FAQ

Your youth can apply for PWD at 18. The benefits themselves start once they’re 19 and outside the child and youth system, but the application can be put together earlier so supports are ready as soon as they age out. In practice, it helps to start much earlier than 18 — gather documentation through the mid-teens, discuss eligibility with your youth’s doctor, psychologist, social worker, or FASD key worker, and align the PWD plan with other transition supports like SAJE.

Starting early matters because these applications take time. Gathering medical and functional documentation, getting forms completed by qualified professionals, and going through review can stretch across many months, and if the first attempt is denied, reconsideration adds more. Build your timeline backwards from when your youth will need supports in place.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Persons with Disabilities — PWD — is a provincial income and support programme in BC for adults with a severe and prolonged disability that affects their daily living. For an eligible adult it provides monthly financial assistance for living expenses, access to health and medical benefits, support for housing and daily living needs, and eligibility for other programmes that require PWD designation. For an adult with FASD, that can mean the difference in maintaining stable housing, accessing ongoing health care, and connecting with disability-specific supports.

PWD is the adult system’s recognition that the support your youth has always needed continues — just in a different form. It also opens the door to other federal and provincial benefits that require PWD status first. It’s one of the most important adult supports to plan for. Your social worker or FASD key worker can help you get started.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

You can usually support the DTC and RDSP process — gathering information, helping the medical practitioner’s section, and helping manage or contribute to an RDSP. Whether you can apply directly on behalf of the youth, though, depends on your legal role and guardianship status, which varies from situation to situation.

The best way to confirm what’s possible in your case is to check with your youth’s social worker or a financial advisor familiar with disability programmes. They can tell you what your role allows and how to proceed.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Three systems do most of the work, each with a different mandate. MCFD leads child welfare, care planning, and the coordination and funding of many child and youth services — it’s usually your primary point of contact for case planning, service coordination, and accessing support programmes. Health services (the Ministry of Health and regional health authorities) handle assessment and diagnosis, medical and mental health care, and specialised programmes like the FASD Key Worker Program. The education system (school districts and the Ministry of Education and Child Care) provides school-based supports including IEPs and classroom accommodations.

Most children with FASD touch all three, and the systems don’t always communicate automatically — so you often end up carrying information between them, advocating for consistent strategies, and joining planning meetings. Knowing which system holds which piece (FASD key workers are Health-side, SAJE is MCFD-side, IEPs are education-side) helps you find the right contact faster. Programme names change over time, so focus on what a programme does rather than its name.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Burnout builds when the emotional, physical, and practical demands of caregiving become overwhelming over time — usually not because you aren’t trying hard enough, but because you’ve been trying very hard for a very long time, sometimes without enough support. Signs to watch for include feeling constantly exhausted even after rest, feeling discouraged or hopeless, more frustration or irritability with the child or others, feeling isolated, struggling to keep up your own routines, and guilt about needing time away.

Feeling this way doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong — it’s often a sign of how much you’re investing. Recognising these signs early, and treating them as information rather than personal failure, helps you reach for support before things get more severe. FASD caregiving stacks up demands that ordinary parenting doesn’t, so needing support is a normal part of the journey.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Children carrying intergenerational trauma benefit from caregiving that honours their identity, supports their connections, and recognises that the family and community story is part of who they are. Supports that tend to help include cultural safety in the home and in the services involved with the child, honouring identity and family connections, supporting community and traditions, building trust slowly with caregivers and professionals, trauma-informed communication that does not minimise history, and acknowledging grief and history rather than avoiding them.

For Indigenous children, helping the child stay connected to cultural roots is part of trauma-informed care. This can happen through family visits, attending community events, learning traditional stories, connecting with Elders, participating in ceremonies, exploring language resources, and supporting relationships with siblings and extended family. These connections are not extras — they are part of what supports an Indigenous child’s well-being and identity. You do not need to be an expert in a family’s history to do this well; curiosity, respect, and willingness to learn go a long way. The child’s coordinator and the ICFSA worker connected to the child can guide what is appropriate and possible for that particular child’s Nation and community.

Source: CFS Trauma-Informed Practice Notes

Intergenerational trauma refers to trauma that is passed from one generation to the next through family patterns, relationships, and systems. A child may not have lived through the original events, but the effects can still travel through the family, often without anyone naming them as such. It is often linked to long-standing patterns and conditions within families and the systems they have lived inside, including family violence, substance use, attachment disruptions, grief and loss, and colonisation and systemic harm. For Indigenous children and families, it may include the impacts of residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, child welfare involvement, and loss of culture, language, and community.

These are not abstract historical events. They are part of the lived experience of many families today, and they continue to shape how children, parents, and communities relate to systems, to caregivers, and to one another. A child carrying this trauma may show deep fear of separation, mistrust of systems or professionals, grief that surfaces around certain people, places, or anniversaries, or uncertainty about who they are and where they belong. These patterns become more understandable when the child’s wider story — the family’s story, the community’s story — is part of the picture.

Source: CFS Trauma-Informed Practice Notes

What a child with developmental trauma needs most, day after day, is predictability and a calm adult who keeps showing up. The brain-based supports that help include predictable routines kept as stable as your household allows, calm and consistent caregiving with the same responses to the same situations, clear expectations the child can rely on, patient relationship-building with connection ahead of correction, co-regulation (staying calm and steady when the child cannot), gentle transitions with warnings before changes, and repetition and patience over months and years.

The work is rarely dramatic — it’s small things, repeated, over time. Each predictable response is one more data point for the child’s nervous system that this place behaves differently from what they learned to expect. It helps to remember that progress is rarely linear: calming a little faster, recovering more quickly, or allowing comfort that would once have been refused are all real signs of healing, even when they seem small.

Source: CFS Trauma-Informed Practice Notes

Developmental trauma happens when a child experiences ongoing or repeated stress, fear, neglect, abuse, or loss during important stages of growth and development. It isn’t a one-time event — it’s the cumulative impact of difficult experiences that shaped the child while their brain and body were still forming. Because it happens over time, it can affect brain development, emotional regulation, attachment and trust, behaviour, and learning and memory.

A child with developmental trauma may stay in survival mode long after the original conditions have ended. Their brain and body learned, over a long period, that the world is unsafe, and that learning doesn’t unlearn quickly — even in a safe home. The nervous system keeps scanning for danger and reacting fast because that’s what kept the child going. What helps most is predictability and a calm adult who keeps showing up, the same way, day after day.

Source: CFS Trauma-Informed Practice Notes

Trauma can take several different shapes in the lives of children in care, and the same child may carry more than one. Developmental trauma is ongoing or repeated stress, fear, neglect, abuse, or loss during important stages of a child’s growth and development. Intergenerational trauma is trauma passed across generations through family patterns, relationships, and systems, including the impacts of colonisation and the harms experienced by Indigenous families and communities. Relational and attachment trauma is fear, instability, rejection, or harm experienced within the caregiving relationships a child depended on. Grief, separation, and system-induced trauma is loss, separation from family, multiple placement changes, and the impact of involvement with child welfare, justice, medical, or school systems.

Each of these has its own pattern of impact, and each calls for slightly different awareness from you. They overlap often, and a child’s experience may not fit neatly into one category.

Source: CFS Trauma-Informed Practice Notes