Caring for damaged children is challenging. But in her former job as a youth worker for now-closed charity Kids Company, Sarina Campbell (pictured) found a Master’s course, ‘Working with children, young people and families: a psychoanalytic observational approach’, helped her react positively to children’s raw and painful emotions.
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust offers the part-time, three-year course at several locations in the UK and Italy. Applicants need a degree, or to have completed an access course, and at least a year’s experience of working with children or families full-time, and be currently working with them at least one day a week.
Ms Campbell now teaches young child observation for the Foundation. When she did the course, she worked with a five-year-old girl whose father was in prison and her mother a heroin addict. She saw Ms Campbell as a mother figure and became furious when Kids Company closed at the end of each day. ‘One day she ran into the traffic in the dark,’ she recalls. ‘I had to chase her and eventually managed to get her safe, but I was so stirred up and left feeling helpless and powerless.’ Ms Campbell says the course taught her the girl was projecting her own feelings of helplessness and loneliness. ‘It helped me to not react, and know part of my role was to bear the awful stuff with the good stuff and not punish her for being cross.’
Students on the course attend two weekly half-day seminars and lectures, and an hour a week observing a baby in its home; and in the second year, also a young child in a nursery. Ms Campbell says these experiences taught her ‘the subtleties of communication, consciously and unconsciously, between mother and baby’.
Seminars and lectures also cover child development. Students discuss their learning in groups and must produce papers demonstrating their understanding. In the third year, they write a dissertation.
Ms Campbell says the course would help any practitioner better understand why children behave as they do, and to engage with their feelings on a deeper level. ‘They’re very intense little creatures,’ she says.
