4 people taking care of 4 kids 24/7 in 24 hour shifts. From article:
> To get that individualized care, though, they had four social workers and four children. One-to-one. [...] But you couldn’t stray that far from one-to-one without changing the nature of the experience, without industrializing it to the point that individual care is lost.
I don't think you need the ratio of worker:child to be 1:1 in order to provide 1:1 care.
The alternative might be 20 social workers taking care of a group of 20 kids. It's the same ratio of workers to kids, since no 1 worker will get to deeply know individuals in the group.
I agree 1:1 is confusing and not totally accurate but it's fine for illustrating the point.
Well 1-1 care for any given child at an average of 25% of the time. Which for social work is probably better than most alternatives, yet not as good as having a parent per one or two kids.
Anyway, I don't mean to nit pick. Everyone has to know their limits, and I'm sad to admit that I found I can barely handle two kids with two adults. And families managing 5+ kids strike me as over natural+healthy limits, unless they've a large extended family (who have capacity to help).
There are 4 workers taking turns looking after 4 kids. So while at any given time 1 worker is looking after 4 kids, you need 4 workers to cover all the shifts. Thus one-to-one
That's a very odd framing. So it works out to one worker per one shift/day? Wouldn't that be true if there were 10 or 20 kids yet still 1 worker per shift?
It muddies the point, because having 1 worker at a time (watching 4 kids) isn't really 1-to-1. And doing 24h shifts means kids have a different caretaker quite often, which complicates conflict resolution and other things that may span days.
Regardless, it's probably the best they can do and likely far better than orphanages with 20+ kids per adult. So the core message about scaling does stand. Even if the ratio described is actually worse and less scalable.
