FAQ

Start before your youth turns 19. SAJE is about continuity into adulthood, so the conversation needs to be happening while they’re still in the child and youth system — not after their services have ended. Aiming for the mid-teen years, by 16 or 17 if you can, gives time for eligibility decisions and for connecting with the adult services SAJE is meant to bridge you toward.

Use the SAJE period to get other adult supports in place — applying for PWD, getting on housing waitlists, linking with Community Living BC where eligible — so there isn’t another sudden drop when SAJE itself ends. SAJE runs through MCFD, so your youth’s social worker or transition worker is the central contact for what’s available and how to apply.

Sources: Foster Family Handbook; CFS FASD Practice Notes

SAJE — Strengthening Abilities and Journeys of Empowerment — is the MCFD programme that gives eligible youth extended support as they move out of care into adulthood. Depending on the youth’s plan, it can help with living expenses, housing or living arrangements, education or training, life skills, and staying connected to support workers. For a youth with FASD, it offers extra time and structure during exactly the years when expectations for independence are rising and other youth services are ending.

It’s generally for youth who were in care or under certain agreements before turning 19, who are continuing in school, training, or life skills development, and who would benefit from ongoing support through the transition. Not everyone qualifies, and eligibility depends on the individual situation — your youth’s social worker is the best starting point to confirm whether it applies.

Sources: Foster Family Handbook; CFS FASD Practice Notes

For many youth with FASD, full independence isn’t the most useful goal — interdependence is. That means continuing to receive support while building skills over time, rather than aiming to do everything alone. FASD is a lifelong disability, and pulling supports too quickly because of an age milestone tends to lead to instability, distress, or risk. Sustaining supports and adjusting them as your youth grows usually produces more durable progress.

A helpful reframe: success after 19 is measured by stability, safety, and well-being, not by how independently your youth lives. Many adults with FASD do well within structured, supportive arrangements that match how their brain works. Treat 19 as a milestone in an ongoing journey, not a finish line.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

At 19, most of the supports built around your youth shift at once. School-based supports like IEPs end when they leave the K–12 system, child and youth services through MCFD come to an end, and the system coordination you may have relied on largely falls away. Supports that used to be automatic now have to be applied for in the adult system, where services are eligibility-driven, often less coordinated, and sometimes have waitlists.

Support doesn’t disappear after 19 — but how you access it changes, and that takes planning. The youth who land well usually have new supports lined up before the old ones end. Start the conversations early, ideally in the mid-teens, with your social worker or FASD key worker.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

The fairness question is real and worth taking seriously rather than waving away. The approach that works is to keep the expectations themselves consistent across all children — every child is expected to be respectful, safe, and contributing — while recognising that how those expectations are supported may differ. Different support is not the same as different rules. During an escalation, focus on getting everyone safe and regulated; the fairness conversation about what felt equitable is far more useful afterwards, once nervous systems have settled.

The siblings who don’t have FASD also need to feel seen — their frustration and their sense of unfairness are real, and the household functions better when those experiences are named rather than dismissed. Protect one-on-one time with each child that isn’t shared with the high-needs sibling; it’s part of what makes the household sustainable. And naming the difference openly often helps: “His brain has a harder time stopping once it gets going. That’s why we sometimes do things differently with him. It doesn’t mean what you need matters less” usually lands better than insisting everything is fair. If a sibling is showing significant distress or taking on an age-inappropriate caregiver role, your social worker, resource social worker, or a family counsellor can help.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Build predictability and access rather than restriction. Keep the same meal and snack times with reliable foods, and set up a specific spot with snacks the child can take without asking — clearly designated and restocked predictably. When the brain can see a visible, reliable source, it no longer needs to hoard for safety. Avoid shame and punishment around food, which usually intensifies the underlying anxiety and produces more hoarding, not less, and in general don’t lock food away — that confirms the very fear driving the behaviour.

A calm, matter-of-fact response works best: “I noticed there were crackers under your pillow. That’s okay. You can keep snacks in your room. Let’s make a spot.” That takes the shame out and gives the behaviour somewhere acceptable to go. Be patient with the timeline — food behaviours rooted in early experience can take months or years to soften. If food intake becomes a health concern, talk with your family doctor or paediatrician, and keep your social worker and FASD key worker informed, especially where there’s a trauma history.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Primary disabilities are the challenges that come directly from how the brain was affected by prenatal alcohol exposure — things like difficulty with memory and learning, attention and focus, transitions and routines, emotional regulation, and adaptive skills. These are not behaviours the child is choosing; they are brain-based and tend to be lifelong, though good support can reduce their impact significantly.

Secondary disabilities are challenges that can develop over time when a child’s needs are misread or unsupported — for example, anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, school disengagement, trouble with the law, substance use, or vulnerability to exploitation. These are not inevitable. They develop when the gap between what the world expects and what the child’s brain can deliver stays wide for too long. The encouraging part is that secondary disabilities are much more responsive to prevention than the primary ones.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Kinship caregivers often step into the role unexpectedly to support a child within their own family, and while that’s an act of deep love, it carries complex emotions foster caregivers experience differently. You may be holding grief about changes in family relationships or what the family used to be like, worry and sadness about the child’s parents — who may be your sibling, adult child, niece, or nephew — a sense of loss about how the family once functioned, and complicated loyalty as you support the child while maintaining ties with their parents and the wider family. Difficult conversations and boundaries within the family often come with it.

All of this sits alongside the daily work of raising a child with additional needs, and the combination can be heavy. Acknowledging the grief — naming it as grief rather than pushing it aside — is an important step in protecting your well-being. It often helps to connect with peer support or professionals who understand kinship caregiving specifically, where the particular shape of what you’re carrying doesn’t have to be explained from scratch. You’re allowed to advocate strongly for the child while also recognising the struggles their parents face; both can be true at once.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

What you’re seeing has a name: after-school restraint collapse. Getting through a school day takes enormous effort for a child with FASD — sustained attention, transitions, social navigation, sensory load — and their brain spends the day holding regulation together. By the time they’re home, that capacity is spent, and home is where they feel safe enough to let it go. The meltdown isn’t sudden, and it isn’t saved up for you. It’s the release of stress that built up all day where you couldn’t see it.

Treat the first hour home as recovery time, not productive time. Allow quiet decompression with no questions about the day, no homework, no demands — just a snack and something settling. Keep the same predictable after-school sequence each day so the depleted nervous system has one less thing to figure out. Once they’ve settled, they’ll be far more available for conversation, homework, and the rest of the evening.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes

Often, no. Memory challenges in FASD can lead to confabulation — the brain filling in missing information with details that didn’t actually happen. It can look exactly like lying, but in children with FASD it frequently isn’t a deliberate choice; it’s the brain trying to bridge a gap it can’t otherwise fill.

Seeing it through this lens changes how you respond. Rather than treating it as dishonesty to be punished, it helps to stay calm, keep expectations realistic, and lean on the same supports that help memory generally — repetition, visual reminders, consistent routines, and one piece of information at a time.

Source: CFS FASD Practice Notes