Practice Standards
Child & Youth Care Professional Ethics
The Association for Child & Youth Care Practice, Inc., its Board and its members have been active in developing professional ethics for the field of child and youth care work. In cooperation with the International Coalition of Professional Child and Youth Care, the Code of Ethics: Standards for Practice of North American Child & Youth Care Professionals was developed.
These ethical and practice standards have been adopted by many child and youth care associations around the world.
Child & Youth Care Professional Competencies
The Association of Child and Youth Care Practice, Inc. as part of the North American Certification Project (NACP) developed a set of child and youth care professional competencies. These competencies were used to develop a pilot testing and certification project for child and youth care professionals. This pilot was completed in August, 2007. Its work became the Child & Youth Care Professionals Certification Board, Inc.
The C&YC Professional Board's certification system is based on competencies identified during a two-year meta-analysis of over 150 sets of competencies drawn from all child and youth care practice settings. These competencies were collected internationally and represent the largest pool of competencies ever analyzed in the CYC field.
The Competency Committee, chaired by Martha Mattingly, Ph.D., of the University of Pittsburgh Program in Child Care and Child Development, sought to identify competency sets that were present in multiple practice settings. Through this process the committee was able to identify knowledge and skills competencies that are believed to be the basis of professional CYC practice.
