There is a pressing need to identify experiences that promote professional wellbeing and resilience among residential childcare workers (RCW). Research examining caring for children and youth in placement under child protective or youth justice mandates portrays a profession disproportionately impacted by burnout, stress, and turnover. Recent findings show that the impact of this work is similar across different geographical locations and cultural practices (1–4). Residential childcare work is characterized by constant pressure, high workload, and an important emotional burden; and, workplace risks like burnout, secondary traumatic stress (i.e., vicarious trauma, compassion fatigue), and moral distress, are in most cases connected to different aspects of the work environment far beyond the control of individual workers. The World Health Organization (WHO), for example, described burnout as symptoms stemming from workplace stressors that have not been properly managed (5). Research has also shown that professionals can exhibit similar symptoms to their clients who have experienced firsthand trauma (6, 7). Importantly, the diminished wellbeing of professionals has been linked to poorer outcomes for the children and youth in care (8–10). The wellbeing of RCW is, therefore, a critical aspect of effective service delivery.

The past decade has witnessed a surge in research identifying risk and protective factors related to the impacts of working in child welfare (11–18). Early study framed resilience as an individual strength, capacity, or character trait, i.e., an ability to withstand hardship. Recently, it has been defined by Yoon et al. (19) as the product of a complex interplay between multiple factors over time, with a structure and development that can be variable. Their resilience theoretical framework reflects this complexity by adopting “a strengths-based lens to understand the protective factors, processes, and pathways through which individuals achieve adaptive functioning in the face of adversity” [(19), p. 2]. This is consistent with the theorizing of a growing body of resilience researchers, including those looking at organizational resiliency models adopted in and across professional settings to engage the environment in the promotion of wellbeing for staff (20–22).

Most of the exposures to workplace risk are embedded within the tasks that define RCW work, it is not possible to separate these risks from the everyday work. In the face of unavoidable exposures to workplace risk, routine access to, and the promotion of protective factors is critical towards RCW wellbeing. The systematic review of vicarious traumatization among child protection workers by Molnar et al. (23) highlights risk factors including personal trauma, work-family conflict, exposure to vicarious trauma, job overload, exposure to disturbing media, role-related factors, and lack of resources; protective factors included supervisor support, co-worker support, positive social support outside of work, age, and job satisfaction. In their recent study on increasing retention and the promotion of resilience in the field of child protection, Russ et al. (16) interviewed 24 Australian child protection workers over two data collection phases within a 12-month period. They found that participants described their work as very challenging, difficult, and complicated. They also reported high stress, direct trauma, and vicarious trauma. In the face of these many challenges attached to their roles, most of the participants also reported marked job commitment, self-awareness, self-efficacy and agency, use of reflective practices, and the application of relationship-based approaches to work. Authors concluded that these findings point to the importance of resilience among this work group (16). In their study of evidence-informed resiliency, Kalergis and Anderson (21) interviewed ten child abuse leaders finding that the conscious practice of an organizational resilience model (ORM) led to the promotion of a healthy and resilient workforce. They emphasized the effectiveness of the ORM if carefully adopted and implemented in child welfare organizations. The elements of the ORM are self-knowledge and insight; sense of hope; healthy coping; strong relationships; personal perspective and meaning. Each of these elements is to be applied at the personal, professional, and organizational levels (21). Therefore, a sense of pride in one's work and personal accomplishment might be protective factors linked to both self-knowledge and insight (knowing what I find gratifying) and personal perspective and meaning (what it means to me to be accomplished at work).

Previous research suggests that a strong feeling of personal accomplishment and pride could promote identity and loyalty towards organizations (24, 25). What identity, personal accomplishment, or factors intrinsic to feeling pride are for RCW has yet to be elaborated. Further, how one feels about trauma-exposure has also been shown to influence the severity of post-traumatic stress (26). Painful feelings, such as betrayal, can increase symptom severity. Indeed, betrayal trauma can be perpetrated by individuals, organization or institutions (27). Li et al. (28) investigated organizational climate, job satisfaction, and turnover among 849 voluntary child welfare workers, finding that “diverse individual characteristics together with stressful, unjust, exclusionary and non-supportive organizational climate negatively influence individual wellbeing and [led] to lack of job satisfaction and lower organizational commitment, which in turn [led] to stronger intentions to leave the job” (p.566). It appears that protective factors, including the experience of pride or accomplishment or job satisfaction more broadly, must be considered within the local organizational context.

Despite the array of research that has explored different protective factors in the field, only a handful of research has examined factors relating to a sense of accomplishment or pride when providing day-to-day care for children and youth in placement. For example, Rycraft (29) investigated retention factors among a 23 child welfare workers and found that a “sense of mission” was protective. Datum such as, “I feel I am doing something of value” suggests a potential overlap between mission and pride. Mor Barak et al. (30) tested “an expanded version of a theoretical model depicting the relationship between diversity characteristics, organizational climate and personal outcome variables on intention to leave” among 418 child welfare workers (p. 553). Among the subsample of participants who agreed to participate in an in-depth interview (n = 33), they found that the majority, “regardless of personal characteristics, expressed satisfaction and pride in having a positive impact and in making a difference in their clients’ lives” (565). How these factors might mitigate workplace risks to RCW remains to be examined.

The theoretical framework we will be adopting is embedded within the model of organizational social context (OSC) (31). Social contexts can be described as the relationship quality between a network of individuals, characterized by expectations, norms, as well as individual behavior that is nested in shared perceptions (32, 33). The importance of the social context cannot be overemphasized as studies have shown its connection to various other important organizational factors (31, 34–36). Findings have shown that the degree to which workers stay committed and engaged at work, as well as the quality of service they deliver, are connected to the quality of the organizational social context (37–40). In their study of OSC, Glisson et al. (31) identified personal achievement as a dimension of one of the three sub-categories of OSC. The feeling of achievement and accomplishment was related to engagement and described as a feeling of being successful and as establishing a satisfied level of professional attainment. Recent research has also suggested that subjective experience of accomplishment may be related to a sense of competence or self-efficacy (41, 42) and an absence of burnout (43). The subjective experience of pride in one's work may also be related to job satisfaction and moral distress (1, 44). The management of exposure to, and recovery from, potentially traumatic or distressing workplace experiences appears to have an important relationship with individual meaning-making (45, 46). Indeed, damage to the capacity to mentalize, or make-sense of the inner worlds the self and others, is an important impediment to psychological wellbeing (47). To better understand how these factors might be experienced by RCW and to identify factors that may only be visible within their lived experience qualitative investigation is indicated. The objective of this study was to describe RCW experiences of accomplishment or pride in the course of working with individual children or youth placed in rehabilitation centers under youth protective or justice mandates, through an OSC lens.

We employed iterative thematic analysis to explore the participants' responses. All of the data was coded, and all of the codes were successfully synthesized into four overarching themes. The smallest of those themes included a subsample of four RCW who were unable to identify a sense of pride or accomplishment in their work with a youth in their primary care. Some of the reasons they expressed for this included a sense that that nothing they tried was working, that their experience of working with this child or youth left them with a feeling of being in a void, and that their role was always to be “part of the bad news.” This brief description encompasses all of the data from the subsample of four RCW who did not report a sense of pride or accomplishment. Three themes synthesize the remaining RCW (n = 77) responses. These themes, and the percentage of the data that is represented within each theme are: 1. Relational factors: data speaking to the quality of the connection experienced or of the relationship (56%); 2. Child and youth factors: data describing vicarious pleasure through the child's accomplishments, or the impact of the child's qualities on the RCW (28%); 3. RCW factors, experiences in relation to the abilities or efforts made by individual RCW (16%).

The present study sought to investigate what pride and accomplishment was for RCW in child protective and youth justice contexts. Perhaps the most interesting finding was the value and quality of the individual helping relationships towards promoting pride and accomplishment. Despite the evident power of significant interpersonal relationships across the lifespan to promote wellbeing, the experience of wellbeing for professionals in helping relationships is less evident. Trauma sustained during early developmental can result in many impacts, including impaired interpersonal empathy and reactive verbal or physical aggression (53). Children and youth with these types of post-traumatic adaptations were evident in many of the accounts in this data set. Unfortunate results of such post-traumatic adaptations include diminished capacities to trust in others, to know how to and want to engage with them. Feeling connected with these youth, collaborating with them, feeling their growth, experiencing one's own growth as a more secure attachment figure—these experiences gave rise to pride and accomplishment. Much has been written about how securely attached caregivers can create the opportunity for insecurely attached clients to heal. Less has considered the nature of secure attachment as potentially bi- or multi-directional. Helping relationships provide the therapeutic space for healing through many mechanisms (mentalization, physical and affective co-regulation, the opportunity to practice interpersonal communication and boundary setting, etc.), perhaps experiencing being a secure attachment figure also promotes wellbeing. Indeed, it is a common sense understanding that any parent, older sibling, or dear friend might be able to affirm.

Previous research uncovering similar data has warned that the pleasure derived from such in-the-moment interactions might be a demonstration of enmeshment or a lack of capacity to mentalize (54). This might indeed be the case, but have we been overlooking something elemental in the creation and maintenance of wellbeing in humans who are facing arduous experiences? Social bonds characterized by mentalization, and mutual trust can be grounds for resilience. Might the therapeutic relationship be a mechanism of healing [for the youth] and a key element of worker wellbeing (16)? These findings support greater investment in understanding how mentalization-based therapy and intersubjectivity theory might interact as a tool towards increasing RCW wellbeing (55–57).

A second interesting result in this study was the profound power of RCW personal experience in creating a secure bond. Specifically, depicted by how one RCW enlisted their own childhood memories to care for the child in her care. Previous work has drawn attention to the power of memories to serve as triggers for countertransference (58). This study raises the question of memories, including rituals, histories, and experiences of care, as a potent source of relational strength, security, connectedness, and precious tenderness. That children need stability and predictability from their caregivers is well established, less attention has been paid to their need for RCW to open their hearts and lives to them. By listening to children share their experiences of placement, Côté and Clément (59) introduced the notion that children and youth in residential care must be anchored both physically to a secure and stable placement setting, but also anchored affectively to their RCW through love and affection.

Our investigation of RCW experiences of pride and accomplishment uncovered unexpected results. Like the children in Côté and Clément's study, the RCW in our study also feel good when they were affectively anchored to the children and youth in their care. These findings suggest that organizational climates, child welfare and youth justice systems and structures must promote and provide the therapeutic space for a deeply felt sense of connectedness between those in care and those caring for them, for love and affection to flourish.

This study contributes to practice and research by describing a novel way of understanding the mechanisms underlying RCW felt sense of work-related pride and accomplishment. In doing so, it expands the discussion of protective factors against RCW work-related harms to include context dependant, complex, dynamic, relational experiences. This perspective may help organizations to identify and provide the conditions necessary for meaningful relationships between RCW and those in their care. It might also assist RCW to develop these types of relationships by prompting further reflections about how they come to feel pride and accomplishment in their work. Further research and theorizing are indicated to better understand how the relational, vicarious, and personal mechanisms underlying RCW pride and accomplishment might be related to self and other mentalization capacities, intersubjective experiences, secure attachment, resilience, factors promoting employee retention or contributing to employee turnover, organizational climate, services, and outcomes in residential care. Future work examining the impacts of worker wellbeing in promoting secure attachment bonds between RCW and those in their care, and how RCW personal histories of secure attachment can be leveraged to extend in their helping relationships are also indicated.

Several limitations should be considered when reading this work. This study reports on the exploration of experiences among a homogenous sample of RCW. Diverse sociodemographic factors such as race, ethnicity and culture are not represented as the sample is largely Caucasian and French-Canadian. Three interviewers conducted these interviews; thus, their personal styles and attributes may have influenced the data collected.

The results of this study reveal the impacts of and reciprocal nature of relationships between RCW and the children and youth in their care. They described engagement in intersubjective exchanges—that can impact multiple domains of development and experience. RCW experienced personal pride and accomplishment relationally through the reciprocal connections that they shared; vicariously, through the growth and accomplishments of the children, youth, and families with whom they worked closely; and, personally, through their own success in promoting the wellbeing of a child or youth. The emergence of pride and accomplishment was most present through the quality of the connections between these professionals and the children and youth in their care.