Good Residential Child Care Starts With Understanding Pain, with Professor James Anglin

Send us Fan Mail“Problem behaviour” is a label that can make adults defensive, punitive and quick to control. We wanted to slow that down and ask a different question: what if the behaviour is pain, showing itself the only way it knows how? For the 50th Secure Start Podcast conversation, I am joined by Professor James Anglin, one of the world’s most influential voices in children’s residential care and therapeutic group home practice. We talk through Professor Anglin’s journey from philosophy and Gestalt training into frontline child and youth care, then into the research that shaped his landmark framework. He explains grounded theory in plain language and why building theory from practice gives workers something they can actually use at 2 am when a young person is dysregulated. At the centre is a struggle for congruence: aligning decisions across funders, leadership, supervision and frontline care so the whole system acts in children’s best interests, not just the words on a policy page. We dig into three major processes: creating an extra-familial living environment, responding to pain-based behaviour, and helping young people develop a sense of normality and dignity. Along the way we unpack the interactional dynamics that make change possible, the real harm of repeated placement breakdown, and how the Cornell CARE model has scaled these ideas across countries and cultures. If you work in child protection, residential care, foster care systems, trauma-informed practice or therapeutic care, this is a concrete guide to doing the work with clarity and humanity. Subscribe to The Secure Start Podcast, share this with someone shaping policy or practice, and leave a review. Professor Anglin's Bio:Professor Anglin began his career as a child and youth care worker in a mental health centre in Vancouver, after which he developed a 6-bed group home for adolescents in Victoria Canada.He then pursued graduate studies, worked in social policy in Ottawa and Toronto, and returned to British Columbia in 1979 to join the faculty of the School of Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria.He served as the School of Child and Youth Care Director for three terms, after which he became the University’s Associate Vice-President Academic and Director of International Affairs.From 1995 to 1999 he was an international advisor to the South African Inter-Ministerial Committee on Young People at Risk involved in the country’s Transformation of the Child and Youth Care System.Currently, he is President of FICE-Canada, Chair of FICE Americas, Asia and Australia Region, and a member of the FICE-International Coordinating Committee. He also serves as a member of the International Work Group on Therapeutic Residential Care,His major research interests have included parent education and support, quality assurance, professionalization of child and youth care, and what constitutes quality residential care for children and youth. James is a Research Affiliate with the Bronfenbrenner Centre for Translational Research at Cornell University advising on the development and implementation of the Cornell CARE Program Model that is now being delivered in 7 countries..He has published widely in international journals and texts, and serves on the Editorial Boards of the Scottish Journal of Residential Child Care, the Residential Treatment for Children and Youth journal, and the International Journal of Child, Youth and Family Studies.Links:Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheSecureStartPodcastPodcast Blog Site: https://thesecurestartpodcast.com/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. Finally, all references to case examples are anonymised to the extent that the actual case could not be identified, or are fictional but based on real-life examples for illustrative purposes.Support the show