Articles Book III - Pg 300-560 (Birthparents) - triadoption

consideration even thouoh he was an or.
phan. or a foster child. or hadn't adjusted
to adoption, or whatever, a child who
didn't take Iris "come-uppance" lying
down, this type of child was seriously
abused and neglected in terms of having his
rights protected. The state as parent has
always lailed the children taken from their
families. No amount of legal rights will ever
protect the child unless these rights begin
with the statement that no child shall be
over arbitrarily separated lrom his family.
We become interested in this because we
felt that a child has certain basic rights, certaln
basic human rights, and we started our
programs on the premise that the alternative
care that was offered to a child away
from his own family should, as a minimum.
at least be equal to what he would have
gotten in terms of human care had he not
been removed lrom his family. We tried to
go further than just physical care. We tried
to prov~de love, involvement, concern,
commitment, advocacy, all those kinds of
dimensions that should be part of what a
child should be guaranteed as a basic right.
Even though we weren't his parents, we
were sponsored by his guardian or parents
to do a job for the child because of the
problems that he liad. We always addressed
ourselves to the question. 'What
would we do for this child il lie were our
own?' We said, treat the child as though he
were our own, as a means of communicating
that we recognized that the child
with problems shares the same needs that
any child has and that these needs can best
be met within a functional fam~ly model
that approximates the family care, love and
support of the extended lamily in nature.
We liad a number of court cases that we
became involved in because of this. The
llrst one never became a celebrated case
because by the time we got into wardship
court an arrangement had been agreed to.
That was the case ol a girl named Betty
who liad been mode a ward ol a Children's
Aid Society, and whose mother had sub.
sequently married. We found Betty's
mother for her and got them back together
and the mother wished to have her child ro-
turned and the child wished to be returned.
At that time there had been no case of o child
having wardship reversed to the parent.
During the preliminary discussions we were
told that tho difficulty was that it wasn't
legally possible. according to the spokesman
for the Childten's Aid Society, to
reverse a wardship decision. Once a
child had bean declared a child of the state
that was the end of the matter: there was
no legal way you could. at a later time,
declare the parents fit parents and have the
child returned to them. Family failure was
seen as irreversible. We challenged that.
We worked it out with the parents, with the
child, with tho Children's Aid Society and
with the juvenile court judge who was quite
agreeable to reversing the wardship procedure
and Betty was returned to her
mother. I heard from her many times after
that and, as far as I know, she has lived
happily ever after and is still doing so.
somewhere in Eastern Ontario.
The second case we dealt with, again, did
not become a case in law becouse we were
able to resolve it outside the courts. This
was the case of two girls who had been
made wards of the Toronto Children's Aid
Society but who remained under the watchful
eye of their father. He had never accepted
the fact that he had been deemed
incapable of coping with them and he had
continually hassled the Children's Aid
Society. Furthermore, he lied refused to
pay the fee that had beon assigned at the
lime of the werdship hearing as his con.
tribution to the cost of their care. So not
only was lie obnoxious in his dealings with
the Children's Aid Society, he also refused
to moot his financial obligations to them.
We became involved with this man alter he
had tracked down his children to our treatmont
facility in Newmarket. Ontario. We
began to work with the father and the
mother. Tcdda Petri, a Dutch social worker
who *was a member ol our staff at that
time, was extrenioly tactful i~nd sensitive in
her work with families, helping to bring out
the strengths and good qualities that parents
had around their children. She spent a lot
FAMILY INVOLVEMENT