caring for a number needing more care than i can give

It's sprummer (a word made up of spring and summer) in London. I've noticed a change in the people, their happier. I wonder whether London sits dormant during winter anticipating the burst of summer. In the space of a few weeks my attitude towards this place has changed. After work we go to Bishops park and play football with some of the young people. There is talk of barbecues and drinking cold beer in the garden.....The youth work I'm doing has taken on a different shape in that we can now make use of the outdoors. No longer are our resources subject to what we can do in a church sports hall. Now we can take groups of kids to the park to play softball and football. Throughout winter parks looked dull disused spaces but now the parks are coming to life with groups of people engaging in sporting activities.

At Kids Hub (kids club) yesterday we took the young people to the park for the first time this year. It was a great idea because in the space we could allow them freedom to enjoy themselves. In a building there are so many restrictions, especially for kids where electrical equipment, stairs, kitchens etc pose such a hazard. Most of the boys opted to play football at the park and so a game of 'no out of play' jumpers for goals football ensued. I takes me back to watch fifteen boys cluster around one ball all battling for possession (even if their on the same team). It also make me laugh to watch the game use up so much space. No matter where the girls played soft ball the boys would end up running onto their turf. With a lack of sidelines the game has a flowing freedom but also a frustrating disorganisation. Sadly, during the football an argument erupted between two of the boys and i stepped in to stop it. However, the result of my intervention was that one of the boys turned on me and began to tell me to get out of his face (this was coming from an 11year old).....I 'got out of his space' quickly and my team mate stepped in. It was a really negative experience for me because he explained to my team mate that he felt i was always on his back and he really didn't want to be around me. What also affected me was the way he was speaking. He sounded more like an adult in the sense that he was telling me to get away before he did something bad. I didn't feel worried for my safety but I'm not totally comfortable with conflict and didn't have the opportunity to put the situation right. I think he's a great kid but he does misbehave a lot and so as a leader i feel a responsibility to step in. Maybe it's been a good learning experience for me because being a leader means that you will be asked to deal with conflict. At the de-brief session afterwards me and my team discussed his behaviour and we discovered that his mum and dad had split up in recent weeks.....

We don't have the benefit of background information at Kids Hub, which means that we often treat kids as a group and not individual cases. I would not be lying if i said that most of the kids at our club exist in a mass of poverty, social exclusion and family breakdown. It is so difficult to find the balance between caring and disciplining problematic behaviour. All year I've been trying to adjust my approach to enable me to make the young people feel cared for and at the same time aware that there are behavioural rules they most follow. So difficult..... I remembered something the other day that i learned in University. We were taught to approach every young person with the mindset that they could be coming from any number of difficult situations. Again this is difficult and for the most part i think I'm consistent with this approach. However, there are times when forty kids is a number to great.....more volunteers would help!