Having worked in a live-in residential children’s home before moving to shift-based settings, I’ve always been interested in the different views about relationship boundaries between staff and children. Boundaries are often seen as lines separating the personal and professional lives of workers. But it is not clear that strict separations of the personal and the professional fit well with the intimacy of the task. In spite of this, concerns about abuse, along with the desire for a more professional identity, have contributed to a shift towards approaches prioritising “professional distance” over personal connection.
Relationships play a central role in work with young people, who often lack positive connections with adults. Boundaries have a strong influence on how these relationships develop. Yet we know very little about the decisions that workers make about the boundaries they will have in their relationships with young people. Finding that no published research on this existed in the UK , I decided to explore these decisions using an online survey (pdf).
The survey asked workers how often they behave in a way that involves crossing boundaries, including physical contact, sharing personal information and giving gifts. More than 100 workers completed the survey: 86 from around 30 different organisations and a comparison group of 20 from my own, East Lothian council, where we have made conscious efforts to develop safe ways of being more flexible about boundaries. While a survey of this kind can only offer suggestive findings, the results raise some interesting questions.
Consensus, divergence and taboo
Responses fell into three broad categories. In some areas, including physical contact (95%), physical restraint (98%), lending possessions (74%) and sharing some personal information (71%), there was consensus among at least two-thirds of workers that boundaries could sometimes be crossed.
Taboo areas, in which (considerably) less than one-third of workers reported crossing boundaries, included being visited at home (15%), and contact via mobile technology (8%) and social media (5%). But there was divergence over giving gifts (59%), keeping in touch when young people move on (52%), spending time with young people outside work (41%) and developing particularly significant relationships with individual young people (35%). This doesn’t fit well with the idea of boundaries as agreed “lines” not to be crossed. It also implies that young people’s experiences are likely to vary.
Influences on boundary decisions
Many factors regarding the care setting, such as size, sector and function, had little influence on responses. But two factors contributed to more flexible responses; younger children and longer placements.
With regard to respondents, gender and, to an even greater extent, role at work, appeared to contribute to substantial differences. Women tended to engage in more physical contact, gift-giving and lending, and men reported more frequent involvement in physical restraint and development of important individual relationships. Seniority also had an impact; workers, supervisors and managers reported ascending levels of flexibility with regard to a range of behaviours, including contact outside work time, developing significant individual relationships and keeping in touch when young people move on.
Individual and cultural belief systems
Both individual beliefs and organisational culture appeared to have a big effect on responses. The flexible culture that has developed in East Lothian was evident in workers’ responses, particularly in relation to the more difficult issues, such as contact outside work time, keeping in touch, contact at workers’ homes and contact via mobile technology, which workers were more than twice as likely to do. Alongside this, individual differences continued to exist, leading to a range of responses from workers in the same setting.
The picture of relationship boundaries that emerges from the survey is more complex and variable than might be expected. Boundary decisions often appear to be influenced by a wide range of personal, contextual, cultural and organisational factors rather than being fixed. It also seems to be possible for organisations to make boundaries more flexible, to expand the scope for creating meaningful connections with young people.
Our experience in East Lothian has been that, while some additional attention to boundaries is required, this can be achieved safely, and with positive results.
Phil Coady and Lisa Muirhead are carrying out a follow-up survey of young people’s views and are keen to hear from care leavers who have been in a residential placement within the past five years. Contact Phil at pcoady@eastlothian.gov.uk or Lisa at lmuirhead@whocaresscotland.org
