Try to remember the first time you slept away from home as a kid without any of your family.
Remember what it was like waking up in the night not sure of where you were and then realizing and wishing you were home in your own bed. Remember how good it felt when morning finally came and you knew you were going home.
This morning, an estimated 18,000 Ontario children will wake up away from their families, many unsure when -- if ever -- they'll live with their families again. These are the kids in the care of Ontario's 51 Children's Aid Societies, about 850 of whom are cared for by the Children's Aid Society of London and Middlesex.
In the last 10 years, Ontario has seen a steady rise in the number of children coming into care. It is now costing the province almost $1 billion a year to fund Children's Aid Societies. Also alarming was a local study that showed that 40 per cent of children in the London and Middlesex CAS had a parent, often their mom, who herself was in care as a child.
Ontario Children's Minister Marie Bountrogianni has made it clear that changes are needed and the buzz is that she'll announce new policies shortly that will provide more permanency in the lives of these children.
Children in care are frequently shuffled between their own home, foster homes, group homes or treatment facilities, which results in uprooting them from neighbourhoods and schools. So if Bountrogianni moves to provide more permanency with the goal of what's in the best interest of the child, this could be great news.
There are parents who are simply unwilling or unfit to raise a child. The best thing for these children is for CASs to find good homes for them as quickly as possible.
Adoption holds out the hope of a fairytale ending, because we all want the children and their new families to live happily ever after. But not all children are good candidates for adoption, sometimes because of their age and their ties to their own families, or because of their emotional problems.
There are also many children who should and could be living with their families if issues of poverty, depression and violence in their homes were dealt with effectively at the community level.
All children are equally deserving of security, caring and love. The problem with the current approach to keeping children safe in Ontario has been policies that encourage social workers to manage the risk by taking children from their homes. There are other jurisdictions, equally concerned about keeping children safe, but their focus is on removing the risk from the home instead of the children.
Social workers, therefore, move beyond assessing the weakness of the parent, often a single mother, to also carefully assess her strengths and, equally important, the strengths of her extended family.
When children need to leave the homes for their safety, the workers look at what they call "kinship care," which means working first with the extended family of grandparents, aunts and uncles to develop a plan that would at least allow the child to remain with a family member rather than be placed with strangers in foster care.
They also look at the pressures the mom is facing, including working with large networks of community-based organizations to ensure the basic needs of the family are met, whether that's affordable housing or access to counselling for mental health and additional problems.
To effectively move to a system of kinship care in Ontario means freeing up social work professionals to work with extended families in developing plans to care for children who need at least temporary protection.
It also requires allowing CASs more flexibility in determining whether homes are suitable and in providing financial assistance to low-income extended family members so they can adequately care for another child.
Bountrogianni may be the minister responsible for children in care, but she's not going to solve the crisis facing families on her own. She has to convince her cabinet colleagues that they have to ease the growing burden of poverty and despair that is causing families to collapse.
We are fortunate in London and Middlesex that we have a solid network of community programs that would be willing to work with CASs in supporting and strengthening families, as opposed to taking children into care.
Short of putting every one of these kids in a padded room 24 hours a day, there will be risk that they could be hurt. Some might even die. Children's aid workers live with that reality every day.
But they are also the first ones to say the current system isn't working. Perhaps it's because most social workers go home every night to their own kids, that they understand how important family is to a child's development. Love for family is truly bred in the bone.