Written July 16, 2026, reflecting on events from May 2026.

A note before you read this: if you’ve never dealt with the child welfare system, some of this might sound strange, even absurd. I promise it was just as strange to live through. I’m going to explain things as I go, because I want you to actually understand what happened, not just take my word that it was unfair.

On May 7, my son Bennett moved back home. He slept in his own bed that night. He went to school from our house the next morning. As far as I was concerned, that was it, he was home, we were done.

Except according to the government, we weren’t done. Not yet. And that gap between what was actually true and what the paperwork said cost me money I don’t think most people would expect it to cost me.

Some background, so this makes sense

Kids like Bennett need a lot of hands-on support. Behavioural interventionists who work with him one-on-one. People tracking his eating and his weight. Routines that stay consistent no matter what. None of that is extra. It’s what keeps him safe.

Several months before this post, Bennett was removed from my care and placed with MCFD, which stands for the Ministry of Children and Family Development. That’s the government body in British Columbia responsible for child protection, similar to what’s called Child Protective Services or CPS in other places. He lived in a resource home with paid staff, while I worked to get him back.

By May, we were at the point where MCFD had approved him coming home to me on what’s called an “extended home visit.” In practice, that just meant: he lives with you now. But legally, he was still classified as “a child in care.” That distinction, the gap between physical custody and legal status, is what this whole post is about.

What “child in care” actually meant, day to day

Bennett’s real return still needed to be finalized in court, and that court date kept getting pushed back. Until it actually happened, he remained, on paper, a child in the government’s care, even while living in my home full-time.

That single classification affected real money:
• The Child Tax Benefit (a monthly government payment to parents raising kids) — I couldn’t access it, because officially, I wasn’t yet Bennett’s primary caregiver again.
• My disability payments (PWD) — reduced, calculated as if I had one fewer child living with me.
• Housing support through BC Housing — reduced for the same reason.
• Child support from Bennett’s father — nonexistent, and there was no clean legal mechanism to enforce it yet.

None of these programs have a category for “the child is physically here, but the paperwork hasn’t caught up.” So I fell into a hole that existed purely because of timing.

The money that kept flowing, just not to us

Here’s the part that still frustrates me most, and I think it’s the easiest part for an outsider to understand is genuinely unfair.

THE House, the home where Bennett had lived for eight months, kept its staff and kept getting funded after May 7, even though Bennett wasn’t there anymore. He hadn’t set foot in it since the day he came home. But because his legal return hadn’t been finalized, the government couldn’t cut that funding yet. So it just kept going: full staff, full budget, for a child who wasn’t there.

Meanwhile, I couldn’t access the funding that was supposed to be mine to direct for his care at home. My support workers still had to bill the government directly instead of through my own funding contract, and the government’s payment process (mailed paper checks) took weeks. That delay meant my support workers’ own bills fell behind, which put me at real risk of losing the people helping care for my son.

So: a room with no child in it was fully paid for. A home with a child who needed round-the-clock care in it wasn’t.

What it felt like from the inside

There were weeks I genuinely couldn’t afford groceries. I was afraid of losing our housing. At the same time, I was doing everything a full-time caregiver for a medically complex child does: managing his feeding tube, his medications, his meltdowns, helping him adjust back to school, and helping him work through his fear of ever being taken away again.

If you’ve never cared for a child with needs like this, here’s what I want you to understand: it isn’t like typical parenting, where things get easier as the day goes on.

Every transition, getting dressed, leaving the house, going to school, coming home, can be its own small crisis that takes real skill and patience to get through safely. I was doing that, largely alone, for twelve or more hours a day.

There’s a specific kind of exhaustion in being trusted with everything and funded for nothing. I was doing the job. I just wasn’t being paid, or supported, like I was doing it.

Why this isn’t a one-time mistake

I don’t believe this happened because one social worker made an error, or because of one bad month. I think it’s built into how the system works: physical custody and legal status move on two completely different timelines, and nobody warns you about that going in. You’d assume that when your child comes home, “home” is just one simple fact. It isn’t. It’s two facts, physical and legal, that can disagree with each other for weeks, and the parent is the one who absorbs the cost of that disagreement.

If you’re a parent in a similar situation right now, child physically home, status still technically “in care,” I want you to know this isn’t a sign you’re doing something wrong. It’s a gap in the design of the system, and you’re the one paying for it.

The moment it crystallized

Here’s the moment it really hit me. I couldn’t activate my own funding contract to care for my own son. A few kilometers away, a fully staffed room sat empty, funded without anyone even questioning it, waiting for a kid who was never going back.

#BCParents #CFCSA #CanadianFosterCare #BCHousing #DisabilityRightsCanada

#MCFD #BrokenSystem #ParentAdvocate #FamilyCourtReform #Unsilenced

#SpecialNeedsParent #AutismParent  #DisabilityParenting #MotherhoodUnfiltered