About this Guide
This guide was created to provide information about permanency for child welfare professionals, in support of Adoption and Permanency Education Month.
This guide covers topics including data, guiding legislation and frameworks, recommendations, research, and practical methods and tools
Background: Changing Landscape & Permanency Reflections
Child welfare data on out-of-home care in Ontario shows:
- Children and youth remain at home with their families in 97% of investigations.
- Children and youth are placed in kinship service or customary care in 2% of investigations.
- The proportion of children and youth in out-of-home care living with people they know (kinship service, customary care, and kinship care) increased from 39% to 45% over 5 years.
- The number of adoptions and legal custody agreements steadily decreased over 5 years.
Achieving permanency for children and youth in their own families and communities, in today’s child welfare context, requires the following considerations:
- Understanding of history, and current legal and moral obligations.
- Focus on identity, belonging, continuity of connections, and cultural attachment.
- Collaborative family engagement, planning and decision making that involves and reflects the voices and rights of children, youth, families, and communities
- Knowledge of engagement methods, including culturally appropriate services available.
- Critical reflections on contributors to permanency for children, youth, and families with intersectional identities.
When alternate placements and permanency plans for children and youth are needed outside their families and communities, all the above considerations remain relevant for permanency planning.
This video outlines the changing landscape of adoption in Ontario, emphasizing the goals of family preservation and reunification, and permanency planning with kin should alternate placement be required. In addition, this video features reflections from child welfare staff and former youth in care, highlighting the importance of viewing permanency through the lens of connections, in addition to that of placements and legal orders.
Legislation, Frameworks & Guidelines
Reconciliation and equity frameworks support collaboration with families and communities, and permanency planning for children and youth in their homes, communities, or culturally appropriate environments. Legislation defines the “best interests” and “well-being” of children and youth and identity considerations. There are enhanced legal requirements, including placement priorities and reassessment requirements, for FNIM youth. If we know about FNIM identity, even if family members do not self-identify, we are required to follow the legislation. Guides on the federal act obligations and identification are available, along with a guide on sharing personal information in certain circumstances to facilitate family, community, and cultural connections. Policy guidelines on permanency funding are also available.
Note: login to myOACAS required to access some linked resources.
Anti-Black Racism
Truth & Reconciliation
Recommendations: Identity & Belonging
Inquest/inquiry recommendations focus on improving belonging for youth with their families, communities, and cultures.
- Safe with intervention: Report of the expert panel on the deaths of children and youth in residential placements [2018]This report, released in response to the deaths of 12 young people placed in licensed out-of-home care settings, identifies connection to families, communities, and culture as integral to identity and belonging.
- Devon Freeman Inquest: Verdict & Recommendation [2022]Inquest themes included lack of connection to community and longing for cultural connection, resulting in 74 recommendations, including models of service that facilitate meaningful, lifelong connections to family, community and culture; belonging; identity; well-being; physical, cultural and emotional safety; and holistic plans of care from the onset.
- Skye's Legacy: A Focus on Belonging [2021]This report following an inquest for a First Nations youth in British Columbia shared the finding that a narrow focus on trying to ensure that Skye was adopted came at the expense of all other aspects of her belonging (relational, cultural, physical) and disrupted her connections. "The systemic focus on legal permanency resulted in significant loss, harm and instability, and ultimately contributed to her fate.”
- The Report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls [2019]This report provides recommendations, or “Calls for Justice,” which are legal imperatives to ensure Indigenous rights and dignity. Calls for Justice include Indigenous perspectives regarding the "best interests of the child" (12.3), prioritizing and funding family and community placements (12.6), and supporting youth transitioning out of the system through network building (12.11).
Research
Research emphasizes the need for multi-dimensional definitions of permanency that go beyond legal outcomes, that consider cultural factors, and centre identity and belonging.
Note: you have to be authenticated by OACAS’s library databases to access any EBSCO articles. To learn how to be authenticated, you can visit the EBSCOHost research databases guide. If you are an OACAS member and are having difficulty accessing these articles, please reach out to Jessica Mariano, Content & Research Librarian (she/her).
Permanency Definition
- Attempting to Operationalize a Multi-Dimensional Definition of Permanency in Child Welfare Practice: Results From a Demonstration Project [2022]This article argues that there is a strong need for the child welfare system to focus on a multi-dimensional definition of permanency to include relational and physical aspects. The article highlights results from a demonstration project using a Family Finding service model, and emphasizes the need to incorporate relational and Indigenous worldviews.
- Permanency Options and Goals: Considering Multifaceted Definitions [2006]A qualitative study that examined permanency goal-setting and permanency outcomes for children in the New York City foster care system. It was found that there is a need to individualize permanency goals, emphasize the emotional and relational aspects of permanency, and engage youth and parents more fully in permanency goal-setting.
- Differing Effects of Family Finding Service on Permanency and Family Connectedness for Children New to Versus Lingering in the Foster Care System. [2015]This study evaluated effects of family finding on relative placement and permanency for children in foster care. The authors recognize the utility of future research to examine the impact on child well-being and family connections, beyond legal permanency and placement.
- Relationships Matter for Youth 'Aging Out' of Care: Research Report [2018]A research project dedicated to exploring long-term supportive relationships for youth 'aging out' of care. The focus of this project is on incorporating and elevating the voices of youth who have 'aged out' of care on issues related to forming healthy, supportive and sustainable relationships with the people who matter to them. This video offers additional information on the project.
Identity & Belonging
- Attachment Theory: A Barrier for Indigenous Children Involved with Child Protection [2022]This article argues that leading legal decisions rely on Eurocentric versions of attachment theory, which is contrary to the needs of Indigenous children. Indigenous people have not only been subject to colonization, but also to systems that try to impose Eurocentric definitions of parenting and child development. Thus, child welfare workers must reconsider how attachment can be used from appropriate cultural lenses that involve the communal or extended caregiving systems common to many Indigenous communities.
- Culturally Restorative Child Welfare Practice: A Special Emphasis on Cultural Attachment Theory [2009]A research project on culturally restorative child welfare practice, which supports Anishinaabe children's cultural identity and cultural attachment. The author concludes that it is important to take cultural attachment theory to the next level in the world of academia and social work practice to increase culturally restorative nations.
- “We Were in White Homes as Black Children:” Caribbean Youth’s Stories of Out-of-Home Care in Ontario, Canada [2021]This article reports on interviews with 25 Black Caribbean youth who navigated Ontario's child protection system. Several former youth in care described negative impacts of transracial placements on their sense of racial and cultural identity. Many youth also stated a stronger sense of belonging within homes with other Black youth and/or caregivers. Thus, the authors conclude that caregivers’ race is significant as white caregivers’ whiteness impacts their capacity to support Black youth in care.
- Strengthening Family Connections and Support for Youth in Foster Care who Identify as LGBTQ: Findings from the PII-RISE Evaluation. [2018]This article reports findings from an evaluation model examining whether youth who receive care coordination team services experience increased connections and enhanced family support. The majority of LGBTQ youth achieved the desired outcomes, and several youth noted an increased sense of identity and belonging. The authors note that experiences of support are key in forming meaningful, permanent relationships for LGBTQ youth.
Collaborative Family Engagement
Collaborative family engagement involves and reflects the voices and rights of children, youth, families, and communities in planning. It supports permanency for children and youth through facilitating lifetime connections.
- Collaborative Family Engagement: Inventory of Practice, Tools, Myths and Barriers [2023]Created by the Family Preservation, Kin Connections and Engagement Provincial Working Group, this document offers insight into practices regarding collaborative family search and engagement in Ontario. The document offers tips on engaging with families and youth, moving past myths and barriers, preventing admissions to care, and facilitating lifelong connections.
- Collaborative Family Engagement: Creating & Strengthening Lasting Connections [2019]An American manual outlining the history of Collaborative Family Engagement, explaining how and why it improves the lives of youth and families, offering tools and strategies, and emphasizing the importance of meaningful, lifetime connections.
Family Group Conferencing & Decision Making Methods
Family group conferencing methods, including culturally adapted approaches, transform permanency planning by shifting decision-making to families and communities.
- Cultural Relevance in Community Case Conferencing [2023]A webinar by the OVOV team on community case conferencing, its potential benefits for Black families involved with child welfare agencies, and how conferencing might connect children, youth, and families with culturally relevant services. Note: you must register to gain access to the webinar recording.
- African Caribbean Black Family Group Conferencing [n.d]A description of the African, Caribbean, Black Family Group Conferencing Project (ACB-FGC), which delivers culturally adapted Family Group Conferencing to African, Caribbean and Black (ACB) communities in the Toronto area, encouraging the involvement of the family, extended family, and the community in decision-making for children.
- Family Group Conferencing [2021]A video on an Indigenous-based, Indigenous-led Family Group Conferencing model, which shifts decision making to the entire family and community, and centres the child within their circle of supportive, lifelong connections.
- Guidelines for Family Group Decision Making in Child Welfare [2010]An American manual outlining the history of Collaborative Family Engagement, explaining how and why it improves the lives of youth and families, offering tools and strategies, and emphasizing the importance of meaningful, lifetime connections.
Family Search & Identification Tools
Family search tools to identify a child, youth, and/or family's support network, extended family members, and cultural identities.
Identifies extended family, using a family tree to support a worker to search, engage, and understand the family and identity.
Identifies connections and supports outside of genealogy, using a conversation-based tool and/or drawn map.
Identifies who has been important to a child/youth, using methods that encourage them to draw out their life story to recall important people and places.
Identifies a family's culture, using a drawn diagram including cultural factors that are individualized and not generalized.
(The Social Work Podcast, 2009)
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