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Ashley Do Nascimento, MA, child and youth studies from Brock University, conducted ethnographical research in Rio de Janeiro, 
Brazil, in 2012. Concerned with child and youth care (CYC) work relationships as they relate to racialized and segregated practices, 
specifically within the slums of Rio, Do Nascimento focuses on CYC work outcomes and legitimacy. Her research looks to the 
practices and role of CYC work in young individuals’ lives and uses critical theories, specifically postcolonial theories, to ask 
critical questions regarding the relations between those who execute services (the CYC worker) and those who receive services (the 
child and/or youth/family). Email: ashley.nascimento78@gmail.com

Rethinking Common Practice in Child and Youth Care
Ashley Do Nascimento

It was a hot, sunny afternoon in Rio de Janeiro in 2013, after 
a less than productive English class with a group of Brazilian 
children at the community centre where I was doing ethnographic 
research as a child and youth care (CYC) worker. I sat at a table 
with a group of other volunteers and two coordinators, feeling 
frustrated and exhausted. We had sent all the children back into 
the streets because they were shouting over each other, getting 
up from their seats, and ignoring instructions. We decided that 
we needed to develop rules for the community centre to maintain 
some kind of order. As we discussed the behaviour of the children 
and our expectations for them, we began to outline a list of rules 
that would have to be followed by every child who attended the 
community centre. It was also decided that if the rules were not 
followed, a child would be punished by losing privileges (e.g., the 
use of pens, markers, balls, books, etc.), and as a final step, they 
would be asked to leave. Lastly, we agreed that if the children as 
a group were not behaving according to the rules, they would all 
be sent home early and the community centre would close for the 
day. During the development of the rules, we discussed keeping 
the children safe and the need for them to show us respect by 

listening to us. We described some of the children as “not knowing better.” We used words like “vulnerable” and “immature.” Later, the 
list of rules with their consequences was presented to the children as nonnegotiable, and the children were told they needed to accept the 
rules or deal with the consequences.

While we felt we were acting in the children’s best interests, what we did not see at the time was how we were reinforcing dominant 
discourses of childhood. We repeatedly viewed the children as dependent, innocent, naïve, and at risk. Our attempt to take care of the 
children through disciplinary actions (i.e., rules and punishments) felt safe, practical, and responsible. Yet our framing of the children as 
needing protection is precisely the problem this articles seeks to address. Mark Smith (2003) warns child and youth care (CYC) workers 
about getting caught up in the protection discourse, arguing that such notions of care draw heavily from developmental psychology. 
Like Burman (2008), Smith suggests that CYC is rooted in developmental notions of children as immature, unknowing, reliant, and less 
than adults. These dominant ways of classifying young people condense children’s varying experiences and social contexts, creating a 
one-size-fits-all model that does little to create real connections between children/youth and adults. While developmental psychology 
informs the way CYC workers view children and, in turn, how we practice CYC, it universalizes, and thus trivializes, circumstances that 
instead must be more deeply and contextually understood (Bernhard, 1995; Burman, 2008; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2011; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 
White, & Armstrong de Almeida, 2006; Watkins & Shulman, 2008).

This paper takes a critical approach to the predominantly Western way that CYC is practiced. Using my experience of CYC work in a 
slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, I challenge the common perception of children based on the developmental frameworks of innocence 
and dependence. I argue that this approach neglects to consider context and, in fact, works to reproduce inequalities among children 

This paper deconstructs the dominant Western discourses of 
childhood innocence and dependence to better understand the 
importance of cultural contexts in child and youth care (CYC) 
work. It challenges dominant discourses as they relate to 
work in CYC settings cross-culturally. Exploring her personal 
experiences doing CYC work in a favela (slum) in Rio de 
Janeiro, Brazil, the author argues that CYC workers must be 
flexible and reflexive about the realities of the people with 
whom they work, or risk reifying the very issues they seek 
to address. In short, CYC workers can become part of the 
problem if they are not deeply aware of the ways they might 
reproduce these dominant discourses.

Keywords: childhood, discourse, child and youth care work, 
Western, Brazil, favela



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in the Global South. Further, I argue that a developmental framework has specific consequences for those doing CYC work in Brazil 
(Gharabaghi, 2010). If taken as truths, Western discourses of innocence and dependency work to further produce inequalities by reflecting 
a Western superiority and way of viewing childhood that does not work for families in the favelas (slums). In fact, CYC programs set 
up to reflect such frameworks will inevitability collapse, because they will fail to deliver the services necessary to make change in these 
young peoples’ lives.

Before exploring my experiences further, I briefly outline the history of childhood as a way of explaining the framework upon which 
CYC is premised, followed by a complication of the developmentally based approach to Western CYC work. I also explore the favela 
as a specific cultural reference point within Brazil in order to more deeply contextualize favela childhoods—particularly childhoods 
in the neighbourhood where I worked. This context informs my recommendations for CYC practices. I then reflect on my experiences 
through the field notes I took while working in Brazil, and situate them within the dominant Western and developmentally framed 
discourses of childhood as a time of innocence and dependence, arguing that using these frameworks overlook certain aspects of 
favela life, and therefore when applied by CYC workers, underserve the children whom they are attempting to help. I then suggest how 
these frameworks, when used in CYC work environments cross-culturally, can create a barrier between worker and child or youth that 
produces questionable CYC work outcomes. In conclusion, I offer some thoughts that speak to the implications that can arise in CYC 
settings in which workers are not culturally sensitive to the populations with whom they work.

The “New”-er Sociology of Childhood and its Implications for CYC Work

There are a variety of ways to approach how childhood is conceptualized both historically and currently. Historically, in the “old” 
sociology of childhood, children were understood in relation to socialization and, in turn, to their development (Burman, 2008; 
Matthews, 2007). Children were never fully viewed as being complete and competent beings, but rather were viewed as individuals 
who were incomplete and in the process of becoming an adult. Matthews (2007) argues that this perspective constricts the ways in 
which researchers understand children and childhood. He claims that research tends to be solely focused on the child in relation to their 
dependency on adults who control the ways in which children are socialized. 

James (2004) proposes a new paradigm for childhood where the experiences of childhood and adolescence do not consist of one 
universal form constructed through biology, but rather are mediated through culture and through social experiences. As Gittins (2004) 
points out, these social experiences suggest that certain social groups in relation to a historical period have defined the term childhood. 
Childhood has therefore been mischaracterized as being “equal, universal and in some ways, fundamentally identical” (Gittins, 2004, 
p. 35). These assumptions have implications for policy, education, and other public provisions because practices are then framed with 
assumptions that children should act “like this” or behave “like that” (Moss & Petrie, 2002; Pacini-Ketchabaw, 2011). 

Burman (2008) also deconstructs understandings of how childhood has been conceptualized in different cultures and through time, 
with influences such as religion and scientific discovery causing major shifts in how childhood has been understood. She posits that 
developmental psychology has been a major contributor to the understandings of childhood, and therefore has had a huge influence 
on childcare practices. In Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, Burman (2008) takes child labour in third-world countries as 
an example of how failing to understand context and culture can be troublesome in practices. She claims that “the issue here is to 
proscribe exploitative and dangerous work practices rather than pathologise Third World cultures and families for failing to uphold 
modern Western notions of childhood as a period of dependency, play and irresponsibility” (p. 93). While looking at child labour (as 
an example), she warns against the “abnormaling” of another country’s practices because they do not reflect Western understandings 
of children. Instead, she argues that context and cultures are critical components to how childhood should be viewed and how children 
should be treated.

James (2004) states that through seeing childhood as something that is mediated by culture, childhood became “open to interpretation, 
and thus variation, rather than a simple and unproblematic description of a universal developmental phase” (p. 28). These varying 
understandings of what childhood should be are often difficult to understand because countries have different “legal, social, and cultural 
expectations about children” (James, 2004, p. 28) and their competencies, abilities, rights, and health. Seeing childhood through stringent 
legal, social, and political boundaries can limit and prevent a child from being seen for who they really are, and can negatively influence 
services that are available to them. Specifically within CYC work, workers then frame their practices with children and youth around 
these boundaries, creating potentially negative consequences for the groups they are working with. 



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Western Notions of Childhood

Western discourses tend to value and emphasize innocence and dependency by privileging the idea that children should not be in adult 
roles. There is a clear distinction between adults and children that works to create dichotomies between the two classifications, placing 
more emphasis on adults as beings in the present with responsibilities (Gharabaghi, 2008; Krueger, 2000). Children are often left out of 
adult spheres and adult roles, and when they are included, the roles they assume are often looked down on. For a child to develop into an 
adult, the child is seen as innocent and must be treated as such, in order to protect them from potentially compromising their development 
into adulthood. Children as dependent also fall under the developmental trajectory where dependency relates to innocence and children 
need to be under constant supervision and guidance by an older, mature adult (Krueger, 2000). Therefore, when other cultures depict 
children in adult roles, they are often “othered” and seen as being abnormal (Gharabaghi, 2008). 

Pacini-Ketchabaw (2011) claims that “the study and treatment of developmental psychology in CYC need to be contextually specific, 
critically embraced, and not necessarily treated as one of the foundations of the field” (p. 20). Developmentally based understandings of 
children can reflect a superior race paradigm that often privileges white, Western, middle-class values around how children should act 
and be treated (L. T. Smith, 2012). Bernhard (1995) cautions against these developmental understandings when she demonstrates how 
educators struggle to cope with the rapidly changing culturally diverse groups of students. She warns of the dangers of educating these 
students using developmental theories that have been based on white, middle-class Western children.

Specifically, within the slum in Rio de Janeiro where I did my research, these ideas around how children should behave and how they 
should be treated worked to constrict and limit my interactions with children and understandings of childhood within the favelas. Instead 
of working for the children, culturally biased misunderstandings of who these children really are and their reality as children in/from the 
favela further hinder the children’s and their families’ potential in the favela and in society. They work to keep those individuals in a state 
of dependence on social services, further distancing them from equal citizenship. The dependence on services is further implicated when 
the services provided neglect to consider how greater historical, social, and political discourses frame their practices. In my experience, 
these misunderstandings demanded a better understanding of the favela.

Locating the Favela

The favela has historically been linked with the social stigmas around poverty, dirtiness, instability, danger, and diseases that cast its 
inhabitants as “scum” (Richardson & Skott-Myhre, 2012). It has been reproduced within popular culture, especially within Brazilian 
films such as Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad), and Sonhos Roubados (Stolen Dreams), to represent an area of chaos, garbage, drugs, and 
weapons, with streets lined with prostitutes and other social outcasts. Richardson and Skott-Myhre (2012) look at spaces like the favela, 
or hood, and argue that Bourdieu’s theory of habitus relates to the occupied spaces in the favela that have been stigmatized by society but 
are really only understood and appreciated by their own inhabitants. The favela then becomes a “dwelling place” (Robin Cooper, 2005, 
as cited in Richardson & Skott-Myhre, 2012) only having value for those who physically embody it and manoeuvre through its space. 
When one thinks of a habitus, the authors claim, we often are only able to associate within our own habitus, therefore giving it status. 
Thus hoods, or favelas, only have one main characteristic, which is its “marginalized relationship…with the mainstream” (Richardson 
& Skott-Myhre, 2012, p. 13). In situating the hood historically, Richardson and Skott-Myhre look to Deleuze and Guattari’s notion 
of catastrophe, claiming that catastrophe occurs when there is mistrust created between individuals within a society. They then claim 
that hoods are a result of the catastrophes of colonialism and slavery and their links to postcolonial settler colonies. It is important to 
understand this “social birth” of the hood in relation to the favela as it relates to the spaces of the favela in which programs and services 
are focused and practiced. The favelados (people inhibiting the favelas), and the favelas themselves “were depicted as a problem to be 
solved, a roadblock on the way to inclusion” (Do Nascimento, Skott-Myhre, & Skott-Myhre, 2015, p. 264). Often then programs are 
created within spaces where notions of individuals in need of liberation are the focus, and not created in spaces that work themselves to 
produce liberation (Richardson & Skott-Myhre, 2012).

Taking On Adult Roles: Challenging Innocence and Dependence

I question the notion of childhood as understood through the developmental frameworks of dependence and innocence in relation to the 
children living within the favelas. I argue that because of the various life circumstances that children are faced with when living in the 
favelas, children are often found assuming adult roles, contesting what it means to be innocent and challenging ideas around dependency.



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I encountered numerous instances while doing my fieldwork where children were left alone. Children as young as 3 were found by 
themselves wandering the streets, and 5-year-olds were found taking care of their younger siblings. At age 6, they might be at the bakery 
buying buns or at the pharmacy buying medication for their families. 

Below I provide four different examples from my work in the field that challenge notions of childhood innocence and dependency. After 
these examples, an analysis of these discourses relative to how they inform CYC services is explored. 

Alone in the streets
One morning in May 2013, I was going for a run around the neighbourhood. I remember passing a young boy who couldn’t have been 
any older than 6 or 7 who was walking alone. I noticed that he had a young baby in a carrier attached to the front of his body, and I 
immediately began trying to think of ways to justify the young boy’s situation. Maybe the baby was his brother and his parents had no 
other choice but to leave him with the young boy because they had to work. Or maybe his mother was ill and his father was dead and so 
it was the young boy’s responsibility to look after his mother and the baby. Either way, I had an uneasy feeling about the situation, so I 
began to question the way I felt. Were the dominant Western discourses so instilled in me that the only way I was able to understand and 
make sense of the world around me was to try and justify the situation through various made-up circumstances that could somehow be 
used to justify (in my mind) what I had seen? Why was it that I even felt uncomfortable with the situation in the first place? Was it not 
appropriate for a boy to be walking by himself in the streets with a baby strapped to his front? All of the questions seemed to attack the 
dominant, Western part of me that was so used to relating to and seeing children from developmental perspectives as beings in need of 
protection and guidance from adults. Was the notion of childhood innocence so firmly framed within a Western developmental discourse 
that it overlooked various ways of looking at innocence socially or culturally? Would not seeing children as innocent and dependent be 
of particular value and importance within Brazilian favela cultures, acting like a survival mechanism for young individuals? Perhaps in 
favelas, being innocent would be a disadvantage for those children because they would be less likely to make it in the streets? Perhaps 
lacking innocence was key to understanding the ways in which society marginalizes certain groups of individuals and reproduces 
inequalities? Therefore, to lack innocence might be of great importance to children and their families growing up in the favelas. 

Who is dependent on whom?
On another day in June 2013, I was at the community centre where a meeting was being held with a group of residents who were 
involved in a project run through World Vision. The lecture focused on the dynamics of family relationships within the favela. As I sat 
back observing the talk, there was a group of four toddlers, all under the age of 2, whose parents and guardians were sitting in listening 
to the talk. I noticed that these young children, who could barely walk or talk, were left alone to play. There were no volunteers from 
the community centre or other adults left to watch over them and watch their every move. I found this to be interesting. I continued to 
watch as the infants poked each other and sucked on each other’s soothers until one of the fathers approached me. His daughter, who at 
the time was 12, had not been spending much time at the community centre because her mother had given birth to a baby girl. She had 
been given more responsibility to help her mother at home and was often left to take of the infant and her other sisters. The father began 
talking with me about how children from the favelas were different, and many knew more than adults. He told me that because of the 
greater life circumstances for those living within the favelas, children were often forced at a young age to take on more responsibilities, 
often taking on adult roles at ages as young as 5 or 6.

What I found to be interesting regarding our conversation was that even though he mentioned that it was due to life circumstances that 
children had to take on adult roles, he did not seem to feel pity for these children. It seems that this is a common reflection from people 
living within the favelas. A child taking on adults’ roles was just the way it was, and it was an important and necessary aspect to living 
within the favelas. But what types of consequences do these notions have for individuals providing child and youth care? If children 
do not depend on adults as much as we think they do, then what does this mean for child and youth care workers? What type of “care” 
should be provided, if it is needed at all? If these children at ages 7 and 8 began to take care of their younger siblings, then what does 
this mean in terms of the care we should be providing as workers?

Sex, and drugs, and death: Oh my!
There were many times when I was involved in conversations with the children of the community where we discussed topics that are 
generally considered inappropriate for children from a developmental perspective. The conversations would certainly not be considered 
appropriate in the various CYC contexts that I worked in back home in Canada. While I never explicitly talked about sex, some of our 
conversations centred around ideas of sex and sexuality. Children at times would talk about baile funk (more specifically, the Proibidão 



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subgenre) and the associated dance routine. Baile funk is a traditional Brazilian favela-cultured music and dance. Proibidão, more 
characteristic in the favelas, has very sexual lyrics. Proibidão is a specific subgenre of funk music that relates to the gang culture as 
reflected in that area. Proibidão, which translates to prohibited in English, has lyrics that reflect gang culture, including control, power, 
violence, drugs, and crime, and it often degrades women, in contrast to other forms of funk music, or funk carioca, which can be seen as 
more pleasant and often reflects the lived realties and struggles of those growing up within the favela. On weekends, the drug lords of the 
favelas would often hold baile funk parties that went late into the early morning of the following day. These parties were often considered 
to be dangerous because men with guns would control the influx of people, and there were often many drugs being sold. The way you 
danced to the music was to suggest that you were having sex—women would be bent over from the hips and men would close the gap 
with their waist fitting tightly behind them. Children were found in the favelas singing along to the newest funk songs that would play 
from their cellphones, or they were found dancing with their peers, often making up their own versions of the dance moves. Although 
many of the children themselves did not discuss ever going to a baile funk, there were two children who continually showed up late to 
the Saturday morning classes at the community centre. They said that they were late every Saturday morning because on Friday nights, 
they had to go with their mother, either to the baile funk or to the bar, and would not return home until late the next morning.

In other conversations, the children and I talked about drugs and the drug dealers. These children knew who the drug dealers were, how 
they worked, and where the drug addicts could be found. The children often told me stories about people being killed, either as a direct 
result of an issue with a drug dealer or because they got caught up in the crossfire between the police and the drug dealers when the police 
would enter into the favela. Children told me stories about their parents or other close relatives who were killed directly by the drug 
dealers or who were injured indirectly by bullets from the police who were looking for the drug dealers. Other children were directly 
related to some of the drug dealers, who were either their cousins or brothers.

Asking the questions that need to be asked
How could these children who were faced with so much responsibility and who had to be aware of the ways in which their community 
functioned be treated as innocent and dependent? In regard to their survival within the favela, wouldn’t being innocent and dependent 
put them more at risk? How would being innocent and dependent serve the families in which adults had to work multiple jobs to provide 
for their children?

In the favela, where its relationship to mainstream society places the people who live there in complicated political, social, and economic 
relationships, I argue that the aforementioned developmental discourses located within Western frameworks serve as ways of “othering” 
and complicating childhood in relation to CYC work.

In the incidences above—the young boy who had the baby strapped to his front, the conversation regarding a girl taking care of her 
younger siblings, and the various conversations I had with the young individuals in the favela regarding drugs, sex, and death—all 
seemed in some way to contradict the notions of childhood innocence and dependence. The young boy with the baby is seen to be 
challenging the developmental aspects of innocence and need for protection because his parents had perhaps relied on him to look after 
his younger sibling, which also demonstrates his independent behaviour. The young girl having to take on more responsibilities to look 
after her younger siblings also challenges notions of dependency and innocence.

In North America, ideas of innocence and childhood play can closely be linked (Burman, 2008). Therefore, one could question the reality 
of the young girl who had no choice but to assume more responsibility around the house by doing laundry, cooking, and looking after 
younger siblings. In situations where young people need to be street smart, need to be aware of how life in the favela works, and need to 
resort to creative ways to occupy their time and manage family responsibilities, how are we to conceptualize their childhoods? Perhaps 
the ways we actualize understandings of innocence are more important than the definition of innocence itself, which means that culture 
and context become critical pieces in how the discourse of innocence is understood in CYC practice.

Although being innocent and dependent in North America may serve children and their families well in relation to achieving the 
American dream and becoming competent adults, being innocent and dependent in the poorest areas of the Global South (such as the 
favelas) actually works to further reproduce inequalities. If it was valued for children to be innocent and dependent, then these families 
in some of the poorest areas of the Global South would need to arrange other ways to have care for their children who are currently left 
alone at home or in the streets, having to fend for themselves or look after their siblings. These families have no other choice but to work, 
oftentimes at multiple jobs, meaning that more social services would have to be created to help protect and look after their children. This 
would therefore further reproduce inequalities because dependence on these services would be increased, making it even more difficult 
for these individuals to become self-reliant through their own economic means.



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This also becomes complicated when looking to notions of care as an outcome in CYC work. Being a white, middle-class female from 
the West forced me to reflect on my own bourgeois assumptions of care in order to have a more relational approach with the children.

Child and Youth Care Services: Providing Help or Reproducing Inequalities?

Fewster (2006) argues that within the process or trajectory of development, children are seen as innocent beings in need of shelter from 
outside corruptions and who therefore rely on adults. As they manoeuvre their way into adulthood, they rely on adults in order to develop 
their personal autonomy and self-efficacy, and it is not until adulthood that they are viewed as being independent, capable beings. 
Fewster (2006), however, questions how children can develop autonomy when they rely on adults who enforce certain values and beliefs 
about how they should be raised. How is one able to develop self-efficacy when adults “actively encourage a dependency-based view 
of the Self through contrived strategies of approval for behavioral performances” (Fewster, 2006, p. 2)? Therefore, the question is, how 
can children successfully become independent beings who develop self-efficacy and autonomy if children are relying and depending 
on adults (here in CYC settings) who reinforce and promote certain ways of being that do not line up with the realities of the children’s 
lives?

More specifically, in areas where children’s life circumstances cannot support dependency, and where CYC workers reinforce the 
developmental discourses of innocence and dependence, how are these children supposed to rely on adults and their guardians to guide 
them? In other words, if CYC services practice and support Method A to guide children and reject Method B, while the families in the 
favelas support Method B and reject Method A, then the services risk reifying the very issues they seek to address. In getting caught up 
in the industry of protecting children instead of looking to the reality of how these individuals live, and without practicing their own 
self-awareness and positionality in the work they do, these workers, and therefore the services, will fail to provide what children need 
(Fulcher, 2014; M. Smith, 2003). In offering after-school help and framing success strictly in terms of educational outcomes, and in 
offering sports or art classes, CYC services get caught up in a need to protect these children and fail to look at the bigger picture of the 
structural and societal inequalities the children face. While I agree that these services better equip these children with protective factors 
to help them manoeuvre their ways through the heavily politically, socially, and economically charged world, I argue that CYC workers 
are only providing band-aid solutions to the larger problems when they fail to understand the reality of those with whom they work. 
These band-aid solutions appear to reflect colonial relationships where the individuals who provide the services (often white, middle-
class individuals) reproduce dominant Western practices via trajectories of care and protection, often to an individual who is of minority 
or lower class standing. Therefore, the practices as noted above in relation to CYC work are contested as the workers become part of the 
problem and therefore provide a disservice to those individuals they are attempting to help.

Making a Change in CYC Practices

Mark Smith (2003) notes the importance of a need to “put a stutter into dominant narratives of child care” (p. 1). Because many CYC 
services get caught up in a desire to protect children, to not protect children, on the other hand, would suggest that those offering 
these services do not care about the child’s welfare. In his analysis of Foucault, Smith (2003) claims that “we need to ask questions of 
dominant discourses—to ‘problematise’ them or ‘make the familiar strange’—to challenge taken for granted assumptions by asking 
awkward questions of them” (p. 2). He argues, much like Foucault, that discourses are powerful in the ways that they force us to think 
and engage with the world. He argues that “rather than question the discourse itself, what so often happens in organizations and at a 
wider social level, is that they retrench and seek answers in better science and greater logic” (M. Smith, 2003, p. 2). This is problematic 
as organizations look to the science and logic of the West (L. T. Smith, 2012) and continue to actively reproduce these discourses through 
their practices, further creating inequality and distancing themselves from the individuals whom they hope to support.

Conclusion

It is important and in many ways necessary to disrupt normative ways of classifying childhood from mainly Western, developmentally 
framed perspectives. As demonstrated, Western ways of viewing children and childhood should be contested so that CYC practices 
privilege other cultural ways of being in order to avoid colonial practices.

Western ways of classifying childhood developmentally privilege certain ways of being or conceptualizing childhood that limit 
understandings of how specific cultural contexts enable or disable children’s capabilities. Policies often reflect notions of children 



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being innocent and dependent instead of seeing children as adult-like and challenging notions of innocence. These policies inform CYC 
practices, creating counterintuitive services that do not look to the reality of the groups they serve. As noted above, these services then 
only provide band-aid solutions that are framed in Western notions of care and protection.

Similar to how Zinga (2012) attempts to recentre practices to reflect Indigeneity in CYC practices, and how Pacini-Ketchabaw (2007) 
pushes toward an ethics of resistance in CYC practices, I argue for the importance of retuning and restructuring practices in CYC 
work. If we look at shifting the ways in which we think about children’s abilities and look to some of the realities of children who 
grow up in different areas, we can modify and accommodate other ways of producing childhoods (Gharabaghi, 2009). It is important to 
acknowledge and not dismiss other ways of being a child, and to challenge the dominant discourses of children and childhood that have 
been reproduced by white, middle-class, Western standards. It is imperative that we, as CYC workers, begin to valorize other discourses 
to deconstruct the hegemonic ways of being a child, or of representing childhood. Without doing this, an imperialistic view of how 
children should be raised will prevail, which will have further implications on policies and services offered to children and will further 
reproduce inequalities.

It is therefore important when doing cross-cultural work that discourses not be taken out of context (Gharabaghi, 2010). Although 
dominant discourses serve a purpose contextually and can be used as a lens to view certain aspects of a given society, once removed from 
their context, the understandings of these discourses need to be reexamined. This reexamination of the understandings of previously 
implied discourses can often be uncomfortable. As Fulcher (2014) states, “it’s one thing to acquire knowledge about race, culture and 
cross-cultural communication in preparation for practice, but cultural safety in direct practice with young people, family and extended 
family members involves learning hard lessons outside our personal comfort zones” (p. 5). 

In conclusion, without rethinking our practices in CYC work, we run the risk of becoming part of the problem as we reify the very issues 
we seek to address. It is not until we as CYC practitioners become more aware of our practices, take a step back from our commonplace 
understandings, and challenge our own assumptions that we will be able to truly work with children and youth, and not for them.

References

Bernhard, J. (1995). Child development, cultural diversity, and the professional training of early childhood educators. Canadian Journal 
of Education, 20(4), 415–436.

Burman, E. (2008). Deconstructing developmental psychology. London, England: Routledge. 

Do Nascimento, A., Skott-Myhre, H. A., & Skott-Myhre, K. S. G. (2015). Revolutionary entanglements: Transversal mappings of 
disability in the favela. Disability in the Global South, 2(2), 620–631. Retrieved from: https://disabilityglobalsouth.files.
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