By Portia Smith (Child and Youth Care Worker)
Working with children in care means you’re holding stories most adults couldn’t carry. Every child I’ve looked after has come to me with some form of trauma. Some have learned how to hold it together on the outside. Others fall apart the moment they feel safe enough to let go. But no matter how they cope, we keep trying. We keep showing up.
In this line of work, you often become the punching bag for pain that isn’t yours. You take the anger, the distrust, the frustration that they don’t know how to direct anywhere else. It’s not personal, but it feels personal in the moment. What I’ve learned is that the response isn’t to pull away or meet anger with anger. The response is to go down to their level, sit with them, and be present.
Half the time they don’t need a speech. They don’t need you to fix everything right there. They need to know that you hear them, that you see them, and that you’re not going to disappear when things get messy. For a child who’s grown up feeling invisible, just being witnessed changes something.
What’s kept me in this field for 14 years is the relationships you build. Not by pretending to be their friend in a casual sense, but by building a friendship rooted in respect, love, and care that goes both ways. It can’t be one-sided. They need to know I’m not just here because it’s my job. They need to know I’m here because I care about them as a person, not just their behavior or their file.
The hardest part of this work is bringing a child back to childhood when it was taken from them. I’ve worked with kids who were forced into motherly and fatherly duties long before they should have had to. At 8, 9, 10 years old they were cooking meals, calming younger siblings, mediating fights, and holding the household together because the adults couldn’t.
Teaching those children that it’s okay to stop adulting is harder than you’d think. You’re asking them to unlearn survival. You’re asking them to let go of responsibility they’ve carried for years and trust that someone else will hold it now. That doesn’t happen overnight. It happens in small moments — when they realize it’s safe to laugh without worrying, to play without guilt, to be messy and loud and carefree without being punished for it. Helping a child reclaim their childhood is slow, patient work, but it’s some of the most important work we do.
Then there’s the trauma that comes from home: parents fighting constantly, alcohol abuse, growing up in environments where chaos and violence felt normal. The hardest part isn’t just living through it. It’s unlearning what they thought was right.
When a child grows up watching parents fight and use alcohol to cope, that becomes their blueprint for relationships and conflict. It becomes what they believe love looks like, what they believe adulthood looks like. Undoing that takes more than telling them “that’s wrong.” You have to show them, over and over, what healthy looks like. You have to give them experiences that contradict everything they believed was true, and sit with them through the discomfort of realizing that some of what they learned at home was actually harm. Unlearning that takes time, and it takes a lot of patience when they slip back into old patterns because it’s all they’ve ever known.
It’s messy work. It’s exhausting work. And there are days you feel like you’re failing more than you’re winning. But it matters.
At the same time, love without responsibility doesn’t help them grow. Part of caring for these kids is teaching them right from wrong, and helping them understand their role in their own healing and in the space we share. We give them room to be kids again, but we also teach them accountability, respect, and how to care for others. Boundaries and love aren’t opposites. They work together.
Above all, my job is to make sure every child in my care feels heard, loved, and cared for. Because when a child feels safe enough to be heard, that’s when trust starts. And when trust starts, healing becomes possible.
To anyone else doing this work: I know how heavy it gets. I know how easy it is to take it home with you and wonder if it’s making a difference. It is. Even on the days they push you away, even on the days it feels like nothing is changing, you’re giving them something they’ve never had before — consistency, safety, and the chance to just be a kid.
That matters more than you know.