EXPRESSIONS IN CONDITIONALS

We use unless in conditional sentences to mean If… not For example:

I won’t go on holidays  unless I save some money. =

I won’t go on holiday If I don’t save some money.

1.1. We can use “in case” to talk about things that we do to be prepared for something that might happen or might be needed in the future for example:

I’ll take my umbrella in case it rains. (because it might rain).

1.2. AS LONG AS / PROVIDE (THAT) / PROVIDING (THAT) / ON CONDITION (THAT) We can use these expressions to emphasize the condition that needs to be present so that something can happen or be done.

For example:

• • I’ll tell you what really happened  as long as you keep the secret.
  • I’ll lend you the money provided (that) you pay me back next week.
  • They will speak to press on condition (that) they remain anonymous.
  • We will invest the money, only if you can prove that it’s safe.

1.1. We also use even if with a similar meaning to “whether or not”. It is used to emphasize that something will be true or will happen if another thing happens for example:

Even if you apologize he will never forgive you.

• RECOGNIZING EXPRESSIONS IN CONDITIONALS IN THEORY

Conditional clauses can begin with unless. Unless means something like ‘if … not’ or ‘except if’.

The verb forms in the examples are like sentences with if: we use the present simple in the unless-clause and shall, should, will, would, can, could, may or might in the main clause:

Unless I phone you, you can assume the train’s on time. (If I do not phone you /except if I phone you, you can assume the train is on time.)

We’ll have to cancel the show unless we sell more tickets at the last minute. (We’ll have to cancel the show if we do not sell more tickets/except if we sell more tickets at the last minute.)

 UNLESS. We don’t use unless for impossible conditions: for example.

• If the government had not raised food prices, there would not have been so many protests

 As long as, providing, even if. Sometimes we need to impose specific conditions or set limits on a situation. In these cases, conditional clauses can begin with phrases such as as long as, so long as, only if, on condition that, providing (that), provided (that).

As long as is more common in speaking; so long as and on condition that are more formal and more common in writing:

[to a group of children]

You can play in the living room as long as you don’t make a mess.

So long as a tiger stands still, it is invisible in the jungle.

  Providing (that) is more common in speaking; provided (that) is more formal and more common in written language.

Love in a Time of Colic: Mobilizing Professional Love in Relationships with Children and Young People to Promote Their Resilience and Wellbeing

By Martin E. Purcell, Jools Page & Jim Reid

 (I) Children and young people in the UK face myriad challenges, which we characterize as colic: the deleterious impact of uncertainty, stress and precarity on their mental health and wellbeing, particularly in their social bonds and relationships. Drawing from research into relationships between UK-based child and youth professionals and the children and young people with whom they work, this article presents our view that the particular stresses and strains of twenty-first century life have combined uniquely to create what we term colic: a crisis in the mental health and wellbeing of children of all ages, born of their unique experience of uncertainty, stress, and precarity.  We  have explored these factors in detail at the outset, demonstrating the extent to which we believe children’s lives are being negatively impacted by current social, economic, and political trends.  We have also explored  how helping children and young people to develop their “resilience” to the challenges presented by colic might enhance their wellbeing, focusing on child and youth professionals with a role in helping them to thrive. We have  argued  that the relationships these professionals maintain with children and young people in their care should be at the center of their efforts to help them build resilience and wellbeing. In our discussion of this, we have  explored the extent to which the purposive development of “love” in these relationships might feature as an element of professional practice. In particular, we explore how Professional Love, according to Page (2018),  as a guiding tenet of practice in work with children and young people could be liberating and transformational for them in responding to the impact of colic in their lives.

(II)  We have come to interesting conclusions after having carried out our research  in the North of England, which used a focus group, individual interviews and experimental LEGOVR modeling sessions with 23 child and youth professionals working in a variety of roles and settings, to determine how demonstrating love within their professional relationships with children and young people can scaffold their resilience to these challenges and enhance mental health and wellbeing. The study involved the following aspects:

5. Critical discussions with child and youth professionals working with children ages 4–19 in a variety of roles and settings (including formal and informal education, care, and health) in the North of England.
6. Creative engagement techniques and interviews that were used to elicit their views on the nature of the colic described.
7. The identification of the extent to which they support our assertions about the potential value of professionally loving practice in remediating its impact on children and young people in their care.

The discussions were used to explore what Professional Love might look like in practice, and also to  present suggestions about how professionals might use this approach to enhance their work in supporting children and young people to overcome colic. We used thematic analysis to make meaning from the data, and we related the findings to our extrapolation of Page’s developmental steps in early years professional practice, highlighting the potential for the concept of Professional Love to enhance children and young people’s wellbeing

       (III) We found out that the potential of Professional Love is an antidote for the development of resilience and wellbeing among these children in their contemporary adverse experience. Actually, our work suggests that child and youth professionals are in a unique position to build meaningful relationships with their charges, and that they can enhance their work by “imbuing discourse with the nomenclature of Professional Love” (Page, 2018).  We sustain our argument that love-in-practice can be nurturing for all children and young people, albeit with the caveat that we would encourage professionals to consider the myriad forms of “love” and to avoid the pitfalls associated with some of these. It is also important to embrace the language used by child and youth professionals who participated in this research when discussing the contribution that relational work with their charges has to make to developing resilience and wellbeing; the emphasis on helping children and young people to “feel valued” seeming to be a recurring theme in their discourse.

These findings give us cause to argue that Professional Love should not be conceptualized only as a form of internalized, essentialist practices. Rather, as love in a professional context is mediated through legislation, policy and regulation (Reid, 2018), we posit that it is crucial for professionally loving practice to be based on reciprocal relationships, to imbue child and youth professionals with the power to reach decisions with the children and young people in their care about their needs and how those needs should be met.

(IV) We know there is more work to be done on explicating if Professional Love challenges the inequalities in society and if the ability to practice in a professionally loving manner is innate or something that can be learned. Nonetheless, we are arguing that the relationships between children, young people, and professionals can be understood and organized in a different frame, one that scaffolds resilience and wellbeing as antidotes to twenty- first century colic. In this way, our argument reflects the underpinning narratives of Garcia Marquez’s epic novel, in its portrayal of the power of enduring love to counter the destructive forces at work in the decaying grandeur of the liminal time straddling the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We portray our notion of colic in much the same way that he locates the global cholera outbreak as the ever-present backdrop to his epic tale, something that has become increasingly pertinent as the COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the deleterious impact of colic on the lives of children and young people across the globe. We suggest that Professional Love offers child and youth professionals a means of overcoming the “drama” of the lived experiences of children and young people at the start of the twenty-first century in much the same way that the book counterpoints images of finality and death with the human drama of “love eternal”. While Garcia Marquez paints images of love that hover between fanciful beauty and terror, our promotion of Professional Love is grounded in the everyday perspectives of experienced child and youth professionals, and enhances our practical understanding of this emerging field of practice.

DK Publishing, First American Edition. (2016). English for everyone English grammar guide. Diane Hall British English and Susan Bardun American English.

Raymond Murphy. (2015) Essential grammar in use. Cambridge University Press.

Raymond Murphy. (2015). Essential grammar in use, Cambridge.

Purcell, M.E.,  Page, J. & Reid, J. (2020): Love in a Time of Colic: Mobilizing Professional Love in Relationships with Children and Young People to Promote Their Resilience and Wellbeing, Child & Youth Services, DOI: 10.1080/0145935X.2020.1820320 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/0145935X.2020.1820320. Licensing_ © 2020 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

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• Practice exercise written by Jose Luis Alatorre  ENES-LEON UNAM
• Practice exercise written by Jose Luis Alatorre Patiño_Language ENES-LEON UNAM