A Scial Worker's Experiences

A Report on a Social Worker's Experiences in a Residential Treatment Center for Young Children

Pages

Abstract............................................... 2

01 The Evolution of Residential Care for Children

in the U.S.A...................................... 3 - 5

02 The Agency and the Therapeutic Milieu............. 5 - 7

03 Social Worker and Client: Problems in relationship 7 - 11

04 My Role as a Social Worker....................... 11 - 22

05 A Condensed Case-History: Tim..................... 22 - 28

06 A Condensed Case-History: Anne.................... 28 - 37

07 Conclusions....................................... 37

References............................................. 38 - 39

The author is a social worker interning in a large suburban residential child care center. After briefly tracing the history of residential care and describing the Center and its therapeutic milieu philosophy, the author analyzes problems of relationships between social workers and clients. She clearly dichotomizes between empathy and sympathy, even as she stresses the need for their synergetic application. The matter of cultural, social class, and gender differences between caseworker and child is examined to reach the conclusion that both common-cultural and cross-cultural characteristics need be considered on a case-by- case basis. The author goes on to examine a

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dapt to the pathological environment to which, willy-nilly, he is heir. My job is to teach him to sublimate his anger and find more socially acceptable ways of fighting back. Or is it to help him debase himself by refusing to fight and thus survive? I believe many of our "emotionally disturbed" children have been so labelled because they have reacted appropriately to a disturbed and disturbing social environment. The trick is to teach them to survive in an environment over which they may have little if any influence for improvement. My role as a social worker becomes more educational than therapeutic. Is my role as a social worker perhaps to manipulate the social macro-environment through modifying the personal micro-environment of individual members of society? Is this what the word social means in my professional title? I thought that perhaps the direct-delivery healthcare and social services professional, such as I, should be of the same race, culture, language, and sex as those of the client. Hopefully, such commonality of personal characteristics would ease the communication and identification processes. I am no longer so sure. Should, for example, the fundamental problem of the child be one of inadequate relations

Category: Psychology - A