More aboriginal children in foster care in Sask. than national average

In 2010, he was the chair of a report called For the Good of Our Children, which delved into the province’s overwhelming disparity of aboriginal children in out-of-home care.

“At the time of the report, the aboriginal population of the province was 15 per cent and 80 per cent of the youth in and out of home care were aboriginal,” Pringle said.

It showed that aboriginal children up until 19 years old are 13 times more likely to be in out-of-home placements.

“At any given time in Saskatchewan six per cent of aboriginal children are in out-of-home care arrangements while it is only 0.5 per cent of non-aboriginal population,” he explained.

“It is a 12-times difference. There is no question that it has to be addressed.”

The most recent report by the Saskatchewan Advocate shows only slight improvements but maintains that aboriginal children are “at a higher risk to become involved in the child welfare and justice systems; and are disproportionately affected by poverty-related conditions such as homelessness, economic exclusion and lack of income security.”

Roots of the disparity

In the 2010 report it said that a consensus among researchers and academics is that the over-representation of Metis and First Nation children in foster care is related to the 19th century colonial period and assimilation policies that were forced on Aboriginal Peoples across Canada.

The report suggested that children being removed from their families and sent to residential schools caused generations of aboriginal youth to experience damage to the connection to their culture and to their families.

“There is a lot of carryover from the impact of residential school and challenges in parenting now because they didn’t learn to parent,” Pringle explained.

The legacy of physical and sexual abuse at the schools also caused many people to develop distrust in the social institutions especially the child welfare system.

“Many experts in Canadian child welfare now point to the residential school period as the beginning of an intergenerational cycle of neglect and abuse. This cycle is seen as one very important contributor to the significant over-representation of First Nations and Metis children and families in child welfare systems,” stated the report.

Pringle said the consequences of these schools are still very real to aboriginal children today.

“We are making progress but these are long standing issues,” he said.

The reasons that children end up in foster care

In 2010, the Auditor General of Canada estimated that aboriginal children were six to eight times more likely to end up placed in foster care than non-aboriginal children.

The most common reason that children end up in out-of-home care is not abuse but neglect.

“We have a higher demographic of First Nation and Metis children then other provinces and of course given the economic and social conditions that First Nation and Metis families live in there is a lot of challenges and a lot of pressures on families,” explained Pringle.

“While being poor doesn’t cause you to have your children go into care or be involved in the child welfare system there is a high correlation between poverty and children in care.”

Pringle is not alone in thinking that socioeconomic issues in the province are increasing the pressures on aboriginal families. Dr. Caroline Tait, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Saskatchewan has been researching intergenerational links to residential schools and the aboriginal presence in the province’s foster care system. She is also part of a team that is specifically focused on researching the progress of children in out-of-home care since Pringle’s 2010 report.

“You have families who are living in poverty, who are under an enormous amount of stress,” Tait explained.

“We have a lot of single-parent families with an enormous amount of children and the circumstances where those children came into care are mainly around neglect not from abuse.”

She said that neglect in most cases is related to three things: poverty, housing, and addictions. She has witnessed the effects of those three contributing factors grow at the same speed the province is.

“When the housing boom took place in 2007 and 2008 our housing prices doubled. There were a lot of condo conversions and that meant that people who were living in apartments were moved out of those places. Our rental market had fewer places available so that pushed people into neighborhoods and housing that they normally wouldn’t move into,” she explained.

“Essentially it’s a trickledown effect where people who were already at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale were pushed right out of their homes.”

In Tait’s experience she said she often sees single mothers living with relatives in circumstances that are overcrowded and often result in the children being exposed to violence and addiction.

“It’s really hard to keep custody of your kids in a circumstance like that,” she said.

“People think that they are either a good mom or a bad mom… but I bet if you put many of us in the same situation that these young women are living in, I’m not sure we wouldn’t all fall for the same challenges that they have.”

Both Tait and Pringle agree that the parents need to take responsibility and maintain safety for their child but they feel that dealing with the causes, like poverty and lack of housing will be more successful then dealing with consequences.

“I know that the parents do need to step up to the plate too but because we see them as ‘bad parents’ (the people in social services) make an excuse for doing things like making mothers choose which child they want to keep or convincing them they shouldn’t take any home,” Tait said in reference to personal accounts told to her while doing research.

The cycle

“You have a mother and father who were in residential school. Then you have a next generation that are taken into care, they become wards of the state. Maybe they are permanently adopted out or they just linger in care long. Then they have babies at a young age and those babies are taken into care. We see a cycle of poverty, unemployment, low education, all of those determinants,” Tait explained.

The 2010 report showed and Pringle confirmed that high rates of aboriginal children in out-of-home care parallel the high rates of aboriginal youths in the provinces juvenile detention centre. Saskatchewan also has high rates of aboriginal adults in correctional facilities.

“I’ve argued that basically child welfare is a determinant of health for aboriginal children. If you look at who are going into gangs, who are ending up in prison, all of those circumstances,” Tait said.

“If you go into a federal penitentiary and ask the aboriginal men how many have been wards of the state I bet that 80 to 90 per cent would put their hands up. We are just feeding into the youth criminal justice system and right up till the adult prisons.”

Prison is certainly not the only problem. The most recent report from the Saskatchewan Advocate expressed that there are still significant gaps for aboriginal children in almost every facet of the education, health, justice, economic and social sectors. Since the medium age for First Nation’s People in the province is 20 years old and Metis people is 28 years old, it is likely that a large majority of the aboriginal population in Saskatchewan has lived their entire lives within these gaps.

“What is happening is that the kids are paying for this down the road. They have to move out of their families because their parents can’t take care of them… As adults, I’ve interviewed young people who are now out of the system and it was not uncommon for them to move 10 times, 20 times, even 30 times,” Tait said.

“If you can imagine the psychological development of a child who not only goes through that apprehension, what it is like to be pulled out your family home and not know where you are going.”

She said she believes that this cycle is also leading to the rapid population growth.

“What we are seeing is families, women having three, four, five, plus children just so they can parent some of their children,” she explained.

“And what we are seeing is that when the children hit 15, 16, or 17 where do they go? They go back to their biological mother. So we have to say if that bond is so strong why isn’t there a way we can support the family and keep them together to break the cycle because we are not breaking the cycle.”
Recommendations to break the cycle

In the 2010 report, Pringle had 12 recommendations to help curve the trend of aboriginal children ending up in out-of-home care. He said that the government took them seriously.

“In response to the child welfare review recommendations they adopted what they call the Saskatchewan Child and Youth Agenda,” Pringle said.

The number of children in out-of-home care has dropped by nearly 500 children since 2008, even though the vast numbers of children that remain are aboriginal.

“When you take different arrangements and some of the preventative work that the province has done and factor in some aging out (meaning the children are now over 18-years-old), the actual number of children in care has gone down from 3,600 to about 2,900 in the last four years,” he explained.

He also suggested that there are numbers that are not taken into account. As more action is taken to keep children within their family, the Saskatchewan Advocate and Pringle are pushing to have more action to assure the safety of children placed with a Person of Sufficient Interest (PSI), which are usually members of the extended family.

Yet, he said that we shouldn’t discredit the progress made.

“There have been some good preventative issues,” he said.

“There is still a long way to go…. better addictions and mental health services, more support throughout housing and all the poverty related conditions. We need better case management between the different ministries because while social services has prime responsibility for the child welfare system many issues that face families are beyond their reach like good education, mental health, addictions, and those kinds of things. It takes a holistic approach to address the problems families face when they are faced with the child welfare system.”

When it comes to the province's children and its future Tait said that solving these problems should be a top priority.

“Why would we not strive to have a world class child welfare system? We are doing so well economically, why would we not say let’s make this a priority and lets be proud of this,” she said.

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by Kelly Malone

More aboriginal children in foster care in Sask. than national average

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