On September 17th, Mary Burton, co-founder of FearlessR2W, super granny, and member of IPAN’s board of directors spoke to the United Nations on behalf of parents around the world.
System change and parent advocacy
Hello, my name is Red Sky Woman of the Beaver clan, my English name is Mary Burton. I am here to talk to you about parent advocacy and system change. I am the child of a residential day school survivor and 3 of my older siblings went to Indian day school. I am a survivor of the 60’s scoop and I aged out of CFS care at 18. I have been advocating for families for over 20 years.
I am the Executive Director for Fearless R2W Inc. We are an organization that helps families navigate the many systems that correlate with child welfare, we also educate our families, so they have the knowledge they need to fight for themselves if ever needed.
I educate families on legislation regarding all systems related to child welfare such as welfare, housing and addictions. I give families a hand up not a handout. Parent Advocacy helps the whole family in many ways, parents learn how to fight in a good way, they learn how to navigate systems and how to access much needed resources. Parent advocacy helps the parents feel empowered to help their families. We have weekly learning circles for our families and our community where we have speakers come out to talk about various topics from child welfare to childcare and more.
We read our values together before every meeting to bring us back to why we are here and how we want to show up as a community. They are something we can hold each other accountable to and help keep us focused on our goal to keep families together.
- We are a circle of support and value one another as one family
- We take care of our own (heart, mind, body, soul)
- We agree to disagree with kindness
- We believe laughter is medicine
- We believe it is all of our responsibility to take care of all of the children all of the time
- We encourage each person to find and share their gifts with us
- We welcome different approaches, opinions and styles
- We will not gossip or undermine one another but speak well of each other and communicate any concerns directly to the people involved
- We will look out for one another
Parent Advocacy
Parent advocacy supports children’s rights it helps parents understand the rights of the children. It also helps children, when children see their parents fighting in a good way to get them back, they feel loved and cared for and wanted. Parents willing to make changes and over come challenges for the best interests of their children presents a good role model for children. When children feel loved and wanted, they are happier and feel empowered to do better. Meanwhile, parents who have received support and have overcome their challenges feel empowered to help other parents this kind of support is called parent advocacy and it is needed in today’s society so that parents have a sense of community and feel like they are part of something important because when parents have their children removed it strips them of their identity and they feel worthless. When families feel empowered, they can do just about anything and are happier.
Parent advocacy helps this to happen by
- Parents learning how to navigate systems in a good way
- Parents learn how to access resources that are needed when they are needed
- Parents are educated on legislation regarding child welfare and can advocate for themselves when needed
Child Welfare
The child welfare system is not a good system any where in the world it is colonized and meant to keep families separated. The system was created to keep families apart and parents sedated We all know that this system of child welfare isn’t working, but what needs to change? The child welfare system is racist, colonized. Based on our most recent census data, 52% of children under 14yo in foster care are Indigenous, despite composing only 7.7% of the child population in Canada1. In Manitoba that number is much higher – almost 90% of children in care are Indigenous2, and Indigenous children are almost 22x more likely to be in foster care than non-Indigenous children3. In the north end of Winnipeg where I live, an estimated one-in-ten children are in state care, almost 4x more than the rest of the city4. These numbers are huge, we need to change how child welfare interacts with indigenous people and people of color.
The child welfare system is a gateway to many things such as
- Homelessness in Winnipeg: 52% of people experiencing homelessness in Winnipeg had been in CFS care at least once.5
- Justice system
- In Manitoba, almost 60% of youth involved in the justice system were also involved in CFS (based on a study of MYC admissions in Oct 2018)6
- Suicide
- In Manitoba, one study showed that children with experience in CFS care are 4.3x more likely to attempt suicide.7
- Addiction
- Rates of opioid prescriptions are 6x greater for youth that aged out of care compared to youth that did not age out of care.8
- Youth that were involved in the child welfare system are significantly more likely to use hard substances and engage in risky behaviour than non-CFS involved youth. One Vancouver study found that street-involved youth who use substances are over 160 times more likely to have been in government care compared to the general population of youth.9
- Justice system
Parents rights are directly supportive of children’s rights. Parents rights emphasize and promote children’s rights because parents belong to their children, they are the child’s heritage, Identity and biology, they have connection and love for their child that can not be replaced. When a child is removed from their family, we are not fixing a problem, we are running from that problem and in so doing we create many, many more new problems. We must stop seeing parents as the problem and start seeing them as an important part of the solution! Children want their parents and parents want to be what their children need. In order to begin solving the challenges families face we must first include parents’ voices in the conversation and one valuable and proven way to do this is through parent advocacy
Sources
1 Statistics Canada analysis of the 2016 Canadian Census data, available in summary here: https://www.sac-isc.gc.ca/eng/1541187352297/1541187392851
2 Manitoba Department of Families Annual Reports, 2001-2020 https://www.gov.mb.ca/fs/about/annual_reports.html
3 Healthy Child Manitoba’s 2017 Child and Youth Report, https://www.gov.mb.ca/healthychild/publications/hcm_2017report.pdf
4 MyPeg Portal (n.d.). Children in Care [Dataset]. International Institute of Sustainable Development (IISD) & United Way Winnipeg. https://www.mypeg.ca/indicator/children-in-care/
5 Winnipeg Street Census (2018), https://streetcensuswpg.ca/2018-census/
6 CBC article on a Winnipeg Free Press Investigation from Oct 2018 (unable to find original source) https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/youth-justice-child-welfare-manitoba-1.5021229
7 Katz, L. Y., Au, W., Singal, D., Brownell, M., Roos, N., Martens, P. J., Chateau, D., Enns, M. W., Kozyrskyj, A. L., & Sareen, J. (2011). Suicide and suicide attempts in children and adolescents in the child welfare system. CMAJ : Canadian Medical Association journal, 183(17), 1977–1981. https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.110749
8 Chateau, D., Brownell, M., v, J., Prior, H. and Stevenson, D. (2018) “Measuring the impact of transition on children aging out of child protective services”, International Journal of Population Data Science, 3(4). doi: 10.23889/ijpds.v3i4.1031.
9 Barker, B., Kerr, T., Alfred, G. T., Fortin, M., Nguyen, P., Wood, E., & DeBeck, K. (2014). High prevalence of exposure to the child welfare system among street-involved youth in a Canadian setting: implications for policy and practice. BMC public health, 14, 197. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-2458-14-197