The following survey by the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of the Children is a good opportunity to express your opinion about what is most important to you. The survey will be submitted to the UN and is anonymous. 

Survey - The State of Children in Canada. 

In September of 2001, there will be a United Nations General Assembly Special Session to examine the state   of children around the world. The Canadian Coalition for the Rights of Children is conducting a survey to   gather information about children in Canada. Data obtained from this survey will be incorporated into a report being prepared for this Special Session. 

Complete the survey.

[Eeva Sodhi] submitted the following comment [to the CCRC]:

Fatherless homes have become the norm in the western world. In Canada, it is still customary to award sole custody to the mothers after a marital break-up, without any regard to the "best interest of the child" principle. 

We have seen  an alarming increase in childhood pathologies. Results from a recent study show that childhood obesity, among other things, is a cause for concern. 

What is often ignored is that fathers typically are the ones who engage in physical play and sports with their children.  There is a need to develop a holistic, rather than a piecemeal, approach to children's health.

Relationships, including marriages, are breaking up at an alarming rate and a sizeable number of children seldom, or never, see their fathers, thanks to the prevailing "zero tolerance" policies which assure that sole custody is almost always given to the mother. Pressed for time and stressed, single mothers simply do not have the energy to provide anything but the very minimum of care. Video games and TV take the place of hockey or swimming with dad. Meals tend to be quick fixes or take-outs, eaten on the couch.

Many single parent families have low incomes. Yet, studies in the U.S. show that "... Remarriage of custodial mothers (with improved financial status) did not improve their children's well-being as hypothesized. This finding does not support the economic disadvantage hypothesis. ... Father custody children were higher in all outcomes (academic achievement and adjustment) than those in mother custody families" (Barry Bricklin. The Custody Evaluation Handbook. ISBN 0-87630-775-6)

Some explanations given are that single fathers enjoy the benefit of informal help by female relatives and friends, thus freeing time for positive interaction with the children. 

Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) on poor immigrant children and native-born children document that immigrant children enjoy better health, are better adjusted and better achievers than native-born children.  " Statistical analysis showed that most of the mental health disadvantage of poor native-born Canadian children could be explained by the familial circumstances associated with poverty, rather than by material deprivation per se" (Investing in Children: A National Research Conference, 1998" W-98-24Es, Applied Research Branch, HRDC) 
.
Studies also show that as long as there are financial incentives for divorce, the numbers will be high. Sole custody allows one spouse to relocate easily and to hurt the other (and the children) by taking away the children. Potentially higher child support payments with sole custody may provide an economic motive for divorce as well. With joint physical custody, both social and economic motives for divorce are reduced, so parents considering divorce may simply decide it is easier to remain married. States whose policies result in more joint custody and less sole custody thus have seen a reduction in divorce rates. (Richard Kuhn (and) John Guidubaldi, Child Custody Policies and Divorce Rates in the US by D.Ed; 11th Annual Conference of the Children's Rights Council October 23-26, 1997. )

In determining appropriate custody arrangements, parents and the courts need to be more sensitive to children's developmental needs. There is a need to educate fathers, mothers, and service providers of the importance of fathers in the lives of children, educate parents as to the consequences of divorce for children; ensure that judges who preside over family courts receive training in the developmental needs of children. 

As the incidence of father absence grows, community disintegration and crime, especially youth crime, will continue to grow. Between 1960 and 1990, the percentage of children living apart from their natural fathers increased from 17 to 36 percent. By the year 2000, half of the Nation's children may not have their fathers at home. While the heroic efforts of single women to raise their children alone are laudable, the economic and social requirements for raising healthy and productive children are hard to achieve by poor single parents alone. Re-engaging fathers in the economic and social life of their children is an important but overlooked aspect of addressing poverty, community revitalization, and crime. Many of our problems in crime control and community revitalization are strongly related to father absence.  For example: 

• Sixty-three percent of youth suicides are from fatherless homes. 

• Ninety percent of all homeless and runaway youths are from fatherless homes. 

• Eighty-five percent of children who exhibit behavioral disorders are from fatherless homes. 

• Seventy-one percent of high school dropouts are from fatherless homes. 

• Seventy percent of youths in State institutions are from fatherless homes. 

• Seventy-five percent of adolescent patients in substance abuse centers are from fatherless homes. 

• Eighty-five percent of rapists motivated by displaced anger are from fatherless homes.

Innovative father engagement programs have had an impact on child rearing, family economic stability, and gang involvement. Unless community revitalization and crime reduction programs begin to address the need for father engagement programs and services, the cycle of poverty and crime could continue virtually unabated." ("What Can the Federal Government Do To Decrease Crime and Revitalize Communities?" by U.S. Department of Justice Office of Justice Programs National Institute of Justice Executive Office for Weed and Seed January 5-7, 1998, 

[The PDF version of the document from which this excerpt was taken contains a full set of graphs and tables. The PDF document can be downloaded from the NCJRS Website. (817 kB)]

Eeva

Submission by Fathers for Life

In promoting the survey, it would be a good thing to identify the political agenda of the Canadian Coalition for the Rights of the Children (CCRC)?  A look at the page showing the funders of the organization should give any promoter of family rights grave concerns.

Just from looking at that and at the absence of any positive mention of the family in the survey input form, it would be well to advise people that the organization is not friendly to families. 

The questions in the questionnaire that relate to families are posed within a negative context:

Inadequate housing for families

Violent or other dangerous neighborhoods that families live in

High poverty rate of lone-parent families

High poverty rate of refugee families

Over-emphasis on family preservation in the child protection system

Child and family abuse

Lack of parent education programs that stress the importance of a stable family environment

All of these questions, except the last one, have negative connotations, and even the last question is ambiguous, in as much that one could give it a high or a low score, depending on whether the respondent sees the lack of parent education programs as something that needs a lot of attention or whether that lack is a big problem. 

We should be concerned that the solutions that the CCRC expounds for the problems symptoms caused by our society's families' destruction, as becomes clear in their report, involve throwing more money at the issues.  More money has done nothing to solve such problems in the Native communities.  It stands to reason that increasing taxes to create the revenues, from which more money can be transferred to families in need or at risk, will therefore hardly be an effective solution for the problems affecting such families in the rest of Canadian society.  To the contrary, just as in the prototype of the Native communities, throwing more money at the problem symptom by creating new government-sponsored programs or increasing funding to existing ones will most likely escalate the problems.

It shouldn't surprise anybody if the CCRC were actually family-hostile.

It appears that they are.  The first instance of where the term "family" makes its appearance in the CCRC's report on the status of Canada's children occurs in page 14 of their report.  It is the context in which it is mentioned that should be of concern.

UN Reporting Category: Family Environment and
Alternative Care
Convention Article 19: Abuse and Neglect 
.
Child welfare legislation recognizes that families are primarily responsible for the care, supervision and protection of their children but when a child is at risk, the government has the duty to intervene to protect the child. Child protection services investigate cases of suspected abuse and neglect and, depending on the circumstances, can elect to provide support services to a family or remove the child from the family home. Removing a child from the family home is referred to as "taking a child into care." 

That is Orwellian doublespeak.  We know that "taking a child into care" is very detrimental to children's development and exposes them to a range of serious pathologies.  For instance, children in government care are roughly 150 times more likely than the average Canadian child to become incarcerated after age 18, assuming that what holds true in the US holds true to an identical extent in Canada.

The rate of incarceration is even higher for Native children.  There is no doubt that foster care is a very strong contributor to that.  Consider just the one statistic quoted at the preceding URL: "In Manitoba, Aboriginal children represent 10 percent of the province's child population but 67 percent of children in care." 

A while ago I pointed out the correlation between fatherlessness and incarceration rates to someone who works as a psychiatric nurse in one of Canada's maximum security prisons.  He didn't have any love for the fact that the pre-printed interview forms included questions such as "Did your mother have gout?" given that most people interviewed wouldn't even know what gout is and what precipitates it.  He thought that I might be right and incorporated a question into the procedure for his intake interviews: "Were you in foster care at the time you were eighteen?" 

He found that the first ten prisoners he asked that new question answered it in the affirmative.

The survey and associated report by the CCRC provide the very strong expression that the CCRC is promoting an agenda of "taking children into care" instead of strengthening families to the point where the need for government child care will never arise anymore.  Consider the meaning of their statement "...Aboriginal agencies and communities are struggling with overwhelming demand and a limited supply of culturally appropriate early intervention and treatment services." [also at the preceding URL]

It is ironic that the almost total absence in Native communities of the one time-proven "culturally appropriate early intervention and treatment service" that has the best performance record of all such systems was never noticed by them.  That system is that of well-functioning families.  Yet the very absence of families is what is causing the problems that ostensibly concern the CCRC. 

Furthermore, it is hardly likely that children who as a result of being in foster care are so much more likely to become hardened criminals and repeat offenders in a wide variety of crimes will actually be predisposed to become the founders of well functioning families.

How is it that the CCRC is not questioning their own role, or more correctly the role of the government, as being that of the cause of the problem they attempt to address?  The problem is government-sponsored and government-induced fatherlessness and family destruction, which thereby is locked into a vicious positive feedback cycle that causes an escalation of the very problem that the government creates.

The sad irony is that the CCRC is laying the blame for the problem symptoms at the feet of the families that the government helped to destroy and prevented from coming into existence.  Furthermore, the illusion is fostered by the CCRC that the traditional nuclear family is the primary source of such problems.

An effective solution to the problems they wish to address is to call for less and not more government interference, and to call for the creation and promotion of the family values that served so well in the past to prevent the kind of problems they hope to address by "taking children into care."

It should be clear to anyone by now that if the programs of family destruction that did so much to destroy the social coherence of Native communities continue to be implemented in the rest of Canadian society, the rest of Canada will eventually reach the level of social disruption prevalent in the Native communities.  The current trends seem to be evolving in that direction.  It is the road to an absolute social disaster.

There is little consolation in finding that the solution to "NEEDS ACTION: The reform of child welfare systems must continue across the country and Canadians must develop effective community responses to families at risk," on page 15 of their report,  is a call for increasing the government's escalation of the cause of that problem by "tak[ing] children into care." 

Another proposal mentioned on page 16 of the report, to provide more welfare support to families in need and at risk (who incidentally are largely fatherless, single-mother-headed families), is not likely to evoke confidence in the ability of the government to take over from fathers the role of provider, protector and mentor of Canada's children.

On page 17 of the report it is suggested that to restrict families with handicapped children from entering Canada is a violation of their rights.

RIGHTS ALERT: The federal Immigration Act discriminates on the basis of disability because s. 19(1)(a)(ii) allows a family's application to immigrate to Canada to be rejected if a child would place excessive demands on health or social services. 

It is very debatable that the right to enter Canada is an established fact.  At best, such a right is no more than a privilege that may be granted or not.  Let's be realistic here.  If we want to bring about the reduction in the number of children at risk, it seems hardly practical to provide incentives to families with such children to attract them to Canada, while other countries do not.

There are two exceptions to the general trend exhibited in the CCRC report, of seeing families in a negative light with respect to children.  One of those is at on page 20.  There, families are mentioned in a positive light, rather than as being the breeding ground for problems that put children at risk. 

Article 22 requires countries to take appropriate measures to ensure that a child who is seeking refugee status or who is considered a refugee under international or domestic law, whether unaccompanied or accompanied by an adult, receives appropriate protection and humanitarian assistance as determined by international human rights instruments, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Appropriate measures include tracing family members and family reunification. 

The other instance is on page 21:

RIGHTS ALERT: It takes too long for refugee families to be reunited in Canada since families cannot join inland refugees until they have been accepted for landing. 

The suggestion is to wave all and any obstacles that may prevent anyone from-, or slow them down when, immigrating to Canada.  The consequence of such a policy is that if a given family manages only to get one of its children into Canada, that that will automatically assure instantaneous immigrant status to the rest of the child's family.

All in all, the report doesn't instill confidence that the agenda proposed is what Canada should have an interest in.  Furthermore, a more appropriate name for the CCRC would perhaps be "Canadian Coalition for the Promotion of the Abrogation of Parental Rights."

In accordance with that, we recently saw the Supreme Court of Canada overturn the decision by the Manitoba Supreme Court not to give social service agencies the right — without the need for a prior hearing and without any warrant — to apprehend children from their parents and to place those children into foster care.  Thereby the abrogation of parental rights has become reality for all of Canada. [See "Nationalizing Children."]

Without any doubt, the CCRC's stance on parental rights has been a contributing factor to the abrogation of those rights.  Moreover, it boggles the mind that the Liberal government of Canada should see fit to fund an organization that feels that the primary objective in addressing the needs of children at risk is to take them away from their parents.  Nevertheless, consider that the funding for the CCRC comes from organizations and departments who largely have a reputation of being hostile to Canadian families.

Additional reading: "HORRORS OF THE NON-HOME", By Timothy Maier. 

--Walter
 

See also:

Seizing children — a tactic for the destruction of the family and to attain state-control of the population

Throughout history, rampant child apprehensions and state-ownership of children went hand-in-hand with totalitarian regimes and tyrannies.

Antiquity — The apprehension of children – boys – in antiquity

20th Century — Evolution of the Hitler Youth

...in a series of coldly and shrewdly calculated moves, radical extremists usurped the youth movement that was very much splintered along political and religious ideological lines and consolidated it into a unified and rigorously controlled sector of the German population.  The slogan that motivated the Nazi leaders was an adaptation of a slogan attributed to Napoleon "Who controls the youths controls the future!"  (Wer die Jugend hat, hat die Zukunft), although its origins go back to Socrates (whom Plato, in Republic, has offer this advice to philosopher kings: "Take all the children from their parents and rid the city of adults."), and, as the history of Ancient Greece shows with respect to Sparta, even farther back in antiquity.

Modern Times — Big Sister Is Watching

"President Obama is committed to helping states develop seamless, comprehensive, and coordinated 'Zero to Five' systems to improve developmental outcomes and early learning for all children....it will be the goal of this Administration to ensure that every child has access to a complete and competitive education -- from the day they are born to the day they begin a career."

— (Fact Sheet: Expanding the Promise of Education in America, Mar 10, 2009
see also:
Remarks of President Barack Obama –
As Prepared for Delivery Address to Joint Session of Congress, Tuesday, February 24th, 2009)

First they came for the fathers, then for the mothers, and now for   both parents in intact families.  In the end all children will be in the care, custody and control of the State.

An epidemic of state-sponsored kidnapping feeds a tyrannical system hungry for revenues.  Child Protective Services and Children's Aid Societies systematically and increasingly often rob children from their parents.  Kafkaesque chicaneries that the targeted families find impossible to comply with are the tools used to keep the revenues rolling in.  Many families don't survive the ordeals that they are being subjected to by any given CPS or CAS. 
(Full Story)

Feminism For Male College Students — A Short Guide to the Truth, by Angry Harry (Off-Site)