Every year on May 14, Ontario marks Child and Youth in Care Day.
It is an important day — and not for the reasons many people assume.
In 2011, more than 100 young people in and from the care of Ontario’s Children’s Aid Societies worked to organize public Hearings at Queen’s Park at the Legislature. At the time, the outcomes for children in care were already well known, though too often ignored by those with the power to change them. Young people in care were disproportionately experiencing homelessness, incarceration, poverty, disconnection from education, and poor mental health outcomes. The data existed. The stories existed. What was missing was the political will to truly listen.
So the young people forced the province to listen.
The hearings were organized and led by youth themselves, with support from the now-shuttered Office of the Provincial Advocate for Children and Youth. Their purpose was simple but profound: to examine how Ontario could improve the life trajectories of children and youth growing up in care.
Youth leaders summoned representatives from every political party, ministers and deputy ministers, executives from Children’s Aid Societies, lawyers, Indigenous leaders, unions, and advocacy organizations to testify before them. Over two days, more than 700 people attended and participated. The Legislature was overwhelmed. For perhaps the first time, the dominant narrative around child welfare was not being shaped by institutions or government officials, but by young people who had lived through the system themselves.
The conversation changed forever.
Following the hearings, the youth authors released a report titled My Real Life Book, capturing both what they heard at the Legislature and the hundreds of written submissions they received from youth in care across the province. To this day, the report remains one of the most important and unflinching accounts ever written about the experience of growing up in care in Ontario.
Remarkably, the report made only two recommendations.
The first was not a list of small policy fixes or politically convenient “quick wins.” In fact, the young authors explicitly rejected that approach, despite pressure from government to provide it. Instead, they called for something far more difficult: fundamental change in the way children in care are raised and supported.
Their testimony was organized around painful truths:
·We are vulnerable.
·We are isolated.
·We are left out of our own lives.
·No one is really there for us.
·Care is unpredictable.
·Care ends, and we struggle.
·As Indigenous youth in care, we keep losing who we are.
The report contained countless ideas for reform, but the writers understood that the problem was not a handful of broken policies. It was a system that too often failed to provide children with stability, belonging, identity, and love.
Fifteen years later, it is hard to argue that this recommendation has been fulfilled.
The second recommendation was deceptively simple: establish a day each year to recognize children and youth in care.
The goal was not celebration. It was acknowledgment.
The young people wanted children in care to know they were seen — that they mattered. They wanted Ontario to remember them, not only in moments of tragedy or scandal, but every year, publicly and collectively. They envisioned a day when the province would recommit itself to improving their experiences and outcomes.
In 2014, the Child and Youth in Care Day Act was unanimously passed by the Ontario Legislature. May 14 was chosen because it marked the release date of My Real Life Book.
But Child and Youth in Care Day is not a celebration of the child welfare system. It is not Children’s Aid Society Day. It is not a day for ministers, agencies, or institutions to congratulate themselves.
Quite the opposite.
It is a day of recognition for children who are too often invisible — and too often silenced. A day to say: We see you. You matter.
It is also a day to recognize the extraordinary resilience and courage children in care demonstrate every day while navigating systems that frequently create additional barriers instead of removing them.
Most importantly, it is a day for all of us to recommit to change.
Today matters for the approximately 10,000 children currently living in care in Ontario, and for the tens of thousands of former youth in care carrying those experiences into adulthood. One need only look at the headlines of last week, last month and recent years to understand why.
Recognition, after all, means very little without action.
My Real Lifebook
https://cwrp.ca/publications/my-real-life-book-report-youth-leaving-care-hearings
Act to Create Child and Youth in Care day in Ontario