ABSTRACT
Traditionally, youth care assigns its clients a passive role. At the beginning of the 1970s, alternative youth care emphasized self-determination and autonomy as moral rights of young people, and their socially backward position. Problem behavior of young people must be seen as a function of the interaction between individual dispositions and the characteristics of the environment. This is a proposition to which, little by little, all professionals in youth care have come to subscribe. In youth care practice the client perspective is gradually gaining recognition. A pedagogically inspired client policy first of all has to be directed at creating a social climate in which the young person feels safe enough to enter into a dialogue with others, and thus develop confidence in his own possibilities. Research in youth care, particularly in involuntary residential care, indicates that involving young people in the planning and implementation of their own and each other's treatment can be extremely effective.
