ALBERTA
Praiseworthy step will help families
I remember the phone call vividly, even years later. It came from a woman who had adopted a girl with fetal alcohol syndrome. Her teenage daughter had all kinds of serious behaviourial problems. Since she was no longer a foster child, but the woman's legal responsibility, the province would give the adoptive mother little or no help to deal with the girl's needs.
A few months later came another phone call, this time from a woman who longed to adopt a child with a serious medical condition whom she'd been fostering. She couldn't go through with the adoption, she told me, because she couldn't risk losing all the financial and practical supports she received as a foster parent.
It seems I wasn't the only one to hear such heart-rending stories. Last week, the government introduced bold new amendments to Alberta's Child, Youth, and Family Enhancement Act to deal with just such situations.
Under some of the proposed revisions to Alberta's child-welfare laws, known collectively as Bill 40, the province would extend the same benefits that foster parents now receive to any guardian who adopts a child who has been a permanent ward of the provincial government. The rules won't apply to private adoptions but to kids who have been in the child-welfare system under permanent guardianship orders.
Adoptive families would be eligible to receive a basic maintenance per diem of between $19 and $32 a day to help pay for food and clothing for the adopted child as well as 24 days a year of respite care to give parents who need it a break. The "Supports for Permanency" include 10 free counselling sessions a year and up to $280 a month of pay for any extra support for a child with emotional or behavioural issues. For those who adopt children with Indian status, there's also a travel allowance to assist children to visit their family reserves to keep in touch with their native heritage. Those supports will remain in place until the adopted child turns 18.
According to the government, Alberta is the first province in Canada to bring in such a generous package of benefits for those who adopt children who've been in permanent care. The province has actually been providing similar assistance to adopting families for several years if the family could demonstrate that the child they were adopting had special needs that would create an undue financial burden for the new parents.
And for the last two years, the department has been quietly giving such supports to almost all families adopting through Children and Youth Services, whether those families could prove financial need or not. This new legislation formalizes that murky situation and makes it a legal right for families who adopt a child who's been under a permanent guardianship order to receive long-term provincial support, regardless of the adoptive family's income.
The department's new philosophy is that all children who have been in government care have special needs -- not because all foster children have physical or psychological problems but because any child who's been made a permanent ward of the government, for whatever reason, will inevitably have gone through rough times.
Of course, we don't want the wrong sorts of parents signing up to adopt for the wrong kinds of reasons; no one should adopt a child for the money.
On the other hand, if we want more people to adopt children in need, we can't actually penalize them financially for doing so. It is in the best interests of many of these children to find real and lasting homes rather than bouncing from foster placement to foster placement, especially in a province with a chronic shortage of foster beds. It's also in the best interests of many of these children to receive ongoing counselling and social support.
It is both sensible and visionary for the province to find a way to give adults and children alike the financial and human help they need to form new and successful families.
And it's pragmatic to recognize that such adoptions are not always easy and blissful, to put aside sentimentality and accept that everyone in the new family might need some help to adjust and cope. It's a tragic thing when adoptions break down and families have to return troubled children to the care of the province because they can't manage.
We don't just want more adoptions. We want more successful adoptions -- and this program could help us meet both of those goals.
Will it cost taxpayers more money? Not much, at least not in the long run. After all, if these kids were to stay in government care indefinitely, we'd have to pay for their room and board and counselling anyway. By making it easier for them to find permanent, stable homes, we increase the likelihood that they'll be able to adapt and thrive and succeed in school, at work and in life.
I've certainly never hesitated to criticize Children and Youth Services when I think something's wrong. Let me be just as forthright now with my praise. Janis Tarchuk and her department have taken an innovative step towards happy endings for hundreds, even thousands, of Alberta's most vulnerable children. And that, I can only applaud.
Paula Simons
25 November 2008
