I’ve lived in the Yukon for 11 years. I love it here. Such a healthy place. Wide open spaces, pristine rivers and lots of fresh air. A great place to raise kids. I intend to stick around for a while even though my 34 year old kid is long gone.

Not that I’ve ever suffered with empty nest syndrome. You see, I’ve always worked with children — as a teacher and a psychologist. Even when I was a university professor I was training teachers to work with kids. And my brief stint as a public servant in the Yukon was spent as an administrator of a unit providing services to students with special educational needs. More kids, kids who were medically fragile, kids with learning difficulties, kids with social-emotional and behavioural challenges, kids with speech and language difficulties, in short, kids who needed special supports, that additional helping hand, in order that they might benefit from a public education. Just can’t seem to get away from all those kids. When most sensible people of my age are deeply into watching their RRSP portfolio rise and fall in concordance with Nortel and the Toronto Stock Exchange, I start a ‘new’ career — consulting psychologist to a group home for teenagers — again more kids. But this time the kids are in care — that is, are wards of the government.

These are the kind of kids that often upset most adults. They swear a lot. And smoke. Some drink and some even do drugs. Some take a roll in the hay (or should that be snow?) without protection and get pregnant. Many have given up on school. Or should I say, the schools have given up on them? These are the kind of kids who challenge any teacher’s patience — and skill. They don’t sit still, pay attention or learn well. They are often working at a grade 4 level when they are supposed to be in grade 10. It makes high school a hard slog for the kids. And when they get frustrated, the teacher will hear about it; they can be pretty mouthy. How’s a teacher with many other kids to teach to find the time to deal with a teenager who is alienated from learning and is resistant to adult authority ? Pretty tough job I’d say.

It’s not much better with the legal system. Many of these kids haven’t learned to obey caregivers and teachers. Why should the police and judges be any different? These are the kind of kids who live in the present; they want things NOW. They have difficulty with judgment and consequences aren’t even a blip on the radar screen of conscience. Predictably, they get in trouble with the law. A little bit at first. Maybe Diversion and community service. A bit more trouble and they can end up in YOF (Young Offenders Facility for those of you listening who move in different circles). A little later and a lot more trouble with the law and they ‘graduate’ to the Whitehorse Correctional Centre

Oh, I nearly forgot. Boy, can they get mad. Mad enough to kick a hole in the wall. Mad enough to break things.

I’ve noticed something else about these kids in care. They’ve moved a lot — 10, 20, 30 or 40 times. As a parent and a responsible adult, these multiple placements bother me. What do these constant moves have to tell us about the level of need of children in care, about the challenges to caregivers, and about the kind of resources needed to support them in their work? And what happened to the notion of long-term planning both for individual children and for the system as a whole?

As a psychologist I understand the impact of multiple placements on children’s development. Let me tell you a bit of what I know — just enough so you can understand my concern and perhaps share it.

During my teacher training in Britain in the sixties, I read the seminal work of John Bowlby on maternal deprivation. From his work, and the work of Mary Ainsworth, came the notion that children have to become bonded or attached to a primary caregiver early on in their life in order to flourish emotionally. Children who are deprived of the opportunity to establish this early connection with a responsive caregiver grow up to lead troubled lives.

At the same time, I was greatly enamoured of the work of a British child psychiatrist, D. W. Winnicott, who introduced the notion of ‘good enough’ mothering, the kind of parenting needed to grow up emotionally healthy. Good enough mothers or caregivers hang around long enough so the child always knows they are there. We psychologists call this being an attachment figure. Attachment figures become a part of the child’s inner landscape. Securely attached children grow up without undue anxiety and develop self-confidence.

We’ve come a long way from the sixties and in child development too. But the concepts introduced by Bowlby, Ainsworth and Winnicott have become established in the discipline of developmental psychology, their works have become classic texts and they have influenced subsequent researchers.

During the last year, I’ve been reading the work of Dr. Stanley Greenspan, a child psychiatrist from the United States and author of several books . In his book entitled ‘The Growth of the Mind’, he provides compelling arguments, based on his research, about why kids need to develop a relationship with a devoted caregiver. He says, and I quote from his introduction:

He spends a good chunk of the rest of the book describing what he calls the emotional architecture of the mind. He describes the first level of the mind’s development as making sense of sensation. The infant who learns to organize ‘life’s wondrous sensations’ in the company of a devoted caregiver will experience pleasure and joy and find a ‘safe haven from which to make bold declarations of anger and rage’. He warns that ‘ severe emotional problems, even psychosis, may result from a failure to master this most elementary of developmental tasks’ (page 45). He sees these early emotional experiences as foundational for the next level — establishing relationships.

At this second stage, when caregiver and child mutually fall in love, adults actively and intentionally signal their feelings. Greenspan says, and I quote from page 51:

Greenspan goes on to show how the third stage of intentionality,helps the infant to define what separates me from you. Babies who are met with unresponsive caregivers at this stage fail to establish effective boundaries for their emerging selves. The very foundation of the developing self is affected. Neither do they learn that others are separate emotional beings who have desires and intentions of their own.

And all of this during the first year of life.

Greenspan continues by discussing how at the fourth level infants connect sensation and emotion to intentional action and this forms the basis for the next two levels that deal with symbolic meaning, including the ability to think. Greenspan argues that it is this ability to intuitively grasp the feelings and desires of another through the emotional signals they send that makes possible reality testing and other forms of logical thinking.

Greenspan’s not the only one who thinks this way. As far back as the 1930s, Vygotsky, a Russian psychologist, argued that all the higher functions (of the intellect) originate in actual relations between human individuals. Seventy years ago, Vygotsky understood the centrality of personal relationships in the development of cognition.

Are the social-emotional and behavioural difficulties of the teenagers in care that I described at the beginning of this article beginning to make sense to you? Has the light bulb gone on? It didn’t for the bureaucrats in Family and Children’s Services.

So, I think the public needs to start asking questions about why children in care get moved so often. What are the needs of these children? How are decisions about placement made? Are foster parents given the information they need in order to understand the challenges of the children they look after? And what supports are available to them? In short, where’s the accountability of the government for the manner in which they raise this community’s children?

Not too long ago, a little boy died in BC. He had been in the care of the BC government all his life. There was a public outcry and the Honourable Judge Thomas J. Gove was commissioned to hold a public inquiry. His report’s called Matthew’s Story. The Executive Summary is on the BC government’s web site. The full report is in the library of Family and Children’s Services in Whitehorse. It makes for sober reading.

Here are some of the things Judge Gove said:

• ‘Child protection has, for as long as anyone can remember, been conducted in secrecy, with at least the perception that social workers are not accountable’.
• ‘Many social workers were confused about their role and did not treat the safety and well-being of the child as paramount, giving priority to family unity instead’.
• Social workers made a succession of disjointed case plans: they did not practice effective case management’
• District supervisors did not effectively supervise their social workers and they approved case decisions without sufficient knowledge’.
• Ministry files were disorganized, making it difficult for social workers to extract key information about the ministry’s previous involvement with the family’.
• The ministry had no established process for people to make complaints, nor any independent process to have social workers’ decisions reviewed’.

I don’t think he was knocking social workers, and neither am I, for he noted that ‘To do their jobs social workers also, quite obviously, need help: better training, manageable caseloads, relief from occupational stress and burnout’.

I wonder if it’s different in the Yukon? Based on what I know, I’m skeptical. Thomas Gove wondered if Matthew’s story was unique. He found that it wasn’t.

Gove made it clear in his report that as well as being protected from physical and sexual abuse, children also need to be protected from emotional harm. In fact, he recommended that the BC Act be changed so that children were protected from the likelihood of emotional harm.

I haven’t seen a physical death of a child in care in the Yukon but I work daily with the results of psychological death — children who have been traumatized by violence, abuse and the lack of stability in their lives.

Nothing less than a public inquiry is needed here.