If It Feels Like Family, It Is
By Anita Lapidus
President, Family Service Association of Toronto
This January, three Ontario appeal court judges issued a ruling granting a woman legal status as mother of the child she’s raised since birth. In doing so, the judges allowed this child to have three legal parents, a first for our family law system. The decision—one that Family Service Association of Toronto supported in our arguments as interveners in the case—represented a step forward for our country’s laws that pertain to families. It acknowledged the diversity of family configurations in Canada today and the need for our laws to reflect this reality.
The case was a precedent-setting one for families and, as an organization committed to being a leader in serving families, we felt it was important for FSA Toronto to participate in it. The three-parent case spoke directly to FSA Toronto’s vision for strengthened individuals and families in just and supportive communities and, most critically, to our concept of family.
As we saw during the case and in the media coverage surrounding the decision, the shape and composition of families continue to be points of debate for many, with the line drawn between those who want the notion of family to retain its strictest traditional form and those who support family in much broader terms. Perhaps understandably, the debate is an intense one. Families are the cornerstone of every society (that much both sides can agree on) and our emotional investment in them is considerable.
In recent years, a number of groups have capitalized on the personal connection people feel to the concept of family. “Family values” has become a powerful rallying term, even though those values are not shared by or inclusive of the myriad families present in our country. What should be a unifying concept has become divisive in its inaccuracy and does a disservice to many strong families.
At FSA Toronto, we believe that healthy families with strong relationships are critical to the overall wellbeing of our society. We have supported families through such difficult life experiences as separation, divorce and death, and helped them address the terror of abusive relationships. We have also seen a wide array of loving, supportive and thriving families who make our communities strong and welcoming. As an agency that has been supporting families for close to a century, we have seen first-hand that there is no one way to be a family.
In 1995, after more than half a year of intense research and discussion, FSA Toronto’s board of directors adopted a new definition of family for the agency: A family consists of two or more people, whether living together or apart, related by blood, marriage, adoption or commitment to care for one another.
This definition was notable then, as it is more than a decade later, because it does not limit the concept of family to heterosexuality or biology. Rather, it recognizes that a family may be formed of many different kinds of relationships. Today, this definition is completely ingrained in FSA Toronto’s culture and through activities like our participation in the three-parent case, we choose to champion it as a leader in social services and inclusive policies. When we adopted our family definition, it reflected the findings of the most recent national study on families in Canada. In the years since, as we have shared our definition with new staff, volunteers, donors and community partners, we have continued to see the diversity of families grow and the definition take on greater resonance.
The reality is that families come in a variety of forms, shapes and sizes. For many Canadians, it is not the framework of the family that matters—whether a family is related by blood or has one, two or three parents—but the quality of the relationships between its members. This belief in a broader definition of family opened the doors to the concept of adoption many decades ago. It enables people who faced abuse within their family to make loving, healthy family connections elsewhere. And it will continue to break down the barriers to recognition facing other strong, productive and loving families in our communities.
For it is love, nurturing and commitment that matter when it comes to defining family. Those are the true family values.
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