A new study lead by Dr. Bryn King (Associate Professor, Factor-Inwentash Faculty of Social Work; Director, Youth Wellness Lab) and co-authored by Dr. Ami Goulden explores the lived experiences of young parents who were the focus of a child welfare investigation and may have had ongoing child welfare involvement in Ontario. The study was recently published in the Clinical Social Work Journal. Twenty-one participants were interviewed and shared their experiences.
I definitely think that CAS [the Children’s Aid Society] likes to target young parents, and the fact that I was raised in the system, and the fact that I’m young, was actually one of the reasons why they opened the file, and I don’t think that’s right…My worker straight out was like, “yeah, it’s because you’re young” and all this stuff that we decided to open a file. And they specifically said, “because I’m young,” and I felt like that was kind of discriminatory. Like, you can’t really say I’m going to be a bad parent because of age, right? (Mimi)
(King et al., 2023)
This study was funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Insight Grant.