Thank you for giving me the opportunity to be here today to speak to you.
I'm an adoptive parent, and I'm also a professional librarian, responsible for aboriginal studies at the University of Ottawa.
I've been involved in the adoption community for 18 years. I have two adopted boys. One was adopted as a newborn. It was a kinship adoption, meaning within family. My second was an international adoption, which was a two-year nightmare, that I completed myself. I went to Guatemala and completed that with a Guatemalan friend.
With my second son, I definitely needed recovery time. When I returned from Guatemala, I had to return to work the very next day because of the way the benefits worked. I suspected that my older son had attachment difficulties and I realized that I was actually his fourth caregiver. There were no post-adoption support services on either the Quebec or Ontario side. This was in 1994.
Adoptive parents, then and now, are reluctant to approach social services for help for fear of being labelled as unfit parents and also of losing their children to the system. This is a real concern.
I was fortunate to find a supportive and sympathetic psychologist at CHEO, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario, here in Ottawa. However, I had to go to the U.S. There were no attachment specialists here. There was no attachment help. As a librarian, at least I had access to information resources. But I went to the U.S and sought help from Dr. Dan Hughes, a psychologist specializing in attachment issues.
In terms of support, I received UI support. I'll just go over that very briefly, because you do have the notes and statistics. I figured it would be easier to refer to the notes.
My employer gave me whatever benefits were the equivalent to a biological parent, so I had 12 weeks. Then when I returned from Guatemala, I had to immediately return to work and work for another 20 weeks so I could get a second leave. For the second leave I was allowed an additional five weeks, because if a child over six months had physical, mental, or emotional problems at that point, you were allowed to have another five weeks. So I had another five weeks.
At that point I had to take a three-day-a-week workload. I could not properly support these children and help them with all their needs working full-time. I neglected to mention that both of these children came within a three-and-a-half-month period, so you can imagine the challenges.
You also asked if I received federal benefits. I received the Canada child tax benefit for both children.
What I really want to focus on are my recommendations for awareness and training. I've given you very specific examples of people I think we should bring to Canada as support for the post-adoption support services. That's my main concern here.
I suggest that the Mental Health Commission of Canada, that newly formed commission, and the Public Health Agency of Canada create awareness of these issues by placing appropriate information on their sites--for example, a tab for adoption, and then under that attachment: grief, loss, and FASD.
I also highly recommend that the HRSDC fund a train-the-trainer program. The North American Council on Adoptable Children has already established this program. They would like to bring it to Canada. It's already there. It would be training adoptive parents who have a lot of experience, such as myself, to then make presentations to the mental health community and mental health professionals.
It's so important to get the message out that there needs to be awareness. I'm including not only mental health professionals, I'm including lawyers and judges. I think that's really very important. That program could also be appropriate for training teachers in the public schools as well. We really need that.
Parent volunteers also have a limit to the amount of time they can give. If there were some remuneration, that would really help. We all want to help one another, but we all are limited in time and have to make a living.
I suggest that the Mental Health Commission of Canada, the Public Health Agency of Canada, or HRSDC sponsor speakers who are specialists in adoption and attachment. I've mentioned specific ones in my notes. I know them all, I've heard them all, and they're excellent. The training they offer is also at a very high level. It is appropriate for curriculum in our medical schools, in our social work schools, for any type of professional training like that, and for judges too. It's of that high a calibre. I've taken it and I really suggest that. I think that's really important.
I also suggest that a national public awareness public health campaign be created and funding provided for a public service announcement and film. We had started on that last year as part of the Adoption Council of Canada, but we weren't able to go forward. We had already identified a filmmaker who has experience in the field of adoption and has continued to work and do research on this—and I've helped her with it—on her own. So I've also mentioned her name and contact information there.
Coming from the academic community, I think the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and other academic funding agencies should be encouraged to fund research on adoptee FASD. There is one professor at the University of Ottawa who does research in this area and is really interested in this. I've also provided you with another link of an agency that I recently found regarding that.
The final point I want to make is that the aboriginal community should be encouraged to participate. I noticed that Cindy Blackstock's name had already come up last Thursday. She's from First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada, which supports aboriginal families dealing not only with adoption outside the aboriginal community but aboriginal families dealing with those issues within their own communities too, especially with fetal alcohol syndrome.
Please feel free to contact me for more information or if you need more help with the research, because I'm a professional researcher. That's my profession.
Thank you very much.