Background:
Colonialism and its ongoing effects (including residential schools and their multi-generational impact) have eroded First Nations cultures throughout Canada. First Nations children are over-represented in the child welfare system and are five times more likely to be admitted into out-of-home care. Success in the education system is negatively correlated to poverty rates, and 50% of First Nations children live in poverty. Across Canada, the secondary school graduation rate for First Nations people is 36% versus 72% for the general population. First Nations people are more likely to end up in jail than to graduate from high school.
Education is important not only for employment and income levels, but is also a protective factor for positive mental health (Kirmayer et al, 2007). Suicide and self- inflicted injuries are the leading cause of death of First Nations youth and adults to age 44. First Nations peoples are 5 to 6 times more likely to commit suicide than non-Indigenous populations. First Nations male rates of suicide are 126/100,000, compared to 24/100,000 for non-Indigenous populations. First Nations female rates of suicides are 35/100,000, compared to non-Indigenous populations of 5/100,000. However, First Nations females are more likely to have thought about attempting suicide than First Nations males (33% compared to 29%) and are more likely to have attempted suicide (19% compared to 13% of males). 21% of females aged 15 to 17 have reported attempting suicide, 3 times the rate of males in the same age group.
Objective:
The objective of this paper is exploratory in nature and its purpose is twofold, namely, to develop plausible predictive models for (1) educational success and (b) suicidality for First Nations youth in out-of-home care in Ontario by identifying and testing relevant risk and protective factors for each of these outcomes.
Method:
The cross-sectional sample was made up of 1,877 First Nations youth aged 12 to 17 living in out-of-home care in Ontario, Canada, who had participated in the completion of an Assessment and Action Record (AAR-C2-2010; Flynn, Miller, & Desjardins, 2010) between 2010 and 2014. The AAR-C2-2010 is the core tool used in the Ontario Looking After Children (OnLAC) needs-assessment and outcome-monitoring project. The AAR is completed annually via a conversational interview intended to facilitate dialogue among the child welfare worker, youth, and caregiver(s) in order to guide and monitor developmental outcomes. Multiple linear and logistic regression analyses were used to estimate the predictive models for educational success and suicidality, respectively.
Results:
The findings from our exploratory models indicated that, for educational success, soft drug use, learning-related difficulties, increased cultural assets, and total behavioural difficulties (Goodman, 1997) were risk factors for lower education scores, and developmental assets and positive life experiences were protective factors. For suicidality, predictive risk factors were gender, age, stress symptoms, and soft drug use, whereas positive mental health and family-based care were significant protective factors.
Conclusion and Implications:
These exploratory (as opposed to hypothesis-testing) models are a starting point for identifying the risk and protective factors influencing educational success and suicidality in the First Nations youth-in-care population in Ontario. These findings, if cross-validated in analyses of AAR data from future years of the OnLAC project, will be useful for practitioners and policy-makers in mitigating risk factors and promoting positive protective factors among First Nations youth in out-of-home care in Ontario and possibly elsewhere.
Mental health of children and young people in care , Education and qualification of children and young people in care
