To Choose or Not: The Act of Change

By Citizen Correspondent Alysen Cameron

Date Posted: 07/28/08

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Across the board the Canadian Mental Health services don't recognize one's emotional balance is the foundation for good mental health. We start life as an emotional beings and that doesn't change throughout life, but our emotional states can easily be changed. Our parents, or primary caregivers, have tremendous power over our emotional well being as children, but few are talking honestly about it.

The Canadian policies on child welfare are founded in the concept of children being free to express their imaginations in joyful playfulness. The advertising materials show big-grin-little-faces with slogans along the lines of 'happy parents make very happy children'.

Our society proclaims every child is to have the same caring and uplifting environments as the next. Provinces and Territories implement laws based on this theory, but speak with an adult or child who has experience in the child welfare system and you will hear nine out of ten tell an unhappy story, not only from the neglectfully abusive natural parents but to the way they are apprehended and conditions in the foster home(s).

So, where does this man-made system continue to fail for the approximately 76,000 Canadian (Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption Canada, excluding NWT, 2008) individuals now waiting to be adopted? I believe my personal experience sheds some light on the issue.

At age 15, as I walked away from my parent's house and headed towards a neighbour working in her yard she looked up to me and reflected with just one look exactly how unhappy I felt. My parents had five natural, one adopted and six foster children. I am the eldest daughter of all and the second natural.

Unhappy is not my natural disposition. The spartan entries Mom made in my baby book included, near the end, “...waves her hand and says ta ta, always laughing...” So, what took me from a laughing baby to an extremely unhappy, cigarette smoking, drug using, promiscuous, socially inept teen to an even more depressed and dysfunctional adult?

My retrospection is aware that neither of my parents were happy, well-adjusted people before and after they immigrated to Canada. How could they be with their upbringings?