A Legacy of Caring

by John McCullagh

  Fortunately, through hard work and a strong commitment to the needs of children, workers managed to place the majority of young people needing adoption with people who had demonstrated they were willing and able to meet their varying needs.

  Workers conducted home studies of couples — adoption in this era being limited to applicants who were married. Some of these couples could best respond to an outgoing, boisterous child, while others may have had more understanding of one who was shy and sensitive. There were those who could readily undertake the care of a child with a medical problem but who would be uncomfortable with a child whose ethnicity was other than their own. There were those who could accept as their own the child who came to them as a toddler or older, whereas others could be parents to an adopted child only if he or she came to them in early infancy.

  One of the reasons agency staff were successful in finding so many suitable homes for children whose needs were not always straightforward was that there were more families seeking children than there were children needing homes. (A situation that left many applicants disappointed.) Another reason was the province’s establishment of the Adoption Clearing Service, which brought the needs of children who were hard to place to the attention of potential adopters.

  Agency staff were successful in finding so many suitable homes for children because there were more families seeking children than there were children needing homes, and because the Adoption Clearing Service brought the needs of hard-to-place children to the attention of potential adopters.

  Although the society rarely had contact with adoptive families once their probationary period was over, most placements were regarded as successful because each year fewer than a dozen of the hundreds of children it placed for adoption were “returned” to the agency.

  Foster family and group home care

  As described in earlier chapters, both the Infants’ Homes and the CAS of Toronto were pioneers in the use of foster families to look after children in care. When the two agencies merged, this tradition continued. However, times were changing and workers had become more aware of the children’s needs. One outcome was that children were not admitted to care as readily as before, and those who were admitted were often more troubled. This frequently resulted in foster parents being asked to provide a level of care that, in many cases, was beyond their capabilities.

  Although the society approved 181 new foster homes in 1953, up from 156 the year before, the number was far from adequate, as Lloyd Richardson told board members:

  The foster home situation for younger children has improved somewhat and the staff are now finding that the more adequate boarding home rate is beginning to attract more and better homes, but the situation in this regard is not yet by any means solved.

  The major difficulty is our inability to find homes suited to the peculiar needs of individual children and more particularly we are still a long way from finding foster homes that will accept or handle the problems common to teenage and adolescent children. I am still inclined to doubt that we will ever find adequate foster homes for this older group of children.

  “The major difficulty is our inability to find homes suited to the peculiar needs of individual children and more particularly we are still a long way from finding foster homes that will accept or handle the problems common to teenage and adolescent children. I am still inclined to doubt that we will ever find adequate foster homes for this older group of children.”

  — Lloyd Richardson

  As Richardson’s comments clearly illustrate, for many children foster care was beginning to be seen as insufficient. This is why, by the 1960s, the therapeutic group home was viewed as one answer. Such homes might provide remedial care especially to children with emotional and behavioural disorders — a fast-growing percentage of the agency’s caseload.

  For many children foster care was beginning to be seen as insufficient. This is why, by the 1960s, the therapeutic group home was viewed as one answer. Such homes might provide remedial care especially to children with emotional and behavioural disorders — a fast-growing percentage of the agency’s caseload.

  As early as 1952, Stewart Sutton had expressed the opinion that:

  Some years ago, we entered an era when it was felt that all institutions were bad and that the foster home provided the only way to care for a child. We now recognize that the pendulum has swung too far, and I feel safe in predicting that within the next decade it will be recognized that many children will have to be cared for in small, adequate institutions. Many of these children can live happily and develop usefully only in the more impersonal atmosphere of a warm, human institution, where they can keep their distance from people whom they are not prepared to accept as replacements for their own mother and father.

  Marnie Bruce, who supervised the society’s new group care program, expanded on Sutton’s theme:

  A group home provides care for a small group of up to six children in a family type setting where the emphasis is on meeting the needs of the children. It is a warm, family setting geared to understanding children who cannot take the close parental relationship of a foster home but who do not require institutional care. They are especially good for adolescents and disturbed youngsters.

  Group parents are very carefully selected and are hopefully of high quality. The group mother is paid for her services, the close relationship with the agency social worker is that of colleague and group parents are expected to accept more responsibility than are foster parents or child care attendants in institutions.

  On the other side of the coin, the agency’s active responsibility is greater and the agency determines the basic mode of living, which is geared to meeting the children’s needs more than in a foster home.

  Despite the development of group homes, foster families still looked after the majority of children in the agency’s care, and most did an excellent job. Barb was one of those children. Born in 1953, she recalls a childhood filled with “unpredictability, mistrust and great sorrow.” Family conditions deteriorated to the extent that she was admitted to care and placed with foster parents. Reflecting back, she recalls: “I can truthfully say I had a positive experience as a ‘system kid.’ But it had a lot more to do with my foster parents than the system itself. They were genuinely interested in giving me — someone else’s child — a chance to become a successful adult.”

  Many staff and foster parents regarded the nerve centre of the agency’s foster care system to have been Margarita Deary, fondly known to all simply as Deary. She worked at the society for four decades, starting in the 1930s, as the placement worker who matched children with foster families. Although faced with what often seemed an impossible task, she would somehow come up with a bed, even if it meant that she had to cajole foster families into changing their plans for the evening. Ron Poole remembers her from his time as a young social worker in the 1960s:

  Deary had her own system of remembering all of the foster parents and knew their strengths and weaknesses. She sat in her office surrounded by stacks of cards in rubber bands with her illegible (to us) scrawl on each of the cards. We often said that if Deary was ever hit by a truck and hospitalized, the whole foster care system would be doomed.

  “Margarita Deary, fondly known to all simply as Deary, had her own system of remembering all of the foster parents and knew their strengths and weaknesses. She sat in her office surrounded by stacks of cards in rubber bands with her illegible (to us) scrawl on each of the cards. We often said that if Deary was ever hit by a truck and hospitalized, the whole foster care system would be doomed.”

  — Ron Poole, social worker

  Institutional care

  Despite the successes of foster care (the numbers of children in foster homes peaked in the 1960s) and group homes, Metro CAS, along with other children’s aid societies, also began to place children who needed specialized care because of emotional disturbance or “maladjusted behaviour” in treatment institutions. Williams writes that:

 
; New institutions appeared, some of a charitable, some of a profit making nature, each advocating the efficacy of its own regime, yet differing markedly in everything from the psychiatric and child nurturing theories of its professional staff, the moral and social values to be inculcated through training regimes, conduct and discipline to the varied techniques of treatment. There were advocates of “permissiveness” and “free expression” and those who promised firm discipline to produce a “proper and well-behaved personality.” In the field of treatment of disturbed children, there was, in fact, no one proven and generally accepted theory of practice with ascertainable and predictable results.

  Although these institutions were originally regulated under the Charitable Institutions Act of 1931, according to Williams they were vulnerable to charlatans, eccentrics and mere incompetents. Fortunately, the good judgment of agencies such as Metro CAS kept these to a minimum. The passage of the Children’s Institutions Act of 1963 strengthened the province’s ability to regulate them by setting appropriate standards and monitoring compliance. As a result of this legislation, 500 beds in children’s institutions across Ontario were closed because of a failure to meet the standards.

  Another piece of child welfare legislation, the Children’s Boarding Home Act of 1957, was a response to newly discovered dangers that unregulated care posed to children. Williams recounts how the legislation came about:

  Bertha “Mom” Whyte and her husband lived on a thirty-acre [12 hectare] property near Bowmanville. From serving as foster parents for the local children’s aid society, the couple began to expand their operation, which they called Whytehaven, by taking in children from various sources. Eventually, they had up to 140 children on the property, with usually no more than five or six adults present to attempt the twenty-four-hour tasks of physical care and parenting.

  Mom Whyte found that she had a talent for publicity and received a warm response from the public and the media [who] assumed she was carrying out a noble, self-sacrificing service. The Department of Public Welfare and the children’s aid society saw the matter quite otherwise. They considered her operation wrong in principle and hazardous in practice. The very identities of the children had become obscure, their names changed, their history forgotten [as] they merged with the heterogeneous crowd that was Mom Whyte’s “family.”

  Jessie Watters recalls that the Department of Public Welfare eventually stepped in and closed Whytehaven after a hepatitis epidemic broke out among the children:

  Staff were called in from Metro CAS and other children’s aid societies, and we all had to go down and get the kids that weekend and sort out who they were, which ones had parents and which ones needed to be admitted to CAS care.

  “Staff were called in from Metro CAS and other children’s aid societies and we all had to go down and get the kids that weekend and sort out who they were and which ones had parents and which ones needed to be admitted to CAS care.”

  — Jessie Watters on Whytehaven,

  an unregulated children’s institution

  This situation at Whytehaven gave rise to a report on children’s institutions in Ontario and was one of the factors that, in 1962, prompted the government of Premier John Robarts to establish the Advisory Committee on Child Welfare mentioned in Chapter 6.

  The Receiving Centre

  In the 1950s, the society operated four institutions of its own: the Receiving Centre, at 15 Huntley Street; Moberly House, at 136 Isabella Street; York Cottage, in Willowdale; and the Christie Street Boys’ Residence, described in Chapter 6.

  This was an era when most children in the society’s care were infants and toddlers, who were usually placed with foster parents directly after being admitted. Children four years of age and older were, more often than not, placed initially at the Receiving Centre, which a contemporary report described as a shelter for “[c]hildren who have recently, and in many cases suddenly, separated from their homes and families or who have been rejected and deserted. They are, therefore, usually confused, angry, frightened and unhappy. Frequently they have come from unstable and chaotic family situations where [unreasonable] demands were placed on them.”

  The 1950s were an era when most children in the society’s care were infants and toddlers, who were usually placed with foster parents directly after being admitted. Children four years of age and older were, more often than not, placed initially at the Receiving Centre.

  The society’s Receiving Centre, which grew out of the program first developed by the Infants’ Home in the 1940s, provided a short-term program for up to twenty-four children, designed to assess their needs while helping them cope with the trauma of separation. Residents were offered a balance of routines that included daily living, schooling, church programs, recreational activities, individual and group counselling and, where appropriate, family visits.

  Full-time child and youth workers, known as houseparents, provided physical and emotional warmth and day-to-day care, while caseworkers provided counselling, handled relationships with the child’s family, and planned and prepared his or her ongoing living arrangements. This might mean the child would return home to an improved family situation or be placed in a foster home or a specialized treatment residence.

  Full-time child and youth workers, known as house-parents, provided physical and emotional warmth and day-to-day care, while caseworkers provided counselling, handled relationships with the child’s family, and planned and prepared his or her ongoing living arrangements.

  In 1963, two hundred and forty children were admitted to the Receiving Centre. About two-thirds were placed in more permanent settings within three months of their admission. The remaining third, who stayed for up to seven months — and in some cases more than a year — were considered hard to place. Staff usually saw these latter children as having many difficulties and behaviours that presented special challenges.

  Tony Diniz, who was employed in several positions at the agency from the 1960s to the 1980s, remembers working at the Receiving Centre:

  In the 1960s, as a summer student, I worked at the Receiving Centre — then run by Shirley Pearse and Dick Phillips. As kids came directly there on admission to care, many of them were very upset. I worked in B Unit with Bill “Morgey” Morgan and many other fine folk.

  The summer nights were very hot and the kids couldn’t sleep. Sometimes, the place almost fell apart at bedtime. To cool the kids off, we took them swimming at Christie Pits or the John McInnes Community Centre. To this day, when I walk into 15 Huntley Street, I can still see the faces of the kids — Jamie, Glen, Billie — and hear their voices and remember the hard times and the good times as if it were yesterday.

  “To this day, when I walk into 15 Huntley Street, I can still see the faces of the kids — Jamie, Glen, Billie — and hear their voices and remember the hard times and the good times as if it were yesterday.”

  — Tony Diniz

  Melvine Petroff, who also worked at the Receiving Centre at that time, recalls that:

  The teenage girls lived on the top floor. They were carefully monitored so that they would not come into unsupervised contact with the teenage boys resident downstairs. Even male staff had to seek permission from their female colleagues before venturing upstairs, so that they could make sure that the girls were decently covered. Thus, it was a major breakthrough when, in the early 1970s, the agency hired Jack Scanlon as the Receiving Centre’s first male child and youth worker assigned to work with female adolescents.

  Moberly House

  As was illustrated above, many of the children in the Receiving Centre needed specialized care and were considered inappropriate for placement with foster families. While the agency often arranged for such children to be cared for in outside institutions, the desire to meet their specialized needs was the impetus behind the society’s decision to open its own “institution for disturbed children.”

  With grants from Metro and the province, and with the surplus from the Charles Street Child Welfare Centre b
uilding campaign of 1952, Moberly House was opened in June 1956. It was designed as a home for twelve boys between the ages of six and fourteen.

  The program was named for Vera Moberly, who, although she had pioneered the move away from institutional care in favour of foster care during her long term as executive secretary of the Infants’ Homes, nevertheless foresaw the need for a residential program of this nature. Its goal was to eventually return the children to their own families or to enable them to be placed successfully with foster parents.

  Richard Phillips, who is the agency’s longest-serving staff member, joined the staff of Moberly House in 1957 as a live-in houseparent. He recalls working seven-hour shifts during the day, as well as five night shifts a week, “at the grand starting salary of $1,800 per year, less board, which was deducted at source.” He recalls two incidents among many that are firmly engraved on his mind:

  The first is of a thirteen-year-old boy who was in trouble with the staff. He played hooky one fine spring day. When he returned late for supper, he went straight to his room carrying a box. He stood on guard over his clothes cupboard door while the other boys whispered and laughed. An air of mischievous excitement filled the residence.

  I asked Billy to open the door to his clothes cupboard. Naturally, he refused, so I decided to open the door without his permission. Out leaped the fox, which Billy had caught that afternoon in the Rosedale ravine. Bedlam erupted in the residence, as Billy ran up and down stairs trying to catch the petrified animal. I, in turn, called the Humane Society.

  The fox finally escaped out of an open door, but not before several of the boys and myself had had contact with it. Of course, it happened to be one of the years that there was a serious outbreak of rabies in the province. That resulted in a steady parade of reluctant boys and staff attending the medical clinic for a series of very unpleasant injections, which, at that time, were given in the belly.