Listen to thisCANADA
B.C. policy that ends foster care at age 19
unrealistic, even cruel
There is a perverse consistency in the B.C. government's policy to abruptly
end help to youth in care the moment they turn 19.
It that starts with a reluctance to take adolescents and teens into care in
the first place.
Every year, there are easily a thousand adolescents and teens crying out for
protection from abuse and violence in their homes, according to Child and
Youth Representative Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond. Too often they are told to
stay there. Too often their complaints are dismissed as nothing more than
the usual parent-teen conflicts.
Among the representative's 11,000 active files, there are hundreds of cases
where the provincial Ministry of Children and Family Development has ignored
youths' fears about their own safety because of their mothers' addictions or
mental illness, or because of their mothers' abusive or sexually aggressive
boyfriends.
"The ministry's threshold is very low in terms of parental capacity," she
says. "I have (cases of) kids who are living with active addicts, and the
ministry takes the view that this can be handled with a safety plan – which
may be nothing more than the kids running across the street to a neighbour."
Turpel-Lafond puts much of the blame on inadequate funding, which has also
resulted in increasing numbers of 16- to 18-year-olds signing Youth
Agreements.
Those agreements give teens $1,000 a month for all their needs, including
rent and food. The expectation is that while living alone, these kids will
make wise decisions like getting up and going to school every morning rather
than staying up late playing videos games or partying every night.
With only minimal support from social workers, these agreements often
stipulate that kids with addictions and mental health issues will have to
get themselves to counselling or even (as the ministry's website says)
"learn to shop for and cook inexpensive, healthy meals."
Expecting that level of maturity from teens, many of whom have grown up in
chaotic homes, seems unrealistic and even cruel.
Even if setting kids up for failure is cheaper than providing foster care
and group homes, over the long term it is definitely more expensive. Which
brings us to the question: When should the government's legal responsibility
for vulnerable children end?
In British Columbia, the cut-off age is 19. In the ministry's parlance, that
is when kids "age out" and are expected to cope on their own. It's a rigid
system. There is no leeway, for example, to let kids who are only a few
weeks or months from high-school graduation to stay in their foster homes.
There is some transitional financial help of up to $1,000 a month for two
years for living expenses for 19 year olds continuing their education. But
how does even a high-functioning person support himself or herself in
Vancouver on that and still have time to study? The answer is clear in the
ministry's own statistics – only one in three kids in foster care graduates
from high school.
The reality is actually more dismal than that, says Turpel-Lafond. Many
so-called "graduates" don't earn Dogwood Certificates (which would allow
them to go on to post-secondary institutions). Instead, they are given
school-leaving certificates.
So how do young adults raised in government care survive with minimal
education, no money and no support, even though close to two-thirds of them
have mental health issues?
In their series this past week From Care to Where? my colleagues Tracy
Sherlock and Lori Culbert have told the stories of a few of the nearly 700
young adults abandoned each year at age 19 by the foster care system.
Reading their painful stories provides a moral case for more government
support both before and beyond age 19.
Yet Sherlock and Culbert make an equally strong economic case. For every $1
spent on foster care beyond the age of 19 in B.C., The Sun
calculated that the long-term savings on incarceration and welfare expenses
and the returns in income tax would be $1.11. The formula my colleagues used
was based on a study intended to convince the Ontario government to extend
support to youth in care from age 21 to 25. In the Ontario case, for every
$1 spent, the government would save (or have returned in income taxes) $1.36
over each person's lifetime. And that formula doesn't even include savings
from reduced emergency room visits, costs of addictions, unwanted
pregnancies and homelessness – all services that former foster children are
much more likely than others to require.
Improving the outcomes for children, youth or young adults who have grown up
in care is an economic message that the B.C. government has heard, but for
which it apparently has no appetite. In the provincial budget announced last
week, the children's ministry was allotted an annual increase of just under
$12 million – a virtual rounding error on its total budget of $1.34 billion.
Aside from being a false saving as others have recognized, hobbling the
futures of thousands of British Columbians through neglect is simply wrong.
Daphne Bramham
26 February 2014
