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What if everything we think we know about residential childcare is wrong? What if, for some children, it's not the dreaded last resort but actually the best option for healing and growth?

Dr. Laura Steckley, who leads the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde, brings three decades of practice, research, and teaching experience to challenge our assumptions. Having worked in both the United States and Scotland, she offers a refreshing perspective on what quality residential care can achieve when properly understood and supported.

The conversation upends conventional wisdom by revealing research showing many children who've experienced both foster care and residential settings actually prefer the latter. For children who find family environments emotionally threatening due to past trauma, residential care offers unique advantages: multiple caring relationships increasing the chance of meaningful connection, natural breaks preventing relationship burnout, and the therapeutic power of peer groups.

Dr. Steckley's groundbreaking research on physical restraint reveals surprising nuance. Rather than viewing restraint as universally negative, she introduces containment theory – a framework for understanding how adults help make "the unmanageable manageable" for distressed children. Her studies found some children reported restraint experiences, when conducted as acts of care rather than control, actually improved their relationships with staff.

Perhaps most powerfully, Dr. Steckley asserts that "in the daily minutiae of good care is where healing and developmental ground is regained." This elevates the importance of residential childcare workers and recognizes the complexity of their work. She also explores how shame, possibly our most "uncontainable" emotion, often manifests as rage in traumatized children, and how staff need proper support themselves to provide effective care.

The episode concludes with a fascinating discussion of attunement, using the famous "still face" experiment to demonstrate how children escalate behavior when seeking emotional connection – offering a radical reframing of how we might respond to challenging behaviors in care settings.

Listen now to gain fresh insights that could transform how you think about caring for our most vulnerable children.

Laura's Bio:

Dr Laura Steckley leads up the MSc in Advanced Residential Child Care at the University of Strathclyde and so has the very good fortune of doing teaching and learning with residential child care practitioners.  She has worked in direct and indirect practice in both the United States of America and Scotland. Her teaching, research and knowledge mobilisation are mostly addressed to residential child care practice and education, with a particular focus on physical restraint.  

Disclaimer

Information reported by guests of this podcast is assumed to be accurate as stated. Podcast owner Colby Pearce is not responsible for any error of facts presented by podcast guests. In addition, unless otherwise specified, opinions expressed by guests of this podcast may not reflect those of the podcast owner, Colby Pearce.

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