ABSTRACT
Teachers, practitioners, and researchers concerned with child and youth care and development have talked for a long time about professionalization—what it means, why we need it or why we don't, in what relationship to other professions, and the like (“Beker, 1979”, pp. 205–230). The differences are important but, at a deeper level, the field shares a commitment to a common effort, a common enterprise. Collectively, we have taken the lead in what Morris (1978) has identified as a broader, emerging professional concern with “caring,” the process of caring, or “care work,” which views nurturance as a helping modality with appropriate applications to the young, the aging, the disabled, the distressed, the isolated, and people in general (Maier, 1979). In this paper, the authors focus on several critical issues for the continued building of the professional discipline of child and youth care. We are concerned with what preparation for service in child and youth care means and how such preparation can best be conceptualized and delivered.
