Love, Respect and Discipline....The Battle of the Colours

Discipline is a major issue when working with kids who come from such traumatic backgrounds as the one´s from the streets of Managua, or abuse and violence.

At the best of times, teenagers are not known to be the best behaved group of people in the world, but for kids who have lived on the streets, been abused and exploited, consumed large quantities of drugs, naturally their behaviors can be far more erratic. 

As members of staff at Casa Alianza we have to provide the genuine and healthy love and respect that these children need, but we also have to help install them with the values of discipline, so that they can to adapt properly to the normal rules of society around them.

It is no easy task, it requires a lot of patience and tolerance, and also innovative thinking, to be able to explain concepts of discipline of the kids, in a way which they can understand and aim to achieve. 

For the past three months I have been preparing a project in order to try and help with this process, and we have now been carrying it out for the past two weeks.  It is a simple concept.  I have divided the approximately 80 kids currently at our main residential protection centre into 4 separate teams (blue, white, yellow and green).  Each team voted for two captains and two vice-captains to take charge of running each team.  The idea is in every aspect of their daily routine, the kids can win points for their team.  Good behavior, decent use of vocabulary, support to their house-mates, active participation in the workshops etc, all wins points for the team.    The winning team at the end of each month will receive a prize.

Thus far, the project seems to be taking us in the right direction.  The kids are motivated and are starting to improve their discipline and values of cooperation in order to work together for the benefit of their team.  Members of staff have also become a bit less stressed as the kids are now helping us out a lot more without job, especially in terms of ensuring the discipline and correct behavior in their team. 

But the main reason I wanted to share this entry is because the project really is very, very simple, and it is working.  Yes, it is of course difficult working with kids with the behavioral problems as the one´s we work with, but at the same time, with the right commitment, finding sustainable solutions is not too difficult.  What I am also learning is that it is very possible to provide the love and respect that these kids so desperately need, but at the same time be a strict figure representing the discipline these kids needs.  The reason I like this project so much is that the kids get to work out for themselves the need to improve their own discipline.  Every morning I publish the list of the total scores for each team, they can see for themselves how their behavior is affecting the progress of their team, and that in itself provides a considerable sense of award or consequence.  It allows us to keep working with these kids in the most positive way possible. 

Love, respect and discipline.  It sounds difficult to achieve all of these things at the same time when dealing with troubled adolescents.  With patience, commitment and understanding, it is, in fact, really rather easy.