The foundation of effective work in optimizing the mental health of children and youth is the Self. This is the area of influence in which the practitioner utilizes self-awareness to guide his/her interactions with all clients, family and other professionals.  A lifelong commitment to developing and utilizing the self in practice ensures that self-care and reflective practice guide all other domains of practice.  For example, the practitioner has a clear sense of personal values and ethics related to those values so that in the domain of Professionalism  he/she is easily able to identify ethical dilemmas or conflicts in professional opinion that are based on different values, vs. different areas of expertise.  The domain of professionalism also includes standards of competence that relate to professional presentation and professional identity as they influence his/her interpersonal interactions in the context of work.  Self should readily translate into the professional identity of the child and youth care practitioner. Communication is the forum (domain) through which self and professionalism is expressed to clientele, co-workers, and the multi-disciplinary team members (both formal and allied) that the child and youth practitioner comes into contact with.  As self and professional identities are established they are evidenced in the skills of verbal, non-verbal, written, and electronic communication with others. 

These three foundational domains

I.     Self

II.    Professionalism

III.   Communication

are then built upon with four domains which are related to the specific skills and knowledge required for creating positive influence and change in the lives of children, youth and families; particularly the optimizing of their mental health, without neglecting physical health and all other areas of developmental change. 

The four inter-related domains that focus on practice with children and youth are:

IV.     Relationships

V.      Normal and Abnormal Child and Adolescent Development

VI.     Systems Context

VII.    Interventions

There is overlap in the competencies required for effective practice in these four areas. For example, the practitioner must be able to assess the status of a child’s development (holistically) and identify areas of competence and areas of developmental delay.  He she must apply this knowledge of development as it occurs in the history and systemic context of the child’s life and the various systems that both the child and the practitioner are involved in.  This assessment and understanding is the basis upon which interventions are planned and executed.  Interventions, in child and youth care practice are both momentary and systematic.  Momentary interventions occur in the life-space of the child but bring to bear on the interaction all the awareness of the child’s development and context as well as personal awareness and professional identity.  In ordinary terminology we might call this “behavior management” but to be effective it is much more than the simple application of behavioural strategies such as cueing or reinforcement.  It involves knowing with which children, and under what circumstances one can tease or use terminology such as “dear” to provoke a calming reaction instead of escalating a conflict. Systematic interventions such as anger management groups, life skills development, or individual counseling and exploration of issues are planned and executed at specific times and over longer periods of time.  Relationships are essential to the implementation of interventions as well as the interpersonal inquiry that is necessary for a developmental assessment.  Children and youth, as well as their families must trust and feel safe in their interpersonal interactions with child and youth practitioners and such safety and trust is developed through relationship.

Standards of Competence for Beginning Practice

The seven domains of practice are used to describe the standards of competence required of child and youth care practitioners.  The focus in developing this set of standards is the skills and knowledge that should be present in child and youth care practitioners as they exit educational preparation and enter full-time practice. Each domain is further subdivided into the knowledge foundations for the domain and then a set of learning outcomes that represent the skills and attitudes that a graduate should posses. Each learning outcome is described by a series of elements of performance to further breakdown the expected level of performance for a graduate. These descriptors use the language of Bloom’s Taxonomy of educational objectives to identify the level of performance. The elements of performance the learning outcomes were drawn from a review of 4 Canadian and 1 North American document on training or certification competencies for child and youth care practitioners. They represent a compilation of existing Canadian knowledge in this area, supplemented with drawn from focus group consultations.

The detail on the standards and the seven domains of practice developed in this phase is posted on the Child and Youth Mental Health “Wiki” for comment by educators and practitioners.