The needs of particularly vulnerable children and youth have long tested Canadian parents and communities. Youngsters with mental and physical impairments have historically experienced a wide range of conditions that are always negotiated in the context of cultural assumptions, existing social supports and barriers, and available technologies. Both institutionalization and inadequate domestic substitutes have a long history, like birth families everywhere, of devastating youngsters beyond their original impairments. The construction of that predicament and its relationship to the use of institutions, fostering, and adoption in Canadian child welfare practices is the concern here. This article begins with a review of the commonplace evaluation of disabled youngsters in English-speaking Canada, next considers the vulnerability of families, and turns finally to institutional and domestic alternatives to birth family care. Although the story in each case is mixed, youngsters with disabilities remained vulnerable into the twenty-first century.
Canadians experience the critical national question of plural persona close to home. Perennial negotiation of multiple identities finds particularly intimate expression in the course of adoption. Girls and boys, men and women involved in the adoption circle face complicated, often contentious, questions of allegiance and obligation. Although adoption's dilemmas are conventionally regarded as private, they bear revealing comparison with significant matters of state, namely the articulation of national identities. In the 1960s, children appearing for adoption in the Today's Child column in the Toronto Telegram, one of North America's large urban dailies, suggested that some English-speaking Canadians were reconsidering families at much the same time as Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau asked them to embrace 'the Just Society.' Today's Child provided one test of just how far Canadians had to go before they could realize that ideal.
Les Canadiens c�toient quotidiennement des personnes � nationalit�s multiples, qui font l'objet d'un d�bat national essentiel. Cette �ternelle n�gociation entre les multiples identit�s prend une forme toute particuli�re dans le cadre d'une adoption. Les filles et les gar�ons, ainsi que les hommes et les femmes touch�s par une adoption sont aux prises avec des questions difficiles, souvent controvers�es, relativement aux all�geances et aux obligations. M�me si les dilemmes associ�s � l'adoption sont habituellement jug�s du domaine priv�, leur comparaison avec des d�bats sociaux importants, notamment l'articulation de l'identit� nationale, est �loquente. Dans les ann�es 1960, la publication d'annonces sur les enfants disponibles pour l'adoption dans la chronique � Today's Child � du Toronto Telegram, un des principaux quotidiens en Am�rique du Nord, permet de croire que certains Canadiens anglophones remettaient alors en question ce qui constituait une familiale appropri�e. Au m�me moment, le premier ministre lib�ral Pierre Elliott Trudeau leur demandait d'�pouser la cause de la � soci�t� juste �. La chronique � Today's Child � a �t� l'un des tests qui ont servi � d�terminer jusqu'o� les Canadiens devaient aller avant de se rendre compte que la � soci�t� juste � s'annon�ait comme le leitmotiv de la nation moderne, � l'aube de son deuxi�me si�cle.
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