Grant: Project Grant

Canada has one of the highest rates of forced separation of families through involvement with child protection services (CPS) in the developed world; within Canada, rates are highest in Manitoba. A recent report indicated that 30% of First Nations children, 11% of Metis children, and 3% of all other Manitoba children were in the care of CPS at some point before their 18th birthday. Whether parents' health impacts such separation, and how this separation impacts parents' health is not well understood. Over the past few years, we have worked with community partners to identify questions that would be most useful in improving the wellbeing of families involved with CPS. The first step is to understand the scope of the issue; to do this, we will describe how many parents are involved with CPS, and how they move through the system. Next, we will look at whether parents with specific health conditions are more likely to have a child placed in the care of CPS and whether losing custody of a child affects parents' health. These relationships will first be examined for parents losing temporary custody of a child to CPS. Among parents who lost temporary custody, we will then examine these relationships for parents who lost permanent custody of their child to CPS. Ongoing colonialism and intergenerational family separation among Indigenous peoples may be experienced differently by First Nation and Metis families. Therefore, we will look at each research question separately for three groups of parents: First Nation, Metis, and all other Manitoban parents. Questions will be answered using population-based administrative data for all parents who had a child born in Manitoba from 1998 to 2020. Findings will inform equity-based and community-led interventions to address the unique health challenges of parents involved with CPS to reduce family separation and shorten the time to reunification among separated families.