This textbook is published as an Open Educational Resource (OER), To find out more, see the ‘What are OERs?’ section.

The content within has been adapted for Child and Youth Care Practitioner (CYCP) students to understand various theories, approaches, and how a knowledge and understanding of different areas of development can inform our practice with young people and their families. Using available OERs with a Canadian context, the content has been adapted, edited, and transformed to align with CYCP competencies, learning, and context.

Within the field of Child and Youth Care (CYC), there is a lot of information that we must consider, to provide us context, in order to best support healthy development for children and youth. Regardless of the setting we are working in, development is a main focus. It provides benchmarks that we can compare and contrast a young person’s strengths, developments, and potentials for growth, relationships, and connection. Children do not grow in a vacuum. Their environment, the people around them, their communities, everything influences development.

Our practice, our approach, and our ethics are guided by many sources, such as the Competencies for Professional Child & Youth Work Practitioners (Association for Child and Youth Care Practice [ACYCP], 2010), The Standards for Practice of North American Child & Youth Care Professionals (ACYCP, 2023), and at the local level, a region-specific code of ethics or practice standards such as the Ontario Association of Child and Youth Care (OACYC) Code of Ethics (OACYC, 2024b).

Understanding the patterns of development provide the ability for professionals such as CYCPs to build caring and responsive relationships (OACYC, 2024a), and design safe and accessible environments which support children’s play and learning, both of which contribute to a sense of belonging and overall well-being (Ontario Ministry of Education, 2014).

In Ontario, the OACYC Scope of Practice (OACYC, 2024) describes our practice as having a “[focus] on children and youth, within the context of families, the community and their lifespace. Acknowledging their evolving capacity, the perspective emphasizes the interactions between persons and their physical, spiritual, emotional, and social environments, including cultural and political settings” (OACYC, 2024 para. 5). The Competencies for Professional Child & Youth Work Practitioners document describes the field of CYCP as having a focus on “on infants, children, and adolescents, including those with special needs, within the context of the family, the community, and the life span. The developmental ecological perspective emphasizes the interaction between persons and their physical and social environments, including cultural and political settings” (ACYCP, 2010, p. 2).
The Competencies also describe our practice as “[promoting] the optimal development of children, youth, and their families in a variety of settings, such as early care and education, community-based child and youth development programs, parent education and family support, school-based programs, community mental health, group homes, residential centers, day and residential treatment, early intervention, home-based care and treatment, psychiatric centers, rehabilitation programs, pediatric health care, and juvenile justice programs” (ACYCP, 2010, p. 2).

Domain of Practice III focuses on development of children, youth, and families. It lists foundational skills such as keeping current with “research and theory in human development, with an emphasis on a developmental-ecological perspective” (ACYCP, 2010, p. 15) and our ability to “integrate current knowledge of human development with the skills, expertise, objectivity and self awareness essential for developing, implementing and evaluating effective programs and services” (ACYCP, 2010, p. 15).

The way this domain is organized, you can see how there is so much interconnectedness in our work. The more information we have, the better we can start where a young person is. To be a strong CYC Practitioner, we need to understand development across the lifespan, different contexts that are present, the environment, community, relationships, and how everything works together. The content of this OER, along with the rest of your courses throughout the CYC program, will reinforce these concepts. Maier (2009) stated that “work with children or youth requires an intense interpersonal involvement at whatever level of development a child or youth is operating” (p. 1) and this is a good summary of how we integrate our learning. 

The content has been adapted and edited to connect within the context of a CYCP approach, which means there may unintentionally be minor errors within the content and pages.

References

Association for Child and Youth Care Practice. (2010) Applied Human Development. Retrieved from: https://www.cyccb.org/competencies/applied-human-development

Maier, H. W. (2009). A Developmental Perspective for Child and Youth Care Work. Journal of Child and Youth Care, Vol.8 No.2, pp. 57-70.

Ontario Association of Child and Youth Care. (2024a). Code of Ethics. Retrieved from https://oacyc.org/code-of-ethics/

Ontario Association of Child and Youth Care. (2024b). Scope of Practice. Retrieved from https://oacyc.org/scope-of-practice/

Ontario Ministry of Education. (2014). How does learning happen? Ontario’s pedagogy for the early years: A resource about learning through relationships for those who work with young children and their families. Retrieved from https://files.ontario.ca/edu-how-does-learning-happen-en-2021-03-23.pdf