WARRENDALE (1967 documentary)

[agate]

Warrendale was a group home (or several group homes) for troubled youngsters in Canada. It apparently has been closed down since the film was made, but I don’t know why it was closed down. Allan King, who made the film, subsequently served on the board of directors for Warrendale and its successor.

Apparently the institutions were set up in order to provide a radical type of care for troubled kids. To help them control their emotional outbursts, adult caregivers would restrain them in a “holding” that looks for all the world like physical restraint to me. There are several instances of “holding” in the movie, which is a documentary following the kids in one of the Warrendale houses for several weeks.

It’s a confusing situation, and I would think it would be confusing for the kids, who are already confused. There seem to be no times when each child has an opportunity to explore anything with an individual therapist, one on one. The kids are always in the midst of one another.

Is this the best way to treat troubled kids–by putting them in a situation with a bunch of other troubled kids and making sure that they hardly ever have any time to themselves?

This brand of therapy is very much enamored of a sort of “groupthink,” where everyone’s feelings and reactions must be explored by everyone else–the other kids and the caregivers.

If I were a kid, having my arms pinned to my chest and my legs rendered immobile would just make me more recalcitrant and fearful and hostile.

An interview with Allan King in the 1990s reveals that a couple of the kids have gone on to do well in life. I tend to think that if they did well, it was in spite of Warrendale.

Moreover, the kids are keenly aware that they are being filmed. How spontaneous is their behavior in the movie then? And when the beloved cook’s sudden death is announced to the group as a whole, isn’t it faintly possible that a few kids, especially desirous of attention, are putting on a show of their grief? After all, they become the center of the caregivers’ attention–and then there is that camera….

At one point three boys escape, and we see one of the caregivers searching for them. We never learn the outcome of this. If they were found and brought back, how were they found? Why did they run away?

We see kids acting up and being restrained. Much shouting and much misunderstanding. A child makes a seemingly nonsensical statement but what he was trying to say is never asked about.

There is a lot wrong with Warrendale. I’d like to know more about the children’s backgrounds but very little is provided. They seem like anonymous creatures who need constant restraint, not human beings in need of more understanding than they may have known up to then.

Enforced hugs from staff members who are only staff members–people who can leave at any time to take holidays or just walk off the job–are false and insulting, and some of the children sense this. One child objects to the bad breath of the caregiver who is getting physically close to him.

And why not? He has no choice. The caregiver is a full-grown adult, much bigger and stronger than he is–and backed up by other caregivers who step in readily when more restraint seems called for.

No, no, no. This place has caregivers who must have been hired for their ability to wrestle rather than for their command of some half-baked psychology.

Warrendale may be a bit of a scam, as are many group homes that came into being in subsequent decades: provide the semblance of a “home” and “care” for some kids who have nowhere else to be “put,” and collect whatever money the kids might be entitled to on the grounds that it will cover the cost of their “care.”

I hope somebody is advocating on behalf of the residents of places like this. These unfortunate kids are very, very sad.