, because there's less agendas when you've got a professional workforce working with children. It's much more vexed if it's family-based care, if it's foster care or, you know, if it's kin as well, where oftentimes the kinship carers are quite negative in their disposition towards the parent on the other side of the family, so to speak. But even foster carers can be very unforgiving of birth parents. So I think so birth family reconnection, I think is something that residential childcare can lead the way. And I guess this kind of leads me into wondering about what you've discovered, about what else you've discovered about how residential childcare can offer things better things or offer things in a better way than other forms of out-of-home care.
Laura:Well, right on that point that you're making, I think sometimes the care that they give to families as well, and helping families make sense of their child's behaviour, for example, creating spaces where children and their family members can start to have that graduated kind of reconnection, so, and I think you know, often it's less threatening for the family too that these, especially if there's a school on site, then oh, my child's at school and they're just the staff at the school. I think that makes it even easier. But even in a care home or they refer to them as houses in a lot of places here because of the negative stigma attached to care home but so in houses here, like it's still a house, that is kind of professional versus the foster care, so kinship care, so yeah, I definitely think there's that. I think I think the power of the group, as I've mentioned having, I can remember, being able to endure and actually be really present and, um, really tolerant and creative and bear quite a lot of rage or difficulty, sometimes into three or four in the morning, having worked a double, you know, having started the morning before whatever, or just the energy of like camping and like many days because I knew I was going to go home and go right, and so I think there's something about. And for kids too to have a fresh face, like with all the shame. I think shame's a part. So I think there's phobia, but I think shame's an interesting part. We talked about that earlier and I haven't read the thing you sent me, I just remembered. But um, but to be able to have breaks from each other as part of um, as part of an alternative experience of care, I think is really valuable. That's just not structurally possible in a foster home or in kinship care. I mean, the break is from the family of origin and sometimes there's to-ing and fro-ing that happens there. That can be helpful but often isn't. So yeah, I think there's that.
Laura:And also having such a range of people with whom that child can have different kinds of connections, or there's at least one person there who can start to see like the beauty in that child that Bram from Brunner quote of one, at least one adult who's irrationally crazy about them. And for some kids, what's happened to them and their way of coping and defending themselves has become such a rejection of the world and ways of please reject me, kind of to keep you away from me that it can be really hard to see that child's beauty or wonderfulness in whatever form that it manifests. And the large you have a large enough group of people and once that starts, then that can spread to other people and so, while we all sometimes have to try to look for it and have to pretend isn't the right word, but when it's difficult you kind of have to shift to where there's this really genuine, authentic reflecting back a child's goodness to him. The bigger the, and we all need that experience in our lives, not just as children, but we need a lot of it as children.
Laura:And then, if you've had really hurtful experiences, you need more of that and I think I think that's something that isn't really talked about, but I was very aware of it in practice when I had those moments where that happened and I was able to do it. It sort of just happened at first and then I became aware of it, was able to do it, and I think like that would be an example of like people who don't understand residential child care wouldn't even be able to muster that up. But that happens within good teams and really good teams who are cooking on gas. They talk about it and like who is connecting with with this kid just now? Who is able to reflect back to this kid? His goodness? Um, it's probably not happening all over, but there's.
Colby:So there's so much in what you say I mean um.
Colby:It puts me in mind of the my own observation, across 30 years of practice in child protection, out-of-home care and related endeavours, which is that our children don't just.
Colby:I often think about the one good adult research and I think, yes, absolutely we need to have. As Yuri Brompton Brenner said, you know you have to have one of those adults in your life, but I do think the more good relationships that children have, the better. So I think you know our child protection system is very much focused on whether you've had a bad experience with parents here. So what we're going to do is line you up with some new parents and you'll have experiences with them that will, that will remediate, that will repair the the damage that is done there. And you mentioned earlier about how foster carers often get um hurt themselves through in in this um system and and largely that's because, from my point of view, that they're sold. They're sold a bit of a dummy really, about what, what, what is possible, what, what, they, what they can, what can be achieved um and what will be demanded of them.
Colby:Yeah, yeah. The reality is that there's so much more that needs to happen to help a child or young person recover from that early relational adversity.
Laura:Yeah.
Colby:I'm not particularly au fait with the power of the group that you know when you're yeah, and I wondered if you might just uh say a few words about that and what you mean for my benefit. If not, you know other other listeners as well okay, gosh, where to begin?
Laura:I think I'll start by saying, like, anytime you have a group of people, or even just two people, and probably intrapersonally as well, there's always dynamics that are happening within a group, and I think being able to channel some of that is useful. But I also think so my first experience was with a model called positive peer culture. Experience was with a model called positive peer culture. So and this is about the power of peer relationships to foster positive change, so much so that, like we were encouraged and sometimes even corrected to, if we didn't do this, instead of, like, directly confronting a kid's behavior, you would sidle up to a different kid and say I'm interested in the fact that you're noticing so-and-so, struggling with this authority problem and you haven't yet called a group. And the whole day, even in education, like if something was happening, any child could call a group or adult could call a group, but ideally you want the kids calling group and then they circle, they stand up and they circle up and they're like I'm calling this group, colby, because I see that you're struggling with your authority problem with Mrs Smith and I think we can help you with that. And there's this whole list of problems. That, on the one hand, is good because it gives kids a way to identify things and a language for it. It's pretty deficit based because it's all problem based. But, um, and then they talk and they swear at each other and they fall. But do you know, and these kids were so insightful and so, and they would listen to each other in a way that they don't listen to adults, right. So there's that like, and that happens anyway.
Laura:I mean, that was a very structured, facilitative approach. That was sometimes amazing and sometimes it felt a bit dodgy. No required qualification for us to be doing that and like the power of that. You really had to be good at it and you had to have an understanding and a value base because, yeah, you could use a book group to bully a kid, for example, a kid who's given you problems or whatever. So there was all that, plus I would and I'm going to draw on Jack Phelan He'd be another great person to have. By the way.
Laura:He wrote this really small article a while back and he's now got a book out that I haven't read yet but is on my list. But this little nugget was this thing called experience arranging and he was like child and youth care work isn't all the things we think, it is, it's experience arranging. That's what we're doing. We're creating the conditions for children to experience themselves differently and activities are about the best way to do that. Especially if the activity is fun enough or engrossing enough, then it drowns out that background narrative of I'm a bad kid or I'm too cool for this or all of the stuff that gets kids in the way of being able to experience, say the restorative foster parents that you mentioned before.
Laura:So group activities if and again it requires skill and fortitude to do well can really enable children and, like for my master's dissertation, which was the school football team that played against other special schools, and the way these boys some of them had already got aged out, as we used to call it the way they talked about those transformative experiences of the school football team and they never at that time would have been able to access a normal mainstream school or league.
Laura:You know, football team because of the behavioral difficulties was like life-changing for them and um, they, they could have that as part of a group and um, like, they could remember Colby, like remember that game where we played against and then they named the other school and I was coming down the line and like this was a few years prior and and then he just knew I was going to pass it to him and he was right there and and the excitement and everything. It was just amazing. So I guess that is what I mean about the power of the group and for a lot of our kids they don't have the normal experiences of group that kids, which I think is reducing for all kids right now. To be honest with you, Sports and band and all of that. The funding for all that is is not good, but, um, yeah, that's what I mean yeah, thank you, that's.
Colby:That's a wonderful description and, um, it put me in mind of sports teams yeah, as you, as you were talking about it and then. So it was nice that you you finished up the talk giving a sports example and I love what you're saying, what you're attributing to Phelan. I totally you will never talk a child out of believing that they're bad.
Laura:Yeah, you'll never talk them out of it. They have to experience themselves.
Colby:They have to experience themselves in a different way. Never talk about it. They have to experience themselves in a different way. They also.
Laura:You'll never, you'll never talk them into trusting people right until they can until they have the experience, and that's the minutiae of care of really good care the little drips of care that that that's where the restoration happens. Not that the therapy hour doesn't have its place, but yeah.
Colby:Yeah, recent guest, adela Holmes, who set up Hirshbridge Farm, a residential therapeutic community here in Australia. She was talking about getting the you know what comes first the cart or the horse, in this sense that we often expect children to behave and as a reward for that, we will give them good relationship.
Laura:Yes, yes.
Colby:Yeah, and it's outrageous, isn't it? And it has to be the other way around. Yeah.
Laura:Yeah.
Colby:Now I want to. People are going to wonder a bit about this little segue. Your research interest has been in restraint. One of your great I know this, I'm not sure if you've mentioned it already, but one of your great theoretical passions is containment theory, containment and restraint yeah, yeah, so I can remember, because I I did have to restrain children, um, young people really.
Laura:I've mostly worked with young people. I remember like something is going on here that is powerful and I don't understand what it is and I need ways of understanding this. And it really troubled me, like, and I became the in-house trainer in in one of the places in Colorado for for crisis, for you know, restraint and all of the stuff that went around trying to avoid getting into restraint, um and so. So physical restraint for anybody who's watching that doesn't know exactly about residential child care and physical restraint it it doesn't just happen in residential Chicago, it happens across a lot of strata of society. But in residential child care if a child poses serious, imminent harm to themselves or someone else, um, and the adults responding have no other way of of making it safe. They sometimes have to hold a child against his or her will and it can be really horrible for everybody. People can get really hurt.
Laura:So I did a study in 2000. It probably started in 2003, and it went on for a long time, partly because I collected so much data. I had to do justice to all of that. So I published from that data for a really long time, and it took a good few years to collect the data around people's experiences of restraint. And I also then came to be aware of containment theory as a way of, first, of a way of understanding what was happening in the data, what I had experienced, as a way of understanding what people were saying about their experiences adults and young people and children and then containment theory just has become an organizing frame and a way of seeing the world generally. For me it's not the only way, but it is a big one and the end of seeing residential child care practice more widely. So, um, so I've done some other research in relation to physical restraint and it's recently been announced, so I can say here, that the Scottish government is funding a 30-month project that I'm a part of, leading up around mainly research but also some knowledge mobilization, and it's not just we research and then we give the knowledge, like we're mobilizing knowledge from the residential child care sector while at the same time giving knowledge back. So there's this flow of knowledge between us that's being mobilized in the best interest of children, young people, around reducing, where possible, eliminating, restraint. But here's the other thing, and again I'll put my cards on the table, but also ensuring that when not ensuring because we can't raising the likelihood to the greatest extent possible that when restraints do happen they are experienced as an act of care and protection by the child or young person.
Laura:And actually that first study, there were children and young people who said some restraint. So I asked a question like how did the restraint affect your relationship with the people who restrained you? And then adults, how did it affect your relationship with the kid that you restrained? And adults all said either it damages it or they're kind of neutral about it. But children and young people over a third said in some cases it improved the relationship. Okay, and I was doing the interviews both at the same time.
Laura:I didn't do like children first and then adults or vice versa. So I started asking adults, once they had exhausted what they wanted, to tell me what about the other side of the coin? Is there ever a time that it's had a positive effect and a really high proportion once, given the question and maybe some permission where, well, with some kids like, there's a relief or you know so, um, so I think when kids are at their most extreme states of distress, rage, um, all of the things that happen in the lead up to a restraint can be understood. And now I'm going to shift to containment theory. So I'm going to give the very boiled down version. So containment theory is really about what makes the unmanageable, unbearable, intolerable, uncontainable, containable, manageable, bearable, tolerable and that like and that like. That's the way in, that's a boil down and most people can recognize states of being uncontained and that's another way in. So if you've ever yourself been so such strong feelings that you can't think straight, feelings that you can't think straight, um, then that would be an example of being uncontained.
Laura:And beyond, who's the father containment theory? Um, so it's actually a developmental theory that we develop the capacity now here's the other little boiled down way and to use thinking to manage raw experience and emotion. Right, so, to be able to use thinking to make it containable, manageable, um, and we all have moments or periods of time, individually and groups, have this, where it where we lose that or where it's lost a bit and we're not thinking very clearly as a team and we become punitive. There's lots of ways we can identify this in our own lives, and so physical restraint is the most extreme form of containing, physically containing. But if there is all the other things, the relational part, it's handled in the most child-centered way possible up to and during the restraint and then post the restraint, then it may also be therapeutically containing and that also came through in the data.
Laura:So containment theory will be very much a part of the the um study that's about to start. That it's more than a study because it's also got some knowledge mobilization in it. But um, but there will be others other elements to that as well. But certainly there are a lot of things that happen for kids that are uncontainable, right, but also for the adults. So if adults are going to be able to buy and also talked about, like the mother absorbs the child's uncontainable empty stomach, uncontainable empty stomach or just dysregulation, we'll use dysregulation because that's identifiable For Brian it was.
Laura:The mother would absorb that and give it back in a more containable form the clean nappy, the full stomach, the rocking, and there is something very physical, I think, about our needs for containment. That's very challenging. So staff do their version of absorbing it and then giving it back in a more manageable form, which could be something as simple. As you seem really upset about that, let's go for a walk. There's a bit of containment in there. But they need contain because there's a lot of things that happen in the work that raise anxiety, that are hard to manage, that, things that are frightening or concerning or um, and not just the children's behavior but the fact that you work in a field that's last resort and stigma that can go with that, organizational policies and practices that aren't so helpful.
Laura:There's all sorts of things that can cause scandals and history of institutional abuse.
Laura:All of that stuff can in a very unconscious way create anxiety that then compromise adults' ability to be good containers for kids through their relationships. If we can help that and if that containment gets stronger, that therapeutic relational containment and the rhythms and routines and positive symbolism and all that stuff symbolic communication then I truly believe in. There's some anecdotal evidence and another project I'm a part of is beginning to produce other kinds of evidence that it can reduce restraints through because that stuff is being contained earlier in whatever process of escalation might've occurred, that sort of thing. So that is a very messy attempt to offer an introduction to like what the two are and what they have to do with each other. Yeah, we'll start there, or we could even end there when I first started getting excited about containment theory, I kind of felt like I was not a sole voice but one of a very few voices and you know banging on about this, and I knew that most people were hearing something different than what I was intending, because of Restrictive practices.
Laura:yeah, Exactly of the negative connotation and I'm like well, holding environments Winnicott's holding environments is kindred like. They're very and beyond containment. They're very, very close and I often use the two almost interchangeably um, but holding therapies, especially like um, the, the attachment holding therapies that foster klein was doing in the united states. I just didn't want that to get conflated, because that's very contentious work, that um, kids were deliberately provoked and then held, and because I was like, yeah, with physical restraint I thought I can't go that way. So I just kept banging on about it and I I have to say in scotland containment theory is getting traction. It's becoming part of people's vocabulary in a way that is useful in helping them understand their own needs to be able to meet the needs of children. It's not uniform across the whole country or anything, but it is definitely getting traction and it's exciting when students are like, oh, like anything that has explanatory power, and people are like, oh, this helps me make sense of stuff, and then they start using it in very enthusiastic ways. We're that and that's.
Colby:That's been very rewarding, for sure yeah, previous podcast guest, lisa etherson, has um. She's the person I was telling you about, who, who has developed shame containment theory yes, yes, that's the thing I need to read that you said yeah, yeah well, yeah, yeah, read it. Uh, it is. It's very interesting. I hope to have her back on shortly. You know, before we move on from that.
Laura:Sorry, just it just occurs to me that shame is probably the most uncontainable emotion, and so I immediately can see a link there, like shame is so intolerable of all of our emotions that we usually shift it into rage or we shut down. And so being and part of containment theory is about making the unthinkable thinkable and the unfeelable feelable, and so, and I think shame is one of the most important unacknowledged, unaddressed aspects of what's going on in practice. So, from my practice interest, um one of the projects I'm working on, we're beginning to look at shame and how we can make that more recognizable and dealable with um, so the fact that she's linked that with containment actually sparked something for me, in a way that when we talked about it before it hadn't, it hadn't set legs in.
Colby:So that's yeah, that's really interesting what you interesting what you said could have came out of Lisa's mouth, then Really, yeah, based on my experience of listening to Lisa talk about it, yeah, absolutely that it does get shifted into rage, and you do. You then do think about some of of our you know our significant social problems in society, in society that are anger and rage based, and, um, and the importance of understand for me, the importance of understanding where that comes from. I think it's probably just misattributed to as just being to do with toxic masculinity, for example, or you know one's own, you know cultural factors around male aggression and so on, when male aggression, a significant component of it, for example, is this uncontained or can be uncontained shame related to that and until we get to grips with that yeah, until we get to grips with it, we won't fully get.
Colby:we won't get as far with dealing with some of those social ills that revolve around male aggression in particular.
Laura:Yeah, and understanding it.
Laura:Yeah, understanding it isn't justifying it in any way. Understanding it can lead us to better solutions, yeah, and it's in everybody's interest. The other thing about containment containment doesn't just make it go away, and so, like the previous ways that term has been used, I think there isn't much thought about what happens after you contain it, like that's it done, happening at work, and you have a really good containing supervision. You don't come out of that supervision with your anxiety taken away. You come out of that supervision with greater clarity of thinking. You come out of that supervision with a greater sense that you can manage what previously felt more unmanageable, and you come out of that supervision maybe with a bit more hope and and um things that you can do. And so, yeah, I think that's the other thing I wanted to say about containment theory it doesn't make it go away, it just shifts it to something more manageable, clear thinking, all that kind of stuff. But boy don't we need that in society. Or, after a really difficult shift, the whole range yeah and and, uh and super.
Colby:I love what you said a little bit earlier when you were talking about it, about the need for staff to be contained to, and it's been a it's been a consistent theme that's come up in this podcast over the past 19 odd guess 19 guests that I've had on um, most of them talking about the need for a containing supervision arrangement in order to yeah, yeah, the other thing, just talking about restraint and some children, I can, you know, looking back at my own practice over the past 30 years, I can easily think of the kids who actually sought out physical contact, part of safe care, and safe care practice in out-of-home care not just, I guess, in therapeutic residential childcare but in foster and kinship care has perhaps led us away from the role of touch, the role of holding, and we have children who haven't been held.
Laura:Right Physically.
Colby:Physically held for years and years and not everybody.
Laura:Sorry, I'm getting excited.
Colby:No, that's okay, I was just going to say 1995, I had a paper published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry about the importance of physical touch on mental health and wellbeing.
Laura:Yeah, yeah, you know, not everybody needs health when they're at their most uncontained or when they're uncontained generally, but a lot of us do, and a lot of kids do. You add to that, though, that being touched and held like you might need it, but you also need for it not to happen, or you're, whether it's phobic or what meaning it has for you after um, after people have have um been exploitative around that or hurtful around that, so, um, so that's this whole another layer of further anxiety that staff are um undergoing and the the research did um there were kids who talked about purposely um orchestrating events such so they knew they would get restrained to either let anger out or to be held while they cried they were a minority, but they were, it's still significant and or witnessing that and thinking that's what was happening for another kid. And there are people who have really had a problem with that being in my findings, or with kids having anything positive to say about it. You know, like the positive impacts on relationship being in my findings, um, and I think you got to create a space for all of people's truths to come forth and then try to make sense of that truth in a way that doesn't distort it. But um, yeah, but here's the.
Laura:The other thing is catharsis, like our bodies have a somatic reaction to the emotional dimension and we haven't really dealt with the fact that a child's body will have needs during that, not just this abstract emotional need through talk dealt through talking but adults as well.
Laura:And so what's going on there that we might be brave but also really careful about to try to better meet kids needs? So again, so that either restraints aren't needed or when they do happen, it's experienced as an act of care and protection. Do you know, and I think the thing I've become very interested in very recently is that attunement, so that achievement and the ability to reflect back what you're tuning in on when you're in that escalating phase, maybe going up to a restraint, like how capable are most people of doing that when actually they're either shutting down or having to manage their natural desire to either shut down or their natural defense, or to shift to rage or whatever it is that's happening for them, but to actually be there for the child and be attuned to that child, and yet I think that might be emotional availability and attunement in those peak moments are the hardest thing.
Colby:But maybe the most powerful thing to avoid it going to the kind of brutalizing restraint that kids have described in my research and in many other places.
Colby:Other research and the promise and that sort of thing, boy, that's advanced practice, isn't it? You know, laura, there is so much we could talk about. I know, I'm sorry, just what you were saying. Then a couple of things, though that I reflect a couple of my own reflections on that. And it goes back to what you were saying right at the beginning of this talk, which is that for for a cert, for for certain children, resident residential care is the best option for for certain children, it aligns with their needs, but in order and and then, and at that time I reflected, you reflected, and I reflected too, that we need to get away from these kind of ideological approaches to the care of the children and actually understand what each child actually needs. Yeah, yeah. And similarly, you're not saying that restraint is a good experience, far from it. You're not saying that restraint is a good experience for all children, but there are children who will seek out that physical contact, that physical containment, because it meets a need for them.
Laura:Yeah, and we have to figure out how to deal with that, or we'll do much greater damage to those kids. Even though they're a small minority, they matter, you know, and people aren't making that up.
Colby:No, and we need to. So again. I mean one of the I think the broad messages of this conversation has been that we need to understand our subject more, more and more. And it's through understanding our subject that we can tailor our responses better and more therapeutically to them.
Laura:Yeah, and I, when I first started working in that first residential treatment center, I knew very quickly I did not know enough to be doing that work and I didn't get the sense that people around about me knew enough either. Like, yeah, and I now I feel that even more so. Do you know? Like, the more you know, the more you know you don't know, kind of thing Like there's and it's such complex work, it's such complex work, yeah.
Colby:Yeah Well, I better let you go. You've got your day ahead of you, I've got my evening ahead of me. But one last thing I would love to speak to you again, and I would love to speak about the topic of attunement, and me too.
Colby:Let's do that I I thought I would just leave you with one one thought, one reflection. You know the, the um, the still face experiments, yeah, you're familiar with, yeah, and there's the famous that there's a, there's kind of like a famous video that you can lift off of the internet yes, I use it in my teaching yeah, yeah, yeah. So, um, at where it's what's one, it's the all one of the authors of it. Um, he's kind of narrating the, the video, you know the one yeah, I mean everyone.
Laura:I can't think of his name.
Colby:No, I'm having a mental blank. Now everyone, um, when I because I use I use it in my training as well I get, I get people to. I've warned people, it's very distressing, bloody blah. But what I want you to do is notice what is the mum's first response to the baby yeah, so that what when she comes out of still face? So, um, if people are don't know what we're talking about, you can go. If you, if you go onto youtube and do and type in still face experiment, you're likely to get the video we're talking about anyway. So you know mum, mum's playing and interacting with her child, and and and they're, you know they're in sync, they're attuned to each other, and then mum looks away, as you know, and she looks and she looks back and she's um, still face. Now, this is, this was advice that was doled out, you know, and maybe still is that you know when a child is escalating, what you should do is just give them no emotional reaction at all.
Laura:Yes, and that probably has caused some restraints, even in my own practice, and you know, and some people then maybe even become more wooden as part of their coping because they don't want counter-aggression to be coming through, or they naturally shut down when they're feeling threatened.
Laura:Right, and at those moments that child becomes, we are, we are so much on the same wavelength with this because I teach about this in my and that child is like I need you and reaching that baby, right, and the baby becomes completely uncontained, so much so that she loses her physical posture, she even becomes contained, uncontained physically, and that it.
Laura:And then you could link it with shame too, in terms of like being cast out and like the deep, fundamental, like sociological understanding of shame, and that a relational repair or the minute, the because you said but what does the mom do as soon as she's allowed to come out of still face? It's that relational repair or that connection that she immediately connects to that child. So if we can stay connected to that child during that escalation, we may have a much better chance of it, of that child not becoming more uncontained, rather than and our uncontainment may look different as we become more wooden, trying to be professional, and certainly when I start working in the field, it was like being professional meant being detached, especially in provocative situations, whereas it actually might help to say, god, I'm really frustrated right now and I don't know how to help you, absolutely so the child.
Colby:The child will be when you, when you give them nothing, they will escalate, because they're looking for you to feel what they feel Exactly. They're looking for attunement. And you give them nothing and they just keep escalating. And the poor baby in the still face, she's just escalating. But then I think about mum. What's mum likely to be thinking at that time? So, mum's, as you watch her, and it gets closer to when she can come out of still face, she just starts blinking really rapidly.
Laura:Does she, she does, she blinks a lot Nice observation.
Colby:And then she comes out and I say to everyone in the talks that I give you know what's mum's first reaction? And they say say she's happy, and I, and so I play it back and I play it again and her first reaction is well, starts with the blinking of the eyes before she even comes out, and her first one reaction she comes out is oh my baby.
Laura:Out is oh my baby my baby, there you are, ah, mommy's here, yes, yes, but she starts at attunement. She's because it's not hard for her, because she feels terrible. The baby feels terrible, and so does she yeah, because she she becomes more uncontained or more dysregulated. Um, as the baby goes up, she has a similar and yeah, and it's like, oh, and then they both and the baby goes whoop straight back.
Colby:As soon as mom sounds her self-distressed, baby goes whoosh.
Laura:It's before she even goes into that little bit and their bodies are having this dance of attunement and this relief almost. I always think of it as she's relieved to be able to get out of that still face and stuff. Yeah, yeah isn't that interesting. We both use that um and had similar things that we see, because that's not what they were. They were studying baby sociability but, you know, whatever lens you're looking at it through, you might see and have different ways of understanding what's happening there.
Colby:Yeah, yeah, well, I like looking at theories and coming up with a different theory about the theory, and we all have them right like yeah yeah, and people who are a theoretical.
Laura:They still have theories about like what this child needs a swift kick up the backside. That is their working theory.
Colby:They might not be aware of it, but we all have them yeah yeah, we might as well get better and better at good ones and using them yeah, it took us a while to talk about containment theory and people that know you might think well that you did well there, but we didn't talk about attachment and, uh, people might think that's remarkable of me in the, in the circumstances, um, I'll leave you with this. There's a pro, there's a prologue to each of my editions of um, of the attachment books, the, the. There's only two editions, but the first one, it's a tale of three mice. The second one it's a tale of four mice and they're both attachment stories but they're both skinner's operant condition paradigm and I've been waiting for someone to take me to task for the last 15 years or 16 years.
Colby:But because our children are very much like the intermittently reinforced rats in Skinner's experiment. So anyway, I'll leave it with you to have a bit of a look at what I'm talking about. But again, me, everyone you know, looked at Skinner's work and it was all about, you know, consistent reinforcement and you know, and optimal for learning. And I looked at it and thought, no, I want to know about those kids that couldn't rely on the. You know, those rats that couldn't rely on the rat.
Laura:Yeah, yeah, that was a more powerful memory was the inconsistent yeah, yeah, that's like our kids.
Colby:Yeah, that's like our kids, it's like our kids. Yeah, anyway, it was lovely to speak to you. Let's do it again another time.
Laura:Yep, I'm happy to follow up with some of those things we talked about and connect you with ruth, maybe yeah, yes, yes, I want send me the, send me the names, please. Okay.
Colby:Okay, thank you, bye-bye, bye.
