Fun, Safe, Useful: An Ethical Stance for Youth Work

“A young person does not owe us their engagement.” This feels like a simple sentence, but I think it challenges how youth services approach the work with our most vulnerable young people in out-of-home-care. We often describe young people as “hard to reach”, “not ready”, “resistant”, or “not engaging”. Those words describe what we see on the surface, but it misses the full picture and let services off the hook. A young person might not be refusing help; they might be refusing a version of it that does not feel trustworthy or worth the emotional risk of showing up for. For me, that is what fun, safe, and useful offers; not a model, manual, or new framework to implement, but an ethical stance to adopt. It is a position we take towards power, relationships, agency, and accountability before we reach for a technique or manualised framework. Fun, safe, and useful is a way of showing up ethically while still being compliant with the overarching system you work in.

Youth professionals endeavour to do good work inside imperfect systems. We are working with real people, with real risk, limited time, policy demands, organisational pressures, and social problems much bigger than any individual can solve. We are asked to produce outcomes inside systems that do not always create the conditions for them to occur. That does not mean we give up, it means we need an ethical way to keep returning to the person in front of us. Fun, safe, and useful comes before your allocated hours or key performance indicators as a worker. It asks you how you are going to connect with the other human in front of you? How are you going to begin a relationship with them that is going to be beneficial to their development, growth, and healing?

Fun – show them that you’re a human worth knowing.

Safe – prove to them that you will be worth the investment and because helping can become coercive if we are not careful.

Useful – because we need to be accountable to the young person in front of us and we need to ensure the work lands for them.

That is the whole thing really, yet somehow it is also the hardest thing to do well when our systems prioritise compliance and our work force is stretched beyond capacity.

Fun is the invitation

Fun is not entertainment. It is not the gimmick we use to get young people to comply, or the fluff before the serious stuff begins. Fun is genuine engagement, it is energy, curiosity, play, novelty and warmth. It gives a young person some reason to think, “maybe this person is worth knowing.” Cooper et al. (2024) argued that the language we use to describe youth work relationships matters because it reflects power, purpose, and accountability. While Conley Wright et al. (2022) described good youth work as voluntary, participatory, responsive, and grounded in authentic relationships of trust and mutual respect. Trust does not come with the job title; it must be earned. Fun is one way we earn the right to be in the room, on the walk, on the sports team, or wherever the work happens.

It does not mean trying too hard to be liked, young people smell desperate adults and inauthenticity a mile away. It means showing up with enough relational warmth, curiosity, and flexibility that the young person does not have to carry the burden of engagement. Sometimes fun is the first sign that a young person feels safe enough to be present. Sometimes it is the moment the work stops feeling like another service and starts feeling like a relationship. That is not fluff, that is where we develop the bond (Bordin, 1979).

Safe is where we prove ourselves

Once we have a young person’s interest, we must prove we are worth their time. Safety is not control, safety is not only about the absence of reduction of danger, risk assessments, safety plans, policies, and procedures. These all matter, but a young person can be physically safe and still feel powerless, they can be in a compliant service and still feel judged, they can be surrounded by professionals and still have very little influence over what happens next.

Safety is relational, because in the end, relationships are mostly what we have. It is where we prove we can be grown-up without becoming coercive. It is where a young person learns whether they can say no, argue, change their mind, give honest feedback, and experience us as someone who will not use adult power carelessly. This is where agency matters, I often hear professionals talk about “giving young people agency” or “giving young people a voice”. I understand the intention, but I think the wording matters. Agency is not ours to give, young people already have agency, they already have voices. The ethical task is to notice where systems have ignored, reduced, overridden, or punished them, and then practise in ways that honour and amplify what is already theirs.

This becomes especially important when working with young people who have experienced coercion, family violence, unstable care, racism, poverty, institutionalisation, or neglect. Forner & Kate (2018) from the International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation (ISSTD) argued that we should approach complexity with fierce dignity. The more complex the problem, the more dignity we should show in our responses. Imagin telling a victim-survivor of family violence, “You need to engage, this will be good for you, I know best.” What a horrible opportunity to repeat coercion in the language of care. But also, what a powerful opportunity to practise something different; to hear “no” and respect it, to treat refusal as communication rather than failure, and to show that this relationship will not be built through pressure.

Useful asks the uncomfortable question

Useful is the word that keeps the whole thing accountable. Fun without safety can become reckless, safety without fun can become control, and both without usefulness can become a nice experience that does not really land. Useful asks the question youth services should ask more often, “who is this useful for?” Useful to the worker, the case plan, the organisation, or the anxious adults around the young person? Our work with young people must also be useful to them.

Useful does not mean young people need to explain exactly what our time together means. Often, they make their own meaning quietly. Sometimes the most important part of the work will not show up in the debrief, the case note, or the outcome measure. That is okay, we do not need to own their meaning, but we do need to stay accountable to their experience. Useful work is intentional without becoming controlled, and participant-led without pretending adults have no responsibility. It is relevant, adaptable, reflective, and connected to the young person’s life. This is why I value Feedback-Informed Treatment (Duncan et al., 2004), because feedback can challenge the worker’s assumption that a session went well. Feedback gives us a way to ask whether things are improving, how our interaction with the young person was received, whether we talked about what mattered, if the fit was right, and what might need to change. Feedback protects from assumptions, it reminds us that the young person’s experience is not a side issue, It is the whole reason we’re doing the work.

A Way Forward

None of this is about pretending youth work is easy, it is not. The work happens inside systems that are stretched, risk-focused, under-resourced, and full of competing demands. Workers are asked to care deeply, document carefully, manage risk, follow policy, and somehow remain human in the middle of it all. Fun, safe, and useful is not a way around that complexity, it is a way of standing ethically within it. It is a position to take before the work begins and a question to keep returning to throughout. It is simple, but it is powerful, and every youth professional can take this ethical stance. Fun gets us in the door, safe proves that we’re worth the effort, useful makes sure the work is meaningful, and feedback keeps us accountable. In imperfect systems, this is something we can still choose; to make our work warmer, safer, more accountable, and worth showing up for. Young people do not need us to be perfect; they need us to be human, trustworthy, and useful enough to come back to.

References

Bordin, E. S. (1979). The generalizability of the psychoanalytic concept of the working alliance. Psychotherapy (Chicago, Ill.), 16(3), 252–260. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0085885

Cooper, T., Corney, T., Tierney, H., Gorman, J., & Sutcliffe, J. (2025). Talking about relational youth work: why language matters. Journal of Youth Studies, 28(5), 731–748. https://doi.org/10.1080/13676261.2023.2298327 

Conley Wright, A., Metcalfe, L., Mawad, R., & Pope, S. (2022). Evidence review: Youth work – agency and empowerment: Full report. Reasearch Centre for Children and Families, University of Sydney. https://evidenceportal.dcj.nsw.gov.au/documents/youth-work-agency-and-empowerment/RCCF_Evidence_Review_Youth_Agency__Empowerment_Full_Report_FINAL.pdf 

Duncan, B. L., Miller, S. D., & Sparks, J. A. (2004). The heroic client: A revolutionary way to improve effectiveness through client-directed, outcome-informed therapy (2^nd ed). Jossey-Bass.

Forner, C., & Kate, M. A. (2018). Dissociation 101: A comprehensive exploration into the field of dissociation and complex trauma (webinar). International Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. https://cfas.isst-d.org/content/series-viii-2018-webinars