kids need nurturing from an early age
I am glad to see this type of editorial written. Anyone who has common sense and a heart that works, need not have to read anything or be told anything of this nature. It's terrible that these things have to be said to adult persons, but the unfortunate reality, is that there are more and more situations that require this action to take place. I believe as a person, that if you know early in life that you do not want children you should take steps to have this taken care of. Mistakes happen all the time, there are so many people in this world that actually love children and would die to be able to conceive a child. It makes you think.
Time to stop blaming the child-welfare system
Kids need nurturing from an early age
PUBLICLY shaming Child and Family Services might make us feel better, but it hasn’t done a single thing to help kids in Manitoba.
At the beginning of the year, there were 10,673 children in care — the highest number yet.
Spending more money hasn’t reduced the number of kids in the childwelfare system.
Provincial funding for child welfare soared to $423 million in 2011 from $165 million in 2001. The federal government upped its contribution, too — to $125 million in 2011 from $50 million in 2001.
Several inquiries into the deaths of children such as Phoenix Sinclair and national outrage over the homicide of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine this past summer haven’t slowed the growing number of kids in care.
Until the systemic problems that got them there are addressed, more children will be entering the system and needing a place to stay. One of the most chilling statements that came out of the inquiry into the death of fiveyear- old Phoenix was that statistically, had she lived, she would likely have had children who ended up in care.
The growing number of kids who come from poverty and neglect are the most likely to end up having kids they’re not prepared to care for and who end up in the child-welfare system.
Until that cycle is broken, there will be a lot of kids who need a safe place to call home. But where?
Marymound is building a residential unit for girls aged 12 to 17 as part of a plan to create 71 new emergency foster-home spaces.
There aren’t enough suitable foster homes ready to take children — never mind troubled kids and sibling groups — on short notice.
Child-welfare agencies in Manitoba were having such a hard time recruiting new foster parents that in 2013, Winnipeg Child and Family Services sent brochures out to 278 licensed homes asking foster parents to host “fosterware” parties. A CFS resource specialist said there was a serious need, with more than 300 children in emergency foster placements and homes and hotels where staff work in shifts.
The agency has since received funding from a charity to have a full-time worker look for permanent, adoptive homes for older kids in care.
But that’s not the quick fix the public is demanding after a 15-year-old girl, a CFS ward, was badly beaten and found Wednesday in a parkade near the downtown hotel in which she was housed.
Police charged a 15-year-old boy, also a CFS ward staying at that hotel, with aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault. News of the girl’s attack sparked outrage. How could her caregiver let her go? Why wasn’t she followed? Why didn’t they call police right away?
The answers to those questions may never be made public. Even if they are, that won’t prevent more kids from ending up in foster placements.
Researchers who’ve studied the long-term trajectory of kids in care in Manitoba say the present system isn’t sustainable. The majority are born into poverty and neglect, are more likely to drop out of high school, live in want, lose their kids to child welfare, battle addiction, end up in the criminal justice system, and suffer chronic health problems. The health care, corrections, and child-welfare systems are already stressed.
They say the only solution is prevention — to envelope at-risk kids with a nurturing environment while their brain development is in hyperdrive — from the time they’re in their mother’s womb until they hit kindergarten.
“The early years matter enormously. They determine the foundation — sturdy or fragile — for what comes later,” Manitoba Centre for Health Policy researcher Rob Santos testified in the final days of the Phoenix Sinclair inquiry. There is visible damage to developing brains of kids in environments of poverty, addictions and violence — what he called “toxic stress.”
About one in four (or 4,000 babies a year) is born into toxic stress in Manitoba. It hurts kids for life — they’re up to three times more at risk for having cardiac diseases later in life. The brain of a child deprived of attention, used to chaos, hunger and violence “is adapted to a predatory, threatening environment,” said Santos, and will have trouble in safe environments such as school and work.
The province has started investing heavily in early-childhood programs, but the payoff — fewer kids in care — will take a long time. In the meantime, the community might be better off investing its time and energy volunteering with agencies and non-profit groups that help kids than blaming and shaming a system that’s struggling.
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Powered by TECNAVIA Copyright (c)2015 Winnipeg Free Press, Edition 04/04/2015
Kids need nurturing from an early age
PUBLICLY shaming Child and Family Services might make us feel better, but it hasn’t done a single thing to help kids in Manitoba.
At the beginning of the year, there were 10,673 children in care — the highest number yet.
Spending more money hasn’t reduced the number of kids in the childwelfare system.
Provincial funding for child welfare soared to $423 million in 2011 from $165 million in 2001. The federal government upped its contribution, too — to $125 million in 2011 from $50 million in 2001.
Several inquiries into the deaths of children such as Phoenix Sinclair and national outrage over the homicide of 15-year-old Tina Fontaine this past summer haven’t slowed the growing number of kids in care.
Until the systemic problems that got them there are addressed, more children will be entering the system and needing a place to stay. One of the most chilling statements that came out of the inquiry into the death of fiveyear- old Phoenix was that statistically, had she lived, she would likely have had children who ended up in care.
The growing number of kids who come from poverty and neglect are the most likely to end up having kids they’re not prepared to care for and who end up in the child-welfare system.
Until that cycle is broken, there will be a lot of kids who need a safe place to call home. But where?
Marymound is building a residential unit for girls aged 12 to 17 as part of a plan to create 71 new emergency foster-home spaces.
There aren’t enough suitable foster homes ready to take children — never mind troubled kids and sibling groups — on short notice.
Child-welfare agencies in Manitoba were having such a hard time recruiting new foster parents that in 2013, Winnipeg Child and Family Services sent brochures out to 278 licensed homes asking foster parents to host “fosterware” parties. A CFS resource specialist said there was a serious need, with more than 300 children in emergency foster placements and homes and hotels where staff work in shifts.
The agency has since received funding from a charity to have a full-time worker look for permanent, adoptive homes for older kids in care.
But that’s not the quick fix the public is demanding after a 15-year-old girl, a CFS ward, was badly beaten and found Wednesday in a parkade near the downtown hotel in which she was housed.
Police charged a 15-year-old boy, also a CFS ward staying at that hotel, with aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault. News of the girl’s attack sparked outrage. How could her caregiver let her go? Why wasn’t she followed? Why didn’t they call police right away?
The answers to those questions may never be made public. Even if they are, that won’t prevent more kids from ending up in foster placements.
Researchers who’ve studied the long-term trajectory of kids in care in Manitoba say the present system isn’t sustainable. The majority are born into poverty and neglect, are more likely to drop out of high school, live in want, lose their kids to child welfare, battle addiction, end up in the criminal justice system, and suffer chronic health problems. The health care, corrections, and child-welfare systems are already stressed.
They say the only solution is prevention — to envelope at-risk kids with a nurturing environment while their brain development is in hyperdrive — from the time they’re in their mother’s womb until they hit kindergarten.
“The early years matter enormously. They determine the foundation — sturdy or fragile — for what comes later,” Manitoba Centre for Health Policy researcher Rob Santos testified in the final days of the Phoenix Sinclair inquiry. There is visible damage to developing brains of kids in environments of poverty, addictions and violence — what he called “toxic stress.”
About one in four (or 4,000 babies a year) is born into toxic stress in Manitoba. It hurts kids for life — they’re up to three times more at risk for having cardiac diseases later in life. The brain of a child deprived of attention, used to chaos, hunger and violence “is adapted to a predatory, threatening environment,” said Santos, and will have trouble in safe environments such as school and work.
The province has started investing heavily in early-childhood programs, but the payoff — fewer kids in care — will take a long time. In the meantime, the community might be better off investing its time and energy volunteering with agencies and non-profit groups that help kids than blaming and shaming a system that’s struggling.
[email protected]
Powered by TECNAVIA Copyright (c)2015 Winnipeg Free Press, Edition 04/04/2015
deadbeat parents targeted
All I can say is, it's about time they did something about this problem. There is so much extra cost to take these deadbeats to court to try and obtain the money they rightfully owe, that the money that is being made to support that children that are being brought into this world is going to the lawyers, instead of the support of the children. If the risks of not paying support were extensive then maybe there would be more care taken in all aspects of life.
MANITOBA LEGISLATURE: NDP to overhaul one law, consult public about another
Deadbeat parents targeted
By Bruce Owen
THE Manitoba government has rewritten its provincial family laws to simplify the court process, recognize same-sex parents and clamp down on deadbeat parents.
The 194-page Family Law Reform Act was introduced Wednesday by Justice Minister Gord Mackintosh. The changes, more than two years in the works, will replace the Family Maintenance Act with the Family Law Act and the Family Support Maintenance Act.
Mackintosh said the changes would see tighter restrictions on deadbeat parents who fail to make child-support payments, have a warrant out for their arrest and cannot be located. There are currently arrest warrants for 57 people.
The move is similar to one brought in by Ontario and Alberta several years ago and will take about two years to put in place.
“Every single parent that owes to their children should be paying, and they should be paying in full,” Mackintosh said.
He said despite a 205 per cent increase in the number of paying parents in full compliance with child-support orders over the last 15 years, 40 per cent continue to be in default.
“The purpose is not shaming,” he said. “It’s to find the debtors and collect for the child. These are people who are hiding from law, hiding from their own obligations to their own children.”
Mackintosh also said the changes would see those in default denied hunting and fishing licences. Five other jurisdictions have a similar provision. The province already withholds driver’s licence and vehicle-registration renewal.
The changes also would increase the maximum compensatory payments for late or missed support payments to $5,000 from $500, allow a child to apply for child support and provide for administrative corrections of math errors and enforceable support amounts to prevent parents having to return to court to have a judge approve it.
The minister also said the changes would modernize family law to recognize parenting by people who are same-sex or who use assisted reproduction or surrogacy arrangements. It would also recognize the ability of a child to have more than two legal parents.
“Our task isn’t to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to differing parenting arrangements,” Mackintosh said.
“Our task is to recognize the different family configurations out there, and just recognize the reality and to put in place rules to guard the rights and interests of children in every kind of family. That will help avoid dispute and will help guard against court involvement.”
Other changes would put the child’s best interest to be the only consideration when dealing with custody, access or guardianship, and minimize the impact of custody proceedings on children through alternative processes to court.
It would also allow grandparents, step-parents or others to apply for custody if they already play a role in a child’s life.
Family lawyer Lawrence Pinsky and others said the changes will improve the court process in emotional family cases, particularly in relocation disputes. The changes would introduce a new process to govern relocation of parents and children.
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PARENTS, NOT KIDS, TO BE REMOVED
First Nation changes child-welfare strategy
By Alexandra Paul
MISIPAWISTIK First Nation will turn parents, not their children, out of troubled homes under its new child-welfare policy.
By making the change, the Cree community of about 1,100, located 430 kilometres north of Winnipeg, becomes the second First Nation in Manitoba to actively work to turn the tide on child apprehensions.
Nisichawaysihk Cree Nation in Nelson House, a community of about 1,900, located 650 kilometres north of Winnipeg, rolled out a policy in 2002 of removing parents from homes, instead of kids, resulting in a 20 per cent drop in child apprehensions.
In Misipawistik First Nation in Grand Rapids, the new policy took effect under a band council resolution March 17 and it applies only within reserve boundaries. It has yet to be acted on; procedures are still being developed to put it into practice.
“Each decision has to be decided on a case-bycase basis,” band councillor Heidi Cook said. “But it is our intention that it will be all interventions. This is our preferred approach.”
Workers with the local Child and Family Services agency have the authority to show parents the door and keep the kids in place under circumstances in which they would ordinarily apprehend the children and place them in foster homes, under the provincial law.
“Our next step is to work on the support systems,” Cook said. “This is not to blame parents. We’re living with the intergenerational impacts of residential schools and Manitoba Hydro (development).”
The community believes it will work.
“This idea has been around for a long time, and it has worked in a couple of instances where we’ve tried it before on a voluntary basis,” Cook said. “This (concept) is coming from the people on the front lines, the people working with child and family.”
Felix Walker, CEO of the Family Community Wellness Centre in Nelson House, said the key is to ensure services are available.
“We’re one of the few communities where our numbers are going down, while everybody else’s are going up. We provide services to keep children at home while working on services for parents outside the home,” Walker said.
Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Derek Nepinak welcomed the change.
“It will help break the intergenerational chain of trauma that most of our families are suffering from, and it will help empower extended families and their responsibilities to our young ones,” Nepinak wrote in an email Monday.
“Incidental to this is the renewal of community parenting and putting the rights of children and families first.”
AMC announced after last week’s attack on a teenage girl, a ward of Child and Family Services, it would hire its own child advocate to work exclusively with First Nations, starting May 1.
By the beginning of the year, there were nearly 11,000 kids in care in the province, most of them indigenous.
In the latest case, a girl, 15, suffered head trauma during a beating in a downtown garage last Wednesday. A boy, 15, was charged with aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault.
Both the victim and accused are in care, and were housed in the same downtown hotel at the time of the assault. Last August, Tina Fontaine, 15, was found dead after being slain. She, too, was a ward of CFS and was staying in a hotel.
Liberal MLA Jon Gerrard called the Grand Rapids measure a “positive first step,” and said while Manitobans may not know about Nelson House, their work is breaking important new ground.
The numbers of children removed from family homes from 2013 to 2014 in Nelson House dropped by 20 per cent when off-reserve families were included, Gerrard said, citing provincial statistics.
“Imagine if the rest of the province had reduced the number of children in care by 20 per cent,” Gerrard said. “Imagine what that would do to reduce pressure on foster homes and on kids in hotels.”
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Powered by TECNAVIACopyright (c)2015 Winnipeg Free Press, Edition 07/04/2015
By Alexandra Paul
MISIPAWISTIK First Nation will turn parents, not their children, out of troubled homes under its new child-welfare policy.
By making the change, the Cree community of about 1,100, located 430 kilometres north of Winnipeg, becomes the second First Nation in Manitoba to actively work to turn the tide on child apprehensions.
Nisichawaysihk Cree Nation in Nelson House, a community of about 1,900, located 650 kilometres north of Winnipeg, rolled out a policy in 2002 of removing parents from homes, instead of kids, resulting in a 20 per cent drop in child apprehensions.
In Misipawistik First Nation in Grand Rapids, the new policy took effect under a band council resolution March 17 and it applies only within reserve boundaries. It has yet to be acted on; procedures are still being developed to put it into practice.
“Each decision has to be decided on a case-bycase basis,” band councillor Heidi Cook said. “But it is our intention that it will be all interventions. This is our preferred approach.”
Workers with the local Child and Family Services agency have the authority to show parents the door and keep the kids in place under circumstances in which they would ordinarily apprehend the children and place them in foster homes, under the provincial law.
“Our next step is to work on the support systems,” Cook said. “This is not to blame parents. We’re living with the intergenerational impacts of residential schools and Manitoba Hydro (development).”
The community believes it will work.
“This idea has been around for a long time, and it has worked in a couple of instances where we’ve tried it before on a voluntary basis,” Cook said. “This (concept) is coming from the people on the front lines, the people working with child and family.”
Felix Walker, CEO of the Family Community Wellness Centre in Nelson House, said the key is to ensure services are available.
“We’re one of the few communities where our numbers are going down, while everybody else’s are going up. We provide services to keep children at home while working on services for parents outside the home,” Walker said.
Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs Grand Chief Derek Nepinak welcomed the change.
“It will help break the intergenerational chain of trauma that most of our families are suffering from, and it will help empower extended families and their responsibilities to our young ones,” Nepinak wrote in an email Monday.
“Incidental to this is the renewal of community parenting and putting the rights of children and families first.”
AMC announced after last week’s attack on a teenage girl, a ward of Child and Family Services, it would hire its own child advocate to work exclusively with First Nations, starting May 1.
By the beginning of the year, there were nearly 11,000 kids in care in the province, most of them indigenous.
In the latest case, a girl, 15, suffered head trauma during a beating in a downtown garage last Wednesday. A boy, 15, was charged with aggravated assault and aggravated sexual assault.
Both the victim and accused are in care, and were housed in the same downtown hotel at the time of the assault. Last August, Tina Fontaine, 15, was found dead after being slain. She, too, was a ward of CFS and was staying in a hotel.
Liberal MLA Jon Gerrard called the Grand Rapids measure a “positive first step,” and said while Manitobans may not know about Nelson House, their work is breaking important new ground.
The numbers of children removed from family homes from 2013 to 2014 in Nelson House dropped by 20 per cent when off-reserve families were included, Gerrard said, citing provincial statistics.
“Imagine if the rest of the province had reduced the number of children in care by 20 per cent,” Gerrard said. “Imagine what that would do to reduce pressure on foster homes and on kids in hotels.”
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Powered by TECNAVIACopyright (c)2015 Winnipeg Free Press, Edition 07/04/2015
for some couples, marriage doesn't have to mean monogamy
For some couples, marriage doesn’t have to mean monogamy
NO RINGS ATTACHED
By Caitlin Dewey
BEFORE online dating, before her two kids, before the Big Conversation with her skeptical husband, Jessie already had an inkling that maybe she wasn’t quite like the ladies she saw at church, that maybe the sexual strictures of life in D.C.’s monied suburbs weren’t for her.
Her first marriage, in her early 20s, had ended after an affair. (Hers.) Her second marriage, started shortly thereafter, was “happy, very happy,” but as her boys grew up and moved out and moved on, she was left faintly bored.
She thought about cheating on her husband of 20 years. She considered bars, parties, a review of the lapses in her mid-20s.
Instead, she sat her husband down and told him something that more and more progressive couples are beginning to realize. They loved each other and wanted to stay together, but in the age of websites and apps such as Tinder and Ashley Madison and OkCupid, they also both wanted to have other options. Options they knew were just a click away.
“Interesting, introspective, happily married D.C. professional,” reads Jessie’s profile on the new non-monogamous dating site Open Minded. “I’m into building deep and loving relationships that add to the joy and aliveness of being human.”
Open Minded isn’t quite like Ashley Madison, the unapologetic dating-forcheaters service that expects a billion- dollar valuation when it launches its impending IPO. It also isn’t quite like mobile hook-up app Tinder, where — according to one recent report — as many as 40 per cent of “singles” are secretly... not.
Instead, says Brandon Wade, the site’s pragmatic, MIT-educated founder, Open Minded is a new kind of dating site for a newly mainstream lifestyle: one in which couples form real attachments, just not exclusively with each other.
He expects swingers, polysexuals and experimental 20-somethings to use his site. But he guesses that most of his 70,000 users are people like Jessie: those in committed, conventional relationships, who realize that, statistically speaking, few modern couples stay with a single person their whole lives.
“If you look at marriage, it developed as a survival strategy and a means of raising kids,” Wade said. “But relationships are no longer a necessary component of life. People have careers and other interests — they can survive without them.”
That’s not wrong, says Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist and one of the world’s leading relationship researchers. In the caveman days, humans teamed up in non-exclusive pairs to protect their children. Later, as people learned to plant crops and settle in one place, marriage became a way for men to guarantee kids, and for women — who couldn’t push heavy plows or carry loads of crops to market — to eat and keep a roof over their heads.
There’s a long history of married men sleeping around, Fisher said. And the romantic notion that relationships are anything but transactions is relatively recent — as is the social expectation that both people partner for life, to the exclusion of everyone else.
Given the history and prevalence of non-monogamous relationships throughout cultures, it’s not scientifically correct to say the human species mates or pairs for life. Dogs mate for life. Beavers mate for life. Humans have one-night stands, paramours and a 50 per cent divorce rate.
Fisher dubs it a “dual reproductive strategy.” We’re biologically programmed to form pair-bonds, yes, but some people — many people — are also programmed to seek out variety.
Just consider the number of married men who have partners outside of their marriage — more than 40 per cent in the United States. (That’s down, by the way, from past decades.) Recent research suggests that the network of secondary partners we developed in our cavemen days is still around on Facebook, where we poke and message as many as eight could-be partners in anticipation of rainy days.
Even Leviticus tacitly permitted male adultery, provided the act didn’t involve a married lady.
“Nothing about this is new. It’s as old as the hills,” Fisher said. “What is new is that women are now also being more adulterous — and so people are beginning to be more open about it.”
Jessie doesn’t like that word. Adultery. It conjures images of lipstick stains and burner phones. Or worse, stonings and scarlet As. It also reminds her of her first marriage, which ended after an affair. She hated the lying, the sneaking around. This time, she wanted to be more honest.
In 2010, Jessie approached her husband with an idea she called “ethical non-monogamy.” They would stay together as each other’s primary, lifelong partners, but they wouldn’t rule out other relationships — as long as they happened openly. Jessie has shown her husband her profile on several dating sites, including Open Minded. When she returns from her weekly date with one of her four extramarital partners, she tells him as much, or as little, as he likes.
PUBLICLY, no one knows about this arrangement. (It’s why we have agreed to just use her first name in this story.) Jessie doesn’t plan to tell her children, though she could see it coming up one day. She and her husband still have sex, still go to social functions and still celebrate anniversaries.
But that whole thing about “the woman which hath an husband is bound by the law... so long as he liveth?” To that, Jessie says no thanks.
More and more women will make this choice or consider it, Fisher expects; it’s in keeping with decades of widespread social change and women’s empowerment.
Just 30 years ago, when Jessie was in her 20s, the average woman married at 23 and had her first child within the year.
Her mother’s generation didn’t even leave the home. The majority simply raised kids, preached chastity and finger-waved their hair.
“That’s all sliding away from us,” Fisher said. “We’re shedding all these agricultural traditions... (and) returning to the way we were millions of years ago.”
Internal data from Open Minded would appear to back that up: thus far, most of its self-declared “monogamish” users are under 33. In other words, they’re women (and men) who paid off their own student loans, fooled around on Tinder and grew up with a notion of personal independence much different from the one taught in the first century AD.
For them, and for their more conventional peers, Jessie has some advice: talk to your partner about monogamy. Listen “without judgment.” Keep, in all cases, an open mind.
“Whichever it is, make a real choice,” she said. “We’re told we only have enough love for one person. Does that sound right to you?”
— Washington Post
‘WE’RE SHEDDING ALL THESE AGRICULTURAL TRADITIONS... (and) returning to the way we were millions of years ago’
What is new is that WOMEN ARE NOW ALSO BEING MORE ADULTEROUS — and so people are beginning to be more open about it ‘We’re told we only have enough love for one person. DOES THAT SOUND RIGHT TO YOU?’
BARRYMAGUIRE/
NEWSART
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