Professionalism in Child and Youth Care
Supports to Successful Attainment of Professional Status
From within the Child and Youth Care Field
Karen Vander Ven (Competent Caregivers Competent Children, 1986) wrote that great strides had been made towards meeting the criteria for professionalism in Child and Youth Care in the following ways:
- "An organized effort has already been made to develop a consensual description of the knowledge base and skill areas subsumed by the field, e.g., the Principles and Guidelines for Child Care Personnel Preparation Programmes (1982).
- Although the delivery system for training and education is not yet comprehensive in terms of levels and geographical distribution, there has been tremendous growth all over North America in this area, particularly in the last decade. Furthermore, expansion in training and education for child care work is continuing despite general retrenchment in higher education.
- Professional associations have gotten under way and are becoming increasingly active. These include the state child associations which collectively comprise the National Organization of Child Care Worker Associations, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, the National Association of Human Services, and others whose mission intersects with that of child care.
- Some efforts to control entry or longevity in the field have been made; increasingly, some agencies require practitioners to have a certain level of competence and experience, and are providing career ladders. These allow them to remain in the field through the opportunity to make both lateral and vertical shifts. Some state child care associations have developed a certification process which is recognized by some agencies.
- A strong dedication to service is characterized by many (although not all) practitioners in the field, whose strong motivations to improve the welfare of children provide them with the energy to sustain recognized by some agencies.
- Although most practice of child care is conducted in organized bureaucratic settings, in line with Etzioni's (1969) concept of semi-profession, the beginning movement towards self-employment and private practice is also a movement towards practitioner independence.
- A growing concern with the public image of child care is beginning to yield more assertive and widely desseminated statements of what constitutes good quality child care service by members of the field"
"In May 2007, the Association for Child and Youth Care Practice (ACYCP) organized the Child and Youth Care Certification Board (CYCCB), an independent non-profit corporation, to oversee the implementation and further development of the professional credentialing program created by NACP. In March 2010, the Competency Review |Committee of CYCCB completed a review of the competencies and recommended language changes to better reflect diverse settings and evolving practices" (Mattingly, 2010)
| competencies_for_professional_child_and_youth_work_practitioners.pdf |
This website was created in 2011 by Jean Braun and Kristy Jackson
students in the Child and Youth Care (CYC) stream of the Human Services Diploma program
as a project for the "Professionalism in Child and Youth Care" course
at Selkirk College in Castlegar, BC, Canada.
