A Young Person and their ‘System’
When it comes to School holidays, it can sometimes feel a bit mean to visit a young person expecting them to do ‘work’ with you, so during the last half term break a young person I’m supporting and I decided to go and do something fun instead to keep in contact, and carry on our conversations about their perspective of the ‘systems’ around them.
It’s been amazing watching this young person, without much guidance through the activities, starting to go through a similar journey we went on as practitioners during the systems change program.
Talking about things being ‘messy’ or ‘difficult’, identifying the parts he would like to change and starting to think about what they, myself or others could or should be doing to help them.
On our ‘fun’ day we decided to go to the park- this young person has described ‘home being like school, and school being like home’ in the past. Meaning both are equally chaotic for them and make them feel like they haven’t got much space that feels safe and quiet, or calming.
This young person described their ‘favourite’ place as a peaceful garden- so after a walk around the gardens in the park we decided to warm up in the cafe.
Whilst getting a drink for the young person I could see them looking at the cakes on the counter and asked if they would like one- eyeing up a massive piece of chocolate fudge cake I got an emphatic ‘yes please’.
Whilst we were sitting the young person asked me if i was having anything and I said no- they were a little pensive and I was worried maybe this young person was feeling anxious about eating in front of me.
Then they said after a moment, ‘I’ve never had chocolate cake before’.
How is this possible?
I was completely blindsided- “a child who hasn’t had cake…”- my internal monologue went full Shakespearean drama. I’m not sure I thought it possible that a young person in the UK could go 10 plus years and never have had cake before?
I had initially been surprised by how intuitively this young person had grasped where we were going in exploring their “system”, in the context of an intervention around well-being.
I have listened in on conversations about the need for “translating” systems thinking for young people, and thought about my surprise about the fluency of this young person talking about it. However, the cake thing demonstrated to me why young people are more systems native than we give them credit for; they are constantly feeling these impacts and then attempting to translate them for us to understand- the grown ups.
Perhaps we’ve got it the wrong way round as an approach- young people should be translating systems change or systems thinking for us; we don’t need to do it for them. They are the systems natives in this context; and we’ll always be the tourists.
Young people are telling us so much more than we are perhaps able to hear- and we have to keep asking ourselves; how much do we really understand about young people?
