Recovering Futures: Adding Recovery to Children's Planning
By Wendy Luckenbill, Family Advocate  Posing the "Recovery" Question
I first encountered the Recovery movement via an adult consumer friend and immediately thought it held important messages for families and their children who struggle with emotional or behavioral difficulties. I soon began writing and training on this possibility. So, this spring, I was excited to learn that the Portland Research and Training Center was working on how Recovery principles might apply to children. In "The Concept of Recovery: 'Value Added' for the Children's Mental Health Field?", Dr. Barbara Friesen writes, "The aspects of recovery that sparked the most interest and excitement on the part of young people and their families were the hope, optimism, and positive orientation to the future that characterize the recovery process." Like the families interviewed by Portland RTC for the article, I respond to the power of Recovery's core message of hope, which, despite two decades of child- and family-centered reform, is too often missing in the messages children and families hear from the systems serving them.
Carrying the Hope
As a parent, Recovery has profound and personal meaning for me. It allows me to speak in real life ways about two of its core concepts, hope and help. My commitment to bringing Recovery into the children's system of care arose from my utter frustration with the monumental roadblocks young adults I knew, including my own, were experiencing because they would not, or could not ask for help. It seemed we were losing this whole generation that we had fought so hard for, the first group of children with severe emotional and behavioral disorders who were really given a chance to get an education and child-centered services. Now they were crashing and burning on entry into adulthood. Shelley Bishop, the adult consumer who introduced me to Recovery, lost her own child to unresponsive services when he was 18. She showed me how Recovery principles could reverse the phenomenon I was seeing. Recovery teaches how to ask for help, how to hope through self-determination and self-advocacy, and the value of having others carrying the hope when the person can't. Recovery totally rejects the notion of "stand and fall on your own," and affirms the connections between us all. Shelley explained how sometimes we need others to carry the hope until we can carry it for ourselves.
Recovering Dignity, Rejecting Defectiveness
Dr. Friesen's article tackles the applicability of Recovery to children. I struggle to put into words what Recovery principles could mean to children and families. The Recovery movement is more than just a new paradigm. It comes from the experiences of adult consumers; it is for many almost a spiritual calling. Recovery gives us the path to the soul. It gives us a way to shift the discussion from system values to personal values that hinge on respect and dignity. It is not about a cure, but a way to honor who a person is, not who she should be, based on what is really a false ideal of normalcy. Recovery principles are essential for the hope of happy days and healthy fulfilling futures for families and their children. To hope is to shift from despair to a belief that life can be meaningful and fulfilling, that the child is welcome in the world, and that he has something of value to contribute, in the present, and in the future, not in spite of his dark side, but in part because of it. Recovery dares to conceive of "deficits" and "weaknesses" as strengths themselves, rather than factors that are negatively impacting a person's "strengths."
The Recovery philosophy allows us to re-conceptualize children with difficult behaviors as being of equal worth and value to all children, just as they are, as they attempt to survive a toxic and often catastrophic dissonance between their needs and their environment. Recovery, when applied to children, forces us to abandon the industrial age's approach to child rearing which was mired in breaking children to the yoke, normalizing them, and "fixing" them as though they were defective parts to be pulled out and repaired or disposed of.
What is our obligation to children whose behaviors are difficult? What if we told children they were gifted rather than flawed, and that their challenge was to learn to use their experience and what Shelley calls their "exquisite sensitivity"? Is it not from darkness and suffering that the best of human emotions can arise? What if they are like canaries in the mine, sounding the alarm to a world that is not safe and welcoming to them? What if we ceased stigmatizing them, invalidating their emotions and experiances, and robbing them of the lessons they are given? What if we helped them quest for beauty, understanding, justice, and compassion? What if we tried to learn from them?
Hope cannot occur for a child unless we accept and value that child's unique and intrinsic being. All children, even at their most exasperating, bring with them a startling capacity for connectedness, insight, knowledge, and creativity. That capacity is too frequently left to atrophy in our zeal to address their demanding and challenging natures. It all begins and ends with hope.
Suggestions for a Healthy Futures-Based System of Care for Children:
• Practice, policies, and programs support all children's developmental, psychological, spiritual needs.
• The richness of variation in natural human condition is welcomed and celebrated.
• Children and their families learn self-advocacy skills and those skills are respected.
• Children and families are helped to create options based on personal choice, not pre-existing social structures and expectations.
• There is effective anti-stigma/discrimination education in the community (e.g., in churches, schools, and so on).
• There is an array of flexible community-based services (e.g., respite, after school programs, school based mental health services-both prevention and intervention, consultation services to day care programs, and youth centers).
• Systems staff practice fidelity to recovery, health/wellness, and resiliency outcomes for children and their families.
• Children and their families do not encounter a ceiling where their needs exceed the system's willingness to respond to them with hope.
Wendy is the Child and Family Policy Consultant for the Mental Health Association in Pennsylvania, working in individual family advocacy as well as state systems policy and program reform. Wendy is the national President of the Federation of Families for Children's Mental Health. As always, we look forward to hearing from you!
Your thoughts…
Comments:
 Colorado - I work with very young children and I think we have to be careful how we use the concept of recovery. For young children, regaining their developmental track and having successful relationships with caregivers is a good place to start a definition. Definition becomes important when funding becomes connected to outcome measures based on a definition. Posted Wednesday, September 28, 2005 by Betsy Rogers, LCSW Aurora, Co at 10:42 AM
A comment re: the posting that gives us the websters dictionary definition of recovery, "According to the definition RECOVERY means 'to to regain a normal position or condition (as of health)". I'm afraid that you'll not get the importtant message of recovery via a dictionary. If fact, what is needed here is dialogue with families, youth, and adults who are experiencing recovery. Recovery and its definition are unique and personal however one finds commonalities. Differring too are types of recovery for instance mental illness and substance abuse; two paths, sometimes parallel sometimes not. My message is this: Recovery is more about hope anything else; please do not become a gate keeper of hope. Posted Monday, July 25, 2005 by We2recover at 08:36 AM
I agree with the previous posting. I absolutely don't like the term "recovery". According to the definition RECOVERY means "to to regain a normal position or condition (as of health) ". NORMAL??? Hold on a minute! While this may hold out hope to parents and families, it may be unrealisitic. Many children (and adults)with mental health issues will stuggle throughout the lifespan with their condition(s). Hopefully, children and their parents will gain the necessary skills, tools and supports to be successful (in their own definition of success) and to cope with recurring episodes over time. But, I think that it is a dangerous thing to say that recovery is possible. As a parent, the amount of grieving that occurs everytime that my child experiences another episode of challenges is beyond explanation. There is certain amount of acceptance that is necessary for parents to be able to move forward, accept their child's differences, and be aware that they will struggle with the conditions indefinitely. Holding out the word "recovery" is like telling a parent with a child who has Down's Syndrome that their child will "recover" one day.
Posted Wednesday, July 20, 2005 at 01:38 PM
I have a very positive reaction to this and to the article on "value added." In particular, I think the potential contribution from both recovery and resilience to the idea of cultural competence is important. My feeling is that in systems of care we don't have a very sophisticated view of what cultural competence is or how it looks. Adding in the ideas of historical trauma and racial socialization may help us move toward the greater sophistication we need. Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 at 12:22 PM
As an advocate and past family therapist, the "successes" I have seen are from families that truely believed in thier children's strenghts and didn't let a diagnosis or the education system stop them. I feel if we all embraced this recovery concept, there would be many more sucesses that positively affect our community. Posted Thursday, June 16, 2005 at 06:19 AM
This article is extremely meaningful (and timely)to me as a parent as well. Our son was discharged yesterday after 15 months in a residential treatment facility. Although many felt it was too soon for him to come home - we, as his parents, believed he deserved the dignity of risk to live and learn in his own community. We have been involved in hours of meetings planning for services to help him be successful at home and beleive me - HOPE and HELP are what we need right now! Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 at 08:14 PM
While I am generally in sympathy with the themes of what's written here, I wonder about going overboard with some of it. I have suffered from depression (including as a young person) and yes, it has made me who I am and it has required me to learn to be stronger in order to make a life. But is it, in and of itself, a strength? Not from my point of view. Would I get rid of it if I could (would I like that aspect of myself to be "repaired" or "fixed")? Yes, in fact I have taken medication to do that as much as possible-- I have even been willing to suffer some considerable side effects to minimize the negative moods and associated problems. Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 at 11:29 AM
I appreciate the points raised both in this essay and in the article by Barbara Friesen (And I am eagerly awaiting the rest of the Focal Point issue to read the other articles). Recovery is a difficult word to use in the context of children's mental health. If it did just stand for hope and health and strengths and building a meaningful life, that would be one thing. But to some people it means getting completely better-- like how things were before. To other people it carries meanings from AA or substance abuse. It will take a lot of work and education to get people to the point where the meaning we want the word to have is the one they associate with it. Posted Wednesday, June 15, 2005 at 11:16 AM
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