Each year on May 14, Ontario marks Child and Youth in Care Day — a day born from the voices of young people themselves. Its origin lies in the youth-authored report My Real Life Book, a raw and unflinching chronicle of lived experience in the child welfare system. The report itself was born from the youth led Youth In Care Hearings that changed “child welfare” forever in Ontario and turned the Ontario Legislature upside down.
The Day was created through legislation, unanimously passed, to “acknowledge the courage and strength” of children in care and to provide the Province the opportunity to recommit to children encountering the system May 14th was selected because it was the date young people released “My Real Lifebook”
Child and Youth in Care Day is not Childrens Aid Society Day no matter how tempting that is for the system. It is not just a symbolic day. It is a demand for action — a clarion call to recognize, reflect, and radically transform how we care for children and youth in this province.
The themes of My Real Life Book are as poignant today as they were when the report was released: the pain of instability, the erasure of identity, the struggle to be heard, and the urgent need for love, belonging, and respect. It is a mirror held up to a system that has failed too many and an invitation to do better.
Ontario’s child protection system is more than 120 years old. It was born not out of a vision for thriving families, but out of the animal protection movement. In 1891, a Toronto animal cruelty officer intervened in the case of a mistreated child. That legacy — of seeing children primarily as objects to be rescued from harm rather than as whole people in need of relationships, healing, and community — still shadows our system today.
This legacy has shaped a system that is built to manage risk and protect against liability. Social workers are caught in an impossible bind: tasked with both protecting children and supporting families. These goals, while interconnected, are often at odds in practice.
This tension in the system leads to confusion, burnout, and — most devastatingly — outcomes that do not serve the best interests of children or their families.
When children are apprehended they live within a system that can not parent them. A system built on risk assessment cannot substitute for a system built upon love.
Child and Youth in Care Day is a reminder that we cannot tinker, redesign our way to good. We need fundamental change. Ontario must confront the uncomfortable truth: our system, as it stands, too often causes harm.
The solution lies not in abandoning children in their homes without support for their families. It does not lie in giving up on those children in care who must live outside their families of origin. The solution lies in reimagining the system altogether.
It is time to separate the child protection function of the system from family and child support. It is time to build a Child and Family Well Being system separate and apart from child protection. It is time to create a separate system that undertakes the work of providing for children in care. These three systems have fundamentally different mandates that require different organizational cultures, ways of thinking, tools, and approaches. The same organization cannot credibly investigate abuse while also trying to build trust and support healing.
We need to build a new, made-in-Ontario North Star system. This system must be rooted in human rights, equity, belonging, cultural humility, relationship, and love. It must centre the voices of those with lived experience. It must be built in partnership with youth in and from care, all families however they are constituted , elders, front-line workers, academics, bureaucrats, politicians everyone who touches the life of Ontario’s children. Once imagined it must be well funded across sector in order for every child and family to have what they need when they need it.
We can look to British Columbia for inspiration. Their Representative for Children and Youth issued a groundbreaking report titled Don’t Look Away, calling for the creation of a new BC North Star , Child and Family Well-Being system. That report makes clear: we must stop looking away from the harms being done in the name of protection. We must stop choosing bureaucracy over belonging.
Ontario has an opportunity — and a responsibility — to lead. Let May 14 be more than a day of recognition. Let it be the beginning of a movement. A movement to finally listen to those who have lived through the system. A movement to honour their resilience with real, transformative change.
Don’t look away and act.