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In Search of New Ideas

In spite of the proliferation of research and writing about children and youth over the course of the past few decades, precious little has changed for the young people about whom we are most concerned. On the one hand, advances in psychology, neuroscience, and even more practice-oriented professions such as child and youth care practice, social work, and other human services, have indeed given us confidence that we can make a difference in the lives of even the most marginalized and vulnerable young people. Our current focus on evidence-based practice, and its first cousin, program evaluation, has ensured that we invest our time and effort mostly where we know seemingly desirable outcomes are likely. In fact, many academic careers are furthered by the need to know whether the things we do, the interventions we propose and act on, and the programs and services we design produce the outcomes we are seeking from and in the young people whom these programs serve. It is not our intention to be critical of the excellent work that has been done in this respect. At the same time, however, we are conscious that all the evidence we have mounted, and all of the program evaluations we have undertaken, have had little or no positive impact at all on the young people who are chronically left out. In fact, in many cases the focus on evidence-based practice at the expense of other ways of being with youth—relational engagement, sport and recreation, authentic caring, and the like—has compounded the alienation and marginalization of many children and young people already on the fringes of our service networks. We think one reason for this unfortunate reality is that our efforts are driven by fairly dated and often misplaced ideas about what constitutes desirable outcomes to begin with. So long as we continue to seek social, moral, and political conformity from young people, effectively seeking to recreate ourselves and our social structures with no critical examination, there will be a substantial group amongst these young people who get lost or who won’t conform to the evidence. We then conveniently construct these young people as the exceptions, or as excessively damaged, or as somehow not meeting the criteria for our research studies and program evaluations in the first place. They, rather than our assumptions and predetermined desired outcomes, remain the problem. Child & Youth Services, 33:1–4, 2012 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0145-935X print=1545-2298 online DOI: 10.1080/0145935X.2012.665317