Being supportive is often misconstrued as enabling and vice versa. Recognize the difference and make sure that your actions are not labeling you as an enabler.
Enabling does not promote positive youth development. Enabling includes behaviors by youth workers that allow young people to avoid the negative consequences of their actions. It can include :
Offering a young person a reward incentive they did not earn.
Allowing a young person who consistently is disrespectful and inappropriate to staff and peers remain in a group setting
Allowing the youth to come up with rules and consequences as a group and overruling their decisions for some youth who don't follow them.
Enabling typically is a culprit when a standard has been set and you allow a young person to not reach the standard (though they are able to) but still be rewarded and/or avoid penalty.
Enabling destroys the integrity of your word and actions. Those youth who are not the receivers of your enabling actions will view you as unfair and practicing favoritism. Co-workers will not view you as an able support when it comes time to reprimand or firmly direct a young person they believe you typically enable.
Enabling is the extreme side of support.
Supports are necessary to promote positive youth development. Supports are behaviors done with a young person that are based in expectations, guidance and boundaries.
For example, your program provides the opportunities for young people to be showcased in a talent show monthly. A service would be providing dance instruction to interested youth who want to ultimately perform a dance routine. A support within that service would be that youth worker who works one-on-one with the youth who need extra help getting down the technique before the performance. If the dancers were required to practice every day leading up to the performance to be eligible to perform, then an enabling act would be allowing those dancers who did not practice as required to perform.
Of course there are certain circumstances and personal emergencies. Enabling is the description of this behavior, however, if there is no special circumstance, and, instead, a young person just chose not to do what the expectation was and you allowed it.
Remember, enabling is about disrespecting your own boundaries originally set and allowing a young person to avoid responsibility.
