TIM COOK - Midori Harth knows she can be impulsive and easily taken advantage of by people with ill intentions.
"Yeah, if I want to do something, I go and do it," she says with a teenaged smile, sitting in a coffee shop in a trendy Regina neighbourhood.
The 19-year-old once found herself in trouble when a friend asked her to cash a bogus cheque at a bank machine and take out $200 before it bounced. She ended up having to pay the money back when the poorly planned scheme was quickly discovered.
Then the same person, who couldn't get a cellphone because of her bad credit, got Harth to sign the contract and give her the phone, promising to pay her back by going on welfare. The company reluctantly took the phone back when Harth's mother found out and raised a fuss.
"It's good learning experiences even though they're pretty tough sometimes and pretty bad situations," Harth says. "Now I have my guard up more. I mean, I trust people, but only to a certain degree."
But for the support of her mother, Lisa Brownstone, who adopted Harth when she was just 10 months old, Harth fears she would "probably be lost" like so many others with her condition - in jail, on the streets or even dead.
Harth has a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
It's a problem that has been called an under-recognized national disaster - a disorder that is preventable but is now believed to be the leading cause of mental disability in Canada.
It preys on the children of poor and destitute mothers who suffer with substance abuse and addiction, but also surfaces in the kids of well-off moms who are either unaware or ill informed about the risks alcohol poses to their unborn.
It's a disability that hides in the brain and, for many, shows no physical signs.
People who have never been assessed for FASD or don't have the proper supports in place are at serious risk of falling through the cracks. They are labelled bad seeds who can't make rent, hold down a job or contribute to society in any meaningful way.
There are no reliable numbers on how many Canadians have some form of FASD. It's so underdiagnosed or mislabelled that experts say it is tough to get an accurate handle on the problem.
Health Canada estimates that about one per cent, or 300,000 Canadians, suffer from some form of the disorder. That's one child in every 100 births or about 4,000 new cases each year.
A diagnosis of fetal alcohol syndrome requires proof that the mother drank during pregnancy, facial features characteristic of the disorder and problems with learning and behaviour. But because not all of those indicators are always present, the term fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) has developed as an umbrella to describe a range of disabilities caused by drinking during pregnancy.
The signs can be subtle.
Young people with FASD can have problems with memory, concentration, learning and behaviour. Without the proper help, kids struggle in school. They are impressionable, easily led and susceptible to making bad decisions.
Fear and worry are constants among parents and those closest to someone with the disability. Brownstone has two adopted children who are both dealing with it.
Harth, who was diagnosed at seven, was able to get the help she needed in school, worked hard to graduate and is now a cashier at her neighbourhood grocery store.
Her brother wasn't diagnosed until he was 15, and by then it was too late. He dropped out of school, ended up in trouble with the law, struggled with homelessness and even spent time on Vancouver's troubled Downtown Eastside. He is now in treatment for alcohol addiction in northern Ontario.
"I probably worry about each about the same amount," Brownstone says. "It's a rare time that I don't have one child or the other in crisis."
Jalyn Zborowski worries about the future for her little girl.
Zborowski and her husband are in the process of adopting four-year-old Ocean, who was born to a cousin who drank when she was pregnant.
As a baby, Zborowski recalls, Ocean spent most of the time screaming. "She wasn't really responding to anyone. She didn't like to be touched."
She wouldn't eat - it would take 2 1/2 hours just to give her 50 millilitres of food - and she had a high threshold for pain. Once she had cut teeth, Zborowski recalls, Ocean bit off the end of one of her own tiny fingers and it actually calmed her down.
Doctors initially thought it was severe colic because Ocean didn't look any different than other babies. As it turned out, it was FASD.
Now Ocean bounces around the living room of her east Regina home like any child her age. She is in school and she gets through her day with a series of diagrams reminding her how to complete tasks such as taking off her shoes or going to the bathroom.
But it's what's ahead that gives Zborowski pause.
"Is she going to have friends that are going to take advantage of her? Is she going to get in trouble because she doesn't understand?"
It's the same for Suzanne Spotted Bull and her six-year-old son Colten in Lethbridge, Alta.
Colten does fairly well in school. But the simplest things, such as dressing himself and learning to do up buttons or zippers, are major struggles. And what does his future hold?
"He's so easily influenced that I worry that when he gets older - who he's going to get involved with and that they can take advantage of him," says Spotted Bull. "Good heavens, if you give him candy or something, you're his friend for life."
Winnipeg mother Val Surbey has realized those fears.
Her 17-year-old son Chris, adopted when he was two, had FASD.
"He looked good and sounded good, but in terms of personal safety, money aspects, judgment, impulsivity, it just wasn't there," she recalls.
Surbey always maintained that Chris needed 24-hour supervision, but he was placed nevertheless in a group home in a rougher part of Winnipeg and left unsupervised overnight.
When the supervisor would leave, Chris would hit the streets. He would come home drunk, pawn his belongings and use marijuana - "classic signs," his mother says, that he wasn't ready for freedom.
In the early morning hours of June 6, 2005, Chris was out with a girlfriend and ran into the wrong people. He ended up being stabbed and died on the way to the hospital.
The police told Surbey that Chris's last words as he was being loaded into the ambulance were "I don't want to die."
"This was our greatest fear," Surbey says. "I had been telling government and anyone who would listen that if he didn't have the appropriate supports he would either end up in jail, on the streets or dead."
For Spotted Bull and Colten, the future is a big unknown.
"I can't even look forward to his future," she says softly. "In the back of my mind I wonder how he's going to be when he gets older. How is he going to develop?
"He'll probably never get to get married unless he finds someone who is willing to put up with him. The other kids I can see going to college and getting married and having kids, but with him I have to deal with just right now."
- With files from Bill Graveland in Lethbridge.
