The Irresponsible Use of Power in Child Care Practice
As a child care worker I believe that my work is to provide care to families. This means that our role as care providers is, simply put, to care for children at the bequest of families. This is best done in thoughtful, honest, caring and respectful ways. We provide care for children because families either want or need us to do this work.
I believe that child care work is immensely rewarding because it benefits children and families, supports equity for women, provides a means of survival for underpaid workers, binds me to a community of care, and helps sustain a rich cultural and community life for everyone. I want to live in a world that cares for, and respects, all people – including all children and all families. I also want to do the cultural and community work that sustains such a place.
Through our cultural and community work child care providers have a lot of power in the lives of children and families, and also in the community at large. As with anyone in a position of power, we should carefully reflect on how we use our power – we should be intentional about for what purpose and in what way we use our power.
With power comes responsibility. Because many families need child care to survive, and in fact have little choice over how to get the care that their children require, care workers often have the power to dictate the terms of care. I believe that providing care in exchange for influence over how a family raises its own children is simply, and in almost all instances, an abuse of power. I also consider it an irresponsible use of power to employ the provision of care as a way to “get inside” a family to influence the cultural life of the family.
In exercising our power responsibly I believe that child care workers should recognize the primacy of a family in guiding and caring for their children. This means that we should consider the family as the initiator of the relationship between us, the care worker, and the family. We work with a child’s family at their bequest. We work with a family because they want or need care for their child. The family asks us to care for their child, and we should proceed on that basis.The fact that families initiate the relationship should limit the power we exercise through our role as care providers.
Caring work is relationship work, because human care exists only in social relations. By nature a human relationship is a two-way process. Even though the relationship is two-way and is between persons of equal inherent worth, the child care relationship should be guided by the principle that the family starts the relationship. The family has the primary role, relative to that of the care worker, in this relationship.
We should recognize that in many family – care worker relationships it is the care worker who has more power. This is because the family does not always have a choice of where, when, how or from whom to get care for their child. The care provider could exercise their greater power to influence the child and the family, but should not.
The exercise of this greater power is most often based on a false presumption of entitlement to intervention in the life of a family. It is therefore an irresponsible use of power to make such an intervention. Care providers have no such entitlement, and have no basis to presume a right to use their power to influence the family in this way. We should should respect the family’s culture, their wishes for their children, their values and their place in world as human beings. We should proceed knowing who initiates the relationship and respect the right of families to be their child’s primary caregiver.
This does not mean that care workers should become robotic in the “delivery” of child care. Just as we, as child care workers, are not entitled to intervene in the lives of the families with whom we work based solely on the power we have when relating with families, families may not dictate to us how we’ll conduct our jobs. We should retain power over the conduct or our work. And part of our work is to share our ideas, values, insights, knowledge, experience and ways of being with families. We may influence families through honest dialogue. We may not influence families through abuse of our power over families on the basis of our role as care providers to their children.
I will not acquiesce the central values that drive what I do as a care worker to anyone. My job is to support the well-being of children and families. I intend to maintain the integrity of this work. This is especially important to me because I consider child care as sacred work, requiring integrity in every aspect of the work itself. The job of caring for children requires an honest dialogue, a two-way conversation between me and the children and the families with whom I work. There is no care without authentic relationships, no care without honesty, no care without integrity.
If the process of honest conversation is shut down, or is not respected by a family, then I cannot do what I value – which is care for children and work with families. Each family that initiates a care provider relationship with me deserves (and requires) honesty and integrity from me. I require (and deserve) the same of them. This is developed over time – there can be no hurrying of depth of knowing or trusting each other. The caring relationship deepens over time. But without such a deepening process taking place, there is little in way of authentic care being developed. And there little hope that there will ever be a caring relationship.
We should also keep in mind that everyone in such a caring relationship – the child, the family, the care worker – has agency. Our unique wishes and interests, wants and needs, values and beliefs, and other cultural ways of being should be respected and nurtured because our agency as persons is a precious gift of the human condition. Conflicts between people in a caring relationship should be honestly resolved. What this requires is that we relate to each other as people.
Rich cultural life depends on a deeply experienced social life, which is only possible in honest dialogue. When are dishonest with each other, when we hide our true selves, and when our relationships lack integrity and depth, then we fail to realize our potential as human beings. This is an extreme form of poverty. In place of such poverty I want to create richly experienced social and community life, rather than to live in poverty or to impose such a form of poverty on myself or on others.
