PRESCHOOL CHILDREN: PROMISES TO KEEP - National Council of Welfare, Canada

PRESCHOOL CHILDREN: PROMISES TO KEEP, Spring 1999

I. THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND ITS PROMISES TO CHILDREN

     Family Poverty

     Parents' Employment

     Mothers in the Labour Market

     Single-Parent Mothers and the Labour Market

     Child Care and Parents in the Labour Market

III. CHILD DEVELOPMENT ISSUES FOR TWO- TO SIX-YEAR-OLDS

     Child Development Goals for Preschoolers

     Physical Well-being and Appropriate Motor Development

     Emotional Health and a Positive Approach to New Experiences

     Age-appropriate Social Knowledge and Competence

     Age-appropriate Language Skills

     Age-appropriate General Knowledge and Cognitive Skills

IV. CANADIAN PROGRAMS FOR TWO- TO SIX-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES

   Quebec's Family Policy

   Child Care in the Rest of Canada

      Accessibility

      Affordability

      Quality

      The Business of Child Care

   Other Programs for Early Childhood Care and Education

      Kindergartens and Nursery Schools

      Family Resource Programs

V. CREATING A SYSTEM OF EARLY CHILDHOOD CARE AND EDUCATION FOR CANADA

   Measuring the Benefits and Costs of a Good Child Care System

   Making Child Care Happen

      Provincial and Territorial Delivery of Direct Services

      National Standards

      Block Funding

      Integrated Services

   Building the System Year by Year

VI. RECOMMENDATIONS

APPENDIX: 1996 POVERTY TRENDS, CHILDREN AND FAMILIES

THE NATIONAL COUNCIL OF WELFARE

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THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND ITS PROMISES TO CHILDREN

Canadian politicians have made many promises about ending child poverty and supporting families with young children. In 1989, the House of Commons passed a unanimous resolution to eradicate child poverty by 2000. In 1991, Canada ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child and made commitments to provide special recognition for children and an adequate standard of living for families. Throughout the decade, successive federal governments have pledged improvements to the number and quality of child care spaces.

To our disappointment, the years that followed these important commitments did not bring improvements in the lives of children. Instead, we have seen child poverty rates inch up from 14.5 percent in 1989 to a record high of 20.9 percent in 1996. Education and retraining, welfare, social services and health programs that serve both parents and children have suffered severe and arbitrary cuts that have reduced their ability to help families. The federal government's efforts to create more child care spaces have foundered. Even the term child care has become something of a dirty word in certain government circles. But no matter how often governments try to duck the reality, families with young children need good child care more than ever.

In the view of the National Council of Welfare, eliminating child poverty requires concerted efforts from the federal, provincial and territorial governments on many fronts. The National Council of Welfare believes that the only solution to the problems of child poverty is an integrated system of family policies that work together to support parents to take care of their children. All levels of government must commit themselves to ensuring that all the programs and policies that affect children and their families have adequate funding and that they work together to ensure the best use of resources.

The centrepiece of family policy must be a system of affordable, high-quality child care. Child care is the essential ingredient in the work force participation of parents of young children - especially mothers. Good child care is also an excellent opportunity to provide better early childhood education that ensures that all children have an equal chance at good development. The National Council of Welfare believes that policies for families with young children must support the choices of parents in the work force full time and part time as well as the choices of parents who decide to stay home to raise young children. This is why we propose a system that includes full-day child care and half-day child care that covers the work hours of parents with full- and part-time jobs and also includes good part-day preschool for children with at-home parents.

The National Council of Welfare believes that Canada can make the changes in social policy that would turn the tide on child poverty and improve the lives of all Canadian children. The government of Quebec has already broken the trail in creating comprehensive family policy with public child care. Just as Saskatchewan provided the model for universal public health insurance in the 1960s, Quebec's efforts to pull together its public policies to support families show that good family policy is an achievable goal for all governments and a popular goal with families. This report sets out a plan to accomplish family policy across Canada.

We have heard rumblings in recent months that the federal budget for 2000 will be a children's budget. To us, a children's budget means a budget that would keep the promises made to children and one that would redirect several billion dollars in federal money to new and improved supports to families with children. It means major new federal spending on a child care system that combines early education with care that supports parents in the work force. It also means more generous provisions for parental leave, higher minimum wages, strong employment equity and pay equity, training programs for parents re-entering the job market and job creation efforts - especially for youth. A budget that did little more than throw a few hundred million dollars at a scattering of programs would be a betrayal of past promises.

We are most concerned about the future of child care programs. We are not convinced that the federal government and most of the provincial and territorial governments are serious about child care. Until they get serious, the promises they made will be nothing more than empty rhetoric.

This report is the second in a series by the National Council of Welfare focusing on issues facing children and families. Healthy Parents, Healthy Babies looked at pregnancy and the first year of children's lives. This report looks at issues and programs affecting the two million children - or almost seven percent of the Canadian population - who are between the ages of two and six. In the autumn of 1998, we published Child Benefits: Kids Are Still Hungry, a report about the Canada Child Tax Benefit. The Council plans to continue to make children's issues a priority. The next report in this series will be about school-age children.

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STATUS OF CHILDREN IN CANADA

Children today live in very different families from the families in which their parents grew up. At the height of the baby boom in 1960, the fertility rate was 3.9 children per woman, and children under 11 years old represented 28 percent of the 1961 population. By 1992, the fertility rate was 1.7 children per woman, and children under 11 represented only 17 percent of the 1991 population. During the winter of 1994-1995, the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth found that almost half the children surveyed - 46 percent - lived with only one brother or sister. On average, a Canadian child 11 or under had only 1.3 brothers or sisters ¹. Where children used to learn about getting along in groups by playing with their siblings, they now must learn with children in the neighbourhood or in preschool.

Children's families are also less stable than ever before. In the winter of 1994-1995, the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth found that while 84 percent of children live in families with two parents, only 79 percent of children aged 11 and under lived with both their biological parents.

Divorce rates have risen dramatically in Canada and most of the other western industrial countries. Although many couples enter common-law unions as a way to test the stability of relationships before entering marriage, common-law unions are even more likely to break down than marriages. As a result, young children experience dramatic changes in their families at an unprecedented rate.

Children whose parents had traditional marriages were the least likely to experience family breakdown: by the age of ten, 14 percent saw their parents split up. By the age of ten, 25 percent of children whose parents had lived common-law but married after the children's births saw their parents separate. But of the ten-year-old children born to parents living in common-law unions, an astonishing 63 percent had seen their parents' relationships end.

Canadian parents are far more likely to have children outside traditional marriage than ever before. In the 1960s, more than 90 percent of children were born to mothers and fathers who were married for the first time and who had never lived together as a couple - either together or with others - before marriage. By the winter of 1994-1995, about 20 percent of Canadian children were born to common-law unions, and another nine percent of children were born to parents who were not living together at all. In Quebec, the situation has changed most dramatically: 43 percent of children were born to common-law unions and only 51 percent of children were born to married couples. ²

No matter the changes in their families, Canadian children almost always stay with their mothers. In the winter of 1994-1995, 16 percent of Canadian children lived with single parents. Almost all single-parent families were headed by women: 681,000 single-parent families were headed by women and only 53,000 by men,³ a ratio of 13 to one.

The National Children's Survey findings in Chart 2-A show that the overwhelming majority of children live with their mothers after the parents separate: only nine percent of children under two, 16 percent of three- to five-year-olds, and 23 percent of six- to 11-year-olds lived with their fathers either full- or part-time during the winter of 1994-1995. After the separation of their parents, about a third of children have very little contact with their fathers (either irregular visits or no visits at all). After the parents have separated, children born of common-law unions are even less likely to see their fathers than children born to married parents ⁴. Since fathers who have low levels of contact with their children are least likely to pay child support, these findings indicate that many, many Canadian children are at a high risk of losing both the personal and financial support of their fathers when their parents separate.

Family Poverty

In the years it has tracked poverty in Canada, the National Council of Welfare has always found that families headed by single parents are extremely vulnerable to poverty. When the parents are particularly young or have little formal education, families are even more likely to be poor. While the poverty rate for couples with children under 18 was 11.9 percent in 1996, single-parent families headed by women had a 61.4 percent poverty rate. Families with two parents who are under 25 faced a poverty rate of 39.2 percent, but when they were headed by single-parent mothers under 25, they had a shockingly high poverty rate of 91.3 percent.

Not surprisingly, when families have more children, they are more likely to be poor. Families are also more likely to be poor when they have very young children. However, when a family is headed by a single mother, chances are that the family is poor no matter the children's ages. As Graph 2-B shows, the poverty rate for a couple with a child under seven was 14 percent in 1996. Graph 2-C shows that a single mother with a child under seven had a 70.6 percent chance of being poor.

Canada's child poverty rates are very high - and rising. In 1989, child poverty concerned the members of Parliament so much that the House of Commons passed a unanimous resolution to end child poverty by 2000. But child poverty continued to increase.

When the House of Commons passed its resolution in 1989, 14.5 percent of Canadian children were poor. By 1996, the rate rose to 20.9 percent, the highest in the 17 years that the Council has tracked child poverty. A 1993 UNICEF report noted that although child poverty rates in Canada were better than those in the United States, they far exceeded rates in European countries. The UNICEF report noted that this was due largely to declining supports from Canadian governments for families with young children⁵.

Graph 2-D shows data from Canada, several European countries and Australia using the poverty measures from the Luxembourg Income Study. The Luxembourg Study uses a different way of measuring poverty than the Statistics Canada low-income cut offs that the National Council of Welfare uses, so the numbers in Graph 2-D do not match the poverty rates we use in other parts of this report. The Luxembourg Study takes the poverty data from each country in different periods during the mid-1980s and early 1990s, so the information from each country does not come from the same year.

The "before taxes" bars in the charts show the child poverty rates before any government interventions. The graph shows that before-tax child poverty rates are high in all countries, ranging from a relatively low nine percent in Germany to 29.6 percent in the United Kingdom. This happens because the earned incomes of parents are often inadequate to cover the costs of raising children. The "after taxes " bars show the child poverty rates after all forms of government programs that provide cash income, food stamps and similar benefits are added and taxes are deducted. The after-tax child poverty rate shows the level of poverty children actually live with after all government help is considered.

All of the other countries except the United States and Australia made much greater efforts than Canada to use their tax and benefit systems to reduce the impacts on children of the inequalities of the labour market. The U.S. reduced its before-tax child poverty rate from 25.9 percent to 21.5 percent, Australia reduced child poverty from 19.6 percent to 14 percent and Canada reduced its rate from 22.5 percent to 13.5 percent. The other countries were far more successful in providing help to families to make sure that fewer children had to live in poverty. France was able to reduce its child poverty rate from 25.4 percent to only 6.5 percent, the Netherlands started with a child poverty rate of 13.7 percent and was also able to reduce it to 6.2 percent, while Sweden began with a child poverty rate of 19.1 percent and reduced child poverty to only 2.7 percent.⁶

Government supports to families and to other low-income Canadians declined for most of the 1990s. On April 1, 1996, the Canada Health and Social Transfer replaced the Canada Assistance Plan and the Established Programs Financing. Federal funding for medicare, post-secondary education, welfare and social services dropped by about $3 billion a year.

In its 1997 report Another Look at Welfare Reform, the Council found that the provincial and territorial governments had implemented cuts to most welfare programs. The most extreme example was the 21.6 percent cut to welfare recipients in Ontario in October 1995. The decision was completely arbitrary, with no assessment of how people who depended on welfare would be able to afford adequate food, clothing and shelter, let alone the impact of these cuts on young children and their families. People with disabilities were exempted from the cuts, but the thousands of families with children on welfare were not.

The full impact of these cuts on families and children was not felt immediately. Many good social programs can continue to provide good quality services for a short while before the full impact of the cuts affects them, and families will use every resource they have to protect their children from hardship for as long as they can. But overwhelming evidence tells us that the extra stresses of poverty have long-term effects on children which will become evident as the children reach adulthood and are ready to enter the labour market and raise families of their own.

Parents' Employment

Most parents depend on the income from their jobs to support themselves and their children. But for many parents working in low-wage jobs or part-time jobs, the extra costs of raising children make it impossible to escape poverty. These parents rely on social programs to help them make up the difference between the cost of raising their children and the income they get from their jobs. For parents who do not have paid work, social programs - and the help of families and communities - provide most of the supports that help them to meet their children's needs.

The main reason parents are poor is their inability to find work that gives them adequate incomes. Canada's unemployment rate is high by comparison with other countries. Although unemployment rates declined since the recession of 1990-91, they are still very high: 9.7 percent in 1996 and 7.8 in January 1999.

A special report by Statistics Canada showed that young people between 15 and 24 made up only eight percent of the 1997 Canadian work force, but they represented 29 percent of the unemployed. The unemployment rate for youth was a shocking 15.8 percent in December 1997, while the rate for other workers was 7.2 percent. School attendance rates was very high and youth employment was at an all-time low at the time of the report.

Statistics Canada notes that one particularly disturbing effect of this long period of youth unemployment is that many young people have never held jobs at all. The proportion of young people with no job experience at all jumped from 9.8 percent in December 1989 to 24.6 percent in December 1997.⁷Since these young people and the age group just slightly older than them are the part of the population who have young children, these trends are a cause for alarm.

Several other economic factors affect the ability of parents to support their families. The real value of provincial minimum wages has decreased significantly. In most provinces, even a single person working full time cannot reach the poverty line. The poverty line for a two-person family in a large city was $22,452 in 1998. With Ontario's minimum hourly wage of $6.85, a person working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks would earn only $14,248. Even with the new Canada Child Tax Benefit rates of $1,625 for one child and a GST refund of $503, the family would have only $16,376. In British Columbia where the minimum hourly wage is $7.15, a full-time worker would earn only $14,872. With the Canada Child Tax Benefit for one child, the GST and additional provincial family benefits in British Columbia, the family would still have only $17,937. A minimum-wage worker in Newfoundland would earn only $5.25 an hour or $10,920 a year. With the Child Tax Benefit for one child and the GST refund, the family would have an annual income of only $13,048. For minimum-wage workers supporting dependent children, it is simply impossible to rise over the poverty line.

Canada has also seen a decline in "good" secure full-time jobs and a growth in the number of "bad" jobs with low wages that are temporary or part-time. For young parents with low levels of education, bad jobs are often the only real possibilities of employment, yet they cannot eliminate child and family poverty, no matter how hard a parent works.

The structure of work in the Canadian labour force simply does not support parents' efforts to balance work and family responsibilities. In its 1994 report on employed mothers, the Canadian Centre for Management Development identified the preschool years as the most demanding period in the lives of parents. Most parents, particularly mothers, reported that they sometimes find the pressures of managing a job and the demands of their families just too much and they often felt like quitting. When asked what employers could do to support work and family, women mentioned flexible work schedules (23 percent), increased family leave (20 percent) and on-site child care (19 percent).⁸

A 1997 study of flexible work arrangements by Human Resources Development Canada found a significant growth in the percentage of Canadian employees who have "flextime," that is, flexible work arrangements where employees can vary the beginning and end of their work day around core hours. Between 1991 and 1995, the percentage of all paid workers with flextime grew from 17 percent to 24 percent.

Unfortunately, the study found that the growth in flextime has been highly concentrated among full-time, permanent employees and those with university degrees. Workers who were married or in dual-earner families - and especially in dual-earner families with at least one child under six years of age - were more likely to be on flexible schedules. But lone parents, both men and women, were the least likely to hold a job with a flexible schedule.⁹ It appears that when their workplaces will allow them to use flextime, parents use it as a tool for managing work and family responsibilities. But the most vulnerable employees and most vulnerable parents are the least likely to benefit from this workplace innovation.

For parents whose children have special needs because of health and disability, the situation is particularly tough. Employed parents report that they have to use vacation and their own sick leave to take care of their children's needs, which gives parents almost no time to spend together as couples or taking care of their other children. Even in workplaces that provide special leave to care for children, workplace culture makes it very difficult to get the leave they are entitled to have. In the words of a parent who works for Canada Post, "Getting permission to take special leave requires a letter from God.¹⁰

Balancing work and family arrangements does not have to be so difficult. Many European countries have developed employment policies with the express purpose of promoting women's equality and supporting working parents by establishing longer maternity and parental leave arrangements, flexible work hours and providing subsidized child care. Sweden, for example, has provided parental leave that can be used either full- or part-time at any point until a child is eight years old.

Swedish parents can divide the leave as they choose, continue to collect seniority in their jobs, or reduce their working hours while keeping their jobs. Parents are entitled to take up to 60 days leave a year to care for a sick child, or 120 days if they have two or more children under twelve. Leave is paid at 75 percent of the parent's wage. Sweden also provides high-quality public child care in a wide variety of arrangements that respond to the work hours of parents and the early child development needs of children. As of 1996, municipal authorities must provide child care spaces for all children between 18 months and six years, and provide before- and after-school child care.¹¹

As a result, Sweden has achieved extremely high labour force participation by women and very low child poverty rates.¹² The 1998 United Nations Human Development Report notes that Swedish women also receive a higher share of earned incomes: Swedish women receive 45 percent of earned incomes while Canadian women receive 38 percent.¹³

Sweden has achieved these successes under conditions that are very similar to Canada's. Like Canada, Sweden is an industrialized country with a high level of human development. Where Canada ranks number one of 174 countries on the United Nations Human Development Index, Sweden ranks number 10. Sweden's real gross domestic product per person was $19,297 compared to Canada's $21,916. Sweden ranks number one and Canada ranks number seven in the United Nations Gender Empowerment Measure, the tool that assesses women's access to high-status jobs and women's share of earned income.

Mothers in the Labour Market

Many Canadian families rely on the earnings of mothers. In its annual Poverty Profile, the National Council of Welfare reports the rate of two-parent families who would have been poor if the wives had not been working. In 1996, 10.5 percent of families with husbands and wives were poor. If the wives in these families had not been working, the poverty rate for families would have been 21.4 percent. Women's paid employment is key to reducing family and child poverty.

More Canadian women have paid jobs than ever before. Only 42 percent of women over 15 had jobs in 1976, but by 1997, 52 percent of women were employed.

Mothers represent a large part of this increase. Between 1976 and 1997, the employment rate of women with children under 16 rose from 39 percent to 66 percent. The age of their children has a dramatic impact on mothers' labour market participation, but at every stage of their children's growth, most mothers have paid work. In 1997, 59 percent of all women with children under three and 62 percent of all women whose youngest children were between three and five years old were employed. Once their youngest reached six, 71 percent of all mothers had paid jobs.

The National Council of Welfare is very concerned by the close link between child poverty and the unequal treatment of women and men in the work world. Women's wages are far lower than men's, so those families that depend on only one income are extremely vulnerable to poverty when the only wage earner is a woman. In 1996, Statistics Canada found that women earned only 73.4 percent of men's earnings and the 1996 average earnings of all women with earnings were only $20,902 compared to $32,248 for men ¹⁴. The 1996 poverty line for a two-person family - for example, a single mother and her child - in a large Canadian city was $21,769.

Single-Parent Mothers and the Labour Market

Single mothers' jobs are especially vulnerable to changes in the economy. As Graph 2-E shows, while employment rates for all mothers rose steadily, employment rates for single-parent mothers actually dropped from 55 percent in 1981 to 50 percent in 1994. Statistics Canada attributes this in part to particularly large losses in jobs for single mothers during the recessions in the early 1980s and the early 1990s. By 1997, the employment rate for single mothers almost reached its earlier level when it climbed to 54 percent.

How old their children are has even more impact on the ability of single mothers to get and keep work than the ages of children of mothers with partners. Graph 2-F shows the employment rates of single mothers and Graph 2-G shows the rates for mothers with partners. For single mothers, employment rates are consistently lower, and the difference between the ages of children is much greater.

The 1997 employment rates for mothers with partners were 62 percent when the children were under three, 65 percent when the children were three to five years old, and 73 percent once the children reached six. Only 35 percent of single mothers were employed when their children were under three, 49 percent when the children were three to five years old, and 63 percent once the children reached six. Clearly, the responsibilities of caring for very young children without the presence of another parent make it extremely difficult to manage the demands of both paid work and family care.

With increasingly large numbers of children being raised in single-parent families - the vast majority of which are headed by women - it is more important than ever before to ensure that governments provide the social supports to mothers to find and keep jobs that can move them and their children above the poverty line. Aside from the improved income for their families, there is overwhelming evidence that children can benefit developmentally when their mothers are employed - if their mothers have decently paid jobs where they are treated respectfully. ¹⁵ This is particularly true when mothers are moving from welfare back to the paid work force.

Several U.S. studies have found that when mothers on welfare look for and find employment voluntarily, they and their children benefit in many important ways. These studies show results ranging from higher self-esteem and more positive opinions of how their families function, to higher reading achievement and vocabularies. Daughters of mothers who are employed full time had higher grade point averages than other children, and they describe their families as putting a higher priority on independence and achievement - all results that indicate that these girls will be more likely to do well in their studies and manage in the work force as independent and self-supporting adults themselves.

A study of 1,154 U.S. children whose mothers were single and had received welfare found that children whose mothers were employed did not suffer any negative effects, even when mothers were employed at very low wages, but when the mothers' wages were higher, children's outcomes were better. The children whose mothers were employed in very low paid jobs had outcomes that were about the same as those children whose mothers stayed on welfare. When mothers were employed in jobs paying more than $5.00 U.S. an hour, researchers started to find improved outcomes for the children. At $5.00 U.S. an hour, children's reading and math scores were better. When mothers were paid $7.50 U.S. an hour or more, even more positive outcomes appeared - such as fewer behavioural problems and improved reading comprehension.¹⁶

The quality of the mothers' jobs is a very important factor in how their families fare. U.S. studies show that parents with complex jobs were more likely to encourage self-direction and flexibility in their children. On the other hand, working in repetitive and heavily supervised jobs erodes parents' intellectual flexibility and can lead parents to stress obedience over independence in their children. A poorly paid, stressful job with long hours jeopardizes the quality of parenting by demanding the parent's time, energy and attention, while adding very little materially to the family's well-being.¹⁷

During recent welfare reforms in Canada, several provincial governments introduced policy changes that force single parents to find work while their children are still very young. In Alberta, for example, the old welfare policy exempted single parents from job search requirements until their children were two years old. As of 1993, single-parent welfare recipients must seek work or enter training once their children are six months old.

The National Council of Welfare supports policies that provide incentives to low-income parents to find and keep satisfying and decently paid jobs. The Council also supports approaches to social policy that support the opportunities for full participation of women in the work force. It seems obvious that encouraging parents to find and keep jobs makes good sense all around for parents, children and the welfare system. But in reality, most single parents just cannot go to work without good social services - child care in particular - to back them up. The chronic shortage of child care spaces, the high cost of child care, and the other costs related to finding and keeping a job create barriers to entering the work force, especially for parents who would normally receive low wages. Until real supports for parents in the work force exist, the pressure from welfare departments to seek work can only be described as punitive and unfair.

Child Care and Parents in the Labour Market

As parents across the country will testify, the absence of child care is a significant obstacle to finding and keeping jobs for parents of young children. All the major reports on women and work have pointed to child care as essential to women's participation in the work force. Overwhelming evidence shows that children need high-quality child care to benefit from the experience, and public regulation has proven again and again to be the best way to ensure quality in child care.

Very little regulated child care even exists in Canada. The University of Toronto's Childcare Resource and Research Unit estimates that there are regulated child care spaces for only 8.4 percent of the children who need them.¹⁸ Most parents rely on unregulated care - often by family members and neighbours - where the quality of care is completely unpredictable. This creates unconscionable risks for children's health and safety, and unnecessary anxiety for their parents. For parents and children with special needs such as the children's health or disability, and for parents working irregular hours or shift-work, child care is often completely unavailable.

Nearly all studies about the decisions mothers make about their employment show that the cost of child care is one of their key considerations. Many studies have shown that for single-parent mothers, the effects of the cost of child care on labour market participation are even stronger than for other parents. The Canadian National Child Care Survey found that if child care costs rose by ten percent, the employment rate of single-parent mothers would drop by about six percent. Nearly 40 percent of single-parent mothers who were working and paying for child care reported that if their child care costs were to rise by 25 percent, they would quit their jobs.¹⁹

The costs of Canadian child care are high and they are rising. Fees for a preschooler's care ranged from $348 to $536 a month in 1995, with some parents paying as much as $850 a month for high-quality care in downtown Toronto or Ottawa. A 1998 study from Status of Women Canada showed that with the federal, provincial and territorial governments' cuts to funding for social programs, the costs of child care are rising. At the same time that fee subsidies to low-income families have been cut or frozen, eligibility criteria for subsidies have become more restrictive, and family incomes are decreasing.²⁰

The issue of child care has been raised again and again by the National Council of Welfare, by other social policy organizations, by women's rights groups and by child development experts. Successive federal governments have made commitments to a national child care program. As recently as 1993, the federal Liberal Party promised to create 50,000 new child care spaces in each year that follows a year of three percent economic growth for a total of 150,000 new spaces, if it could obtain the consent of the provinces and territories. The spaces have simply never materialized.

Although there are many excellent child care programs scattered across the country, Canada has never succeeded in creating a national child care system. The absence of a national system that guarantees quality, affordability and accessibility is nothing short of outrageous. The issues around providing good quality, affordable and accessible elementary school were debated and resolved a century ago, but the debate over child care continues - even in the face of overwhelming evidence that public investment in child care is as good for the country as it is for children and their families.

ENDNOTES CHAPTER II

1. David P. Ross, Katherine Scott and Mark A. Kelly, "Overview: Children in Canada in the 1990s," Growing Up in Canada: National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (Ottawa: Human Resources Development Canada, 1996).

2. Nicole Marcil-Gratton, "Growing up with Mom and Dad? The Intricate Family Life Courses of Canadian Children." Occasional paper from Statistics Canada, July 1998.

3. Ross, Scott and Kelly.

4. Nicole Marcil-Gratton, private communication, November 1998.

5. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, Child Neglect in Rich Nations (New York: UNICEF, 1993).

6. Lee Rainwater and Timothy Smeeding, "Doing Poorly: The Real Income of American Children in a Comparative Perspective," Appendix Table A-2, Working Paper Number 127, Luxembourg Income Study, August 1995 (http://lissy.ceps.lu/wpapers.htm); and United Nations, "Safety Nets for Children are Weakest in U.S." in The Progress of Nations 1996 (New York: United Nations, 1996).

7. Statistics Canada, Labour Force Update, Winter 1998, Vol. 2, No. 1.

8. Catherine Lee, Linda Duxbury, Christopher Higgins, Employed Mothers: Balancing Work and Family Life (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Management Development, 1994).

9. Brenda Lipsett and Mark Reesor, "Flexible Work Arrangements: Evidence from the 1991 and 1995 Survey of Work Arrangements." (Ottawa, Human Resources Development Canada, 1997).

10. Sharon Hope Irwin and Donna S. Lero, In Our Way: Child Care Barriers to Full Workforce Participation(Wreck Cove, Nova Scotia: Breton Books, 1997).

11. Kathy O'Hara, "Comparative Family Policy: Eight Countries' Stories." Study Number F/04. (Ottawa: Canadian Policy Research Networks Inc., December 1998).

12. Maureen Baker, Canadian Family Policies: Cross-national Comparisons (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1995).

13. United Nations Human Development Programme (UNDP), Human Development Report 1998 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 131.

14. Statistics Canada, Earnings of Men and Women, 1996.

15. Martha J. Zaslow and Carol A. Emig, "When Low-Income Mothers Go to Work: Implications for Children," The Future of Children: Welfare to Work, (www.futureofchildren.org) Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 1997.

16. Kristin A. Moore and Anne K. Driscoll, "Low-Wage Maternal Employment and Outcomes for Children: A Study," The Future of Children: Welfare to Work, (www.futureofchildren.org) Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 1997.

17. Toby L. Parcel and Elizabeth G. Menaghan, "Effects of Low-Wage Employment on Family Well-Being," The Future of Children: Welfare to Work, (www.futureofchildren.org) Vol. 7, No. 1, Spring 1997.

18. Childcare Resource and Research Unit, Child Care in Canada: Provinces and Territories 1995 (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1995).

19. Gordon Cleveland and Michael Krashinsky, The Benefits and Costs of Good Child Care: The Economic Rationale for Public Investment in Young Children (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1998).

20. Gillian Doherty, Martha Friendly and Mab Oloman, Women's Support, Women's Work: Child Care in an Era of Deficit Reduction, Downsizing and Deregulation (Ottawa: Status of Women Canada, 1998).

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CHILD DEVELOPMENT ISSUES FOR TWO- TO SIX-YEAR-OLDS

Good health and development during early childhood are among the most important factors in making sure that people grow up healthy enough to learn, find work, raise families of their own and participate fully in society for the rest of their lives. Other factors such as the social supports people get from their family and friends, the communities in which they live, their level of education, and the luck of being born with good genetic endowment are also very important to people's health. All these factors work together and all are significant, but research has proven that of all of them, the most important is income and social status.¹

Governments themselves have recognized this by adopting a population health approach to health and social policy in the 1990s. Table 3-A on the next page shows the determinants of population health identified by Health Canada.

Even when people have all the basics such as adequate food and shelter, the higher their income and social status, the better people's health. The Whitehall Study followed the health of more than 10,000 British civil servants for nearly 20 years. It showed that health and life expectancy improved at each level in the ranks of the civil service, even though all the people studied had adequate incomes, and all worked in "low risk" office jobs. Even when the study looked at "high risk" health behaviours such as smoking, researchers found that top people who smoked were much less likely to die of smoking-related causes.²

Stress explains a lot of the differences in health status. Living with prolonged stress hurts the biological systems of all animals - including people - and gives rise to many illnesses. For example, children who lived with some stress and were exposed to streptococcal infections were more likely to become ill than children who were similarly exposed but had not had stressful experiences.³ When the Whitehall Study looked at the differences in coping with stress at each level within the hierarchy of the British civil service, it found that although all ranks in the study had similarly raised levels of stress when they were at work, the blood pressure of senior administrators dropped when they went home, but low-level workers' did not. Both animals and people who live in unsatisfactory, low-level social arrangements live in states of constant alert, never knowing when there will be another threat to their sense of well-being."⁴

TABLE 3-A DETERMINANTS OF POPULATION HEALTH
Income and Social Status	Health status improves at every step up the income and social ladder.
Social Support	Supports from families, friends and communities have effects as strong as risk factors such as smoking and physical activity.
Education	Health status improves with level of education. Education increases opportunities for income and job security.
Employment and Working Conditions	Increased control over one's work environment and fewer stresses increase health.
Social Environments	The combination of employment, social status, social support networks, education and social factors in the workplace work together to affect health.
Physical Environments	Air, water and soil quality in natural environment and housing, workplace safety, community and road design affect health outcomes.
Biology and Genetic Endowment	A person's predisposition to disease or disability affects health.
Gender	Health experiences of men and women are different (for example, child birth). Women's and men's use of the health care system and social experiences also differ.
Personal Health Practices and Coping Skills	People's health behaviours and coping skills are key influences.
Child Development	Health at birth is affected by mothers' health, income and living conditions. Early development has significant effects on brain growth.
Health Services	Quality, affordability and accessibility of health services affect populations' health.
Culture "EN5"	Health practices, use of health services, life in community are all affected by culture.

These findings about stress help to explain some of the difficulties of parenting while coping with the pressures of high-stress, low-status, low-paying jobs, living as a single parent without a partner to share the burden, or living on welfare, in poor housing or in a run-down or dangerous neighbourhood. One result of these stresses is that parents' capacity to provide the responsiveness and appropriate discipline essential for optimal child development is seriously compromised.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (National Children's Survey) found that the capacity of parents to care for children and their children's developmental outcomes are better at each step up the income ladder. Low social support, family dysfunction and depression in children's caregivers had significant negative effects on children's outcomes. Of the children living in low-income households, 18 percent lived with parents who had many symptoms of depression. In middle-income households, the rate was eight percent, and in higher-income families the rate was only five percent. Children living with depressed parents were almost four times as likely to be living in lower-income households than in higher-income households.⁶

Study after study in Canada and other countries have shown the impact of poverty on all aspects of children's development, with short-term and long-term effects. During the first four years of life, injury is the most common cause of death of Canadian children, and children living in poor neighbourhoods are more likely to die of injuries. Aboriginal preschoolers have a death rate from injuries that is more than five times the rate of the total Canadian preschool population.

Motor vehicle accidents, drowning, and burns are the leading causes of children's deaths by injury. Thirty-eight percent of those injuries were caused by motor vehicle accidents. One reason for the high level of deaths of young children in car crashes is the poor use of child restraints. In 1989, a Transport Canada survey reported that less than half of all Canadian preschoolers travelling as passengers in motor vehicles were properly restrained.⁷ There are many other strong associations between poverty and environmental dangers to children: children in families on welfare, for example, are far less likely to use seatbelts than children in general.⁸

Child abuse occurs in families of all incomes, but it is a particularly great problem for children living in poverty. The families investigated by child welfare services are disproportionately poor: between 38 and 50 percent of families investigated for child abuse in Ontario in 1993 were on welfare. Although some of these investigations may be biased on the basis of social class,⁹ strong evidence indicates that children are far more likely to be physically, sexually and emotionally abused when they live in poor neighbourhoods. Concentrated neighbourhood poverty and child abuse are very closely linked, and abuse is more likely the more intense the poverty in the children's neighbourhood. Researchers believe that this is caused in part by the stresses of living in poverty, and in part by some individual and family characteristics that lead to poverty.¹⁰ For children, the combination of these factors create environments that are both physically and emotionally dangerous. For children in families already dealing with other stress factors, the results of abuse are particularly damaging.

An Ontario study found that poor children have consistently higher levels of problems with psychiatric disorders, poor school performance and social impairment. The poorer the families, the worse the results, but the differences are most marked for children whose families' annual incomes were below the poverty line.¹¹ The National Children's Survey found that four- and five-year-old children in poorer families are less likely to have the skills that make it easier for them to enter school than children from middle-income families. However, neither poor nor middle-income children fared as well as children from families with high incomes.¹²

Early childhood has often been called the "critical" or "investment" period for intervention in population health. The impacts of experiences in early life build on each other and affect people's physical and emotional health throughout their lives. Children who benefit from certain positive experiences during this period - even when they are exposed to many other risk factors - sometimes develop unusually good social or coping skills which can help them to cope with risk and adversity for the rest of their lives.¹³

New understanding of the enormous effects of early childhood experiences on a person's whole life has led to a debate about the best social policy approaches to working with young children. Unfortunately, this has led some people to believe that governments should focus their efforts on early childhood, and then ignore the social programs that support other important times and aspects of people's lives. Without supports that cover the other important factors of population health, the successes of even the best early interventions are diminished. Some of the positive effects of U.S. Head Start programs on children's I.Q., for example, can fade out in a few years if children go on to poor-quality elementary schools and continue to live in high-risk situations¹⁴. With good supports that continue beyond early childhood, the positive results of good programs are protected and even amplified. At the Abecedarian project in North Carolina, children who participated in good quality early childhood programs with follow-up into elementary school achieved reading scores far higher than either the children who attended preschool without follow-up or the children who attended elementary school without preschool.¹⁵

Health Canada and many of the provincial and territorial governments have adopted population health as their approach to policy and planning. The National Council of Welfare supports this sensible and comprehensive approach to social programs. Good social policy for children must include strong supports to their parents and their communities. Social policy that includes strong supports for parents may also help to reduce the strains on couples raising children together and help to maintain more stable and enduring relationships between parents. Many single parents are able to raise children on their own, but sharing the job of raising children with a supportive partner and the possibility of two incomes instead of one reduces parents' stress levels and the likelihood that families will live in poverty.

Child Development Goals for Preschoolers

Between two and six years of age, a child moves from babyhood into childhood, and begins to develop his or her independence from adults. Young children begin to make their own friends, express their own ideas and explore the world around them. While they develop their independence, they depend on the care, guidance and constant supervision of their parents and the other adults around them.

The intense growth and development during this period have enormous impact on children's future health and social development. One measure of the achievement of children's developmental goals is their preparation and readiness for formal school. School readiness at age six has a great impact on children's capacity to benefit from primary school, and children who are successful in primary school are much more likely to complete high school.¹⁶ Higher levels of education help people to find and keep good jobs with incomes that allow them to raise their own children out of poverty.

A 1997 research paper about school readiness that was prepared for Human Resources Development Canada identifies five main components to child development:

physical well-being and appropriate motor development;

emotional health and a positive approach to new experiences;

age-appropriate social knowledge and competence;

age-appropriate language skills; and

age-appropriate general knowledge and cognitive skills."EN17"

As Table 3-B on the next page shows, each part of child development becomes a foundation for the next. Like the determinants of health, all these factors of child development work together to create optimal development. Good early childhood programs have been proven to have a significant impact on helping children to achieve some or all of these goals, and on supporting their parents to provide the care their children need.

But it is also important to remember that in all early childhood development, research shows that poverty plays a serious and negative role. Children who are born into and raised in poverty face serious obstacles in their earliest development that shape their access to education, jobs, a stable family, and a fair start to life. Other factors such as coming from certain racial or cultural minorities or having health or developmental difficulties make it much harder - and sometimes impossible - for certain children to meet the goals of school-readiness.

TABLE 3-B SOME DEVELOPMENTS IN COMPONENTS OF SCHOOL READINESS BETWEEN BIRTH AND AGE FIVE "EN18"
Age	Motor Development	Emotional Health/Positive Approach to New Experiences	Social Knowledge and Competence	Language Skills	General Knowledge and Cognitive Skills
Two months	sucking and other survival reflexes, little voluntary control	unable to differentiate self from other	no concept of being able to influence another	reflex crying when nervous system is over stimulated	no understanding of cause-and-effect
One year	independently mobile using non-walking methods, can walk holding onto something, able to grasp items using thumb and forefinger	can differentiate primary caregiver(s) from others, will use caregiver as a secure emotional and physical base for exploration	understands that others can act and be acted upon, engages in games with familiar adults, imitates others	skilled at using gestures, e.g., holds up arms to be picked up. Imitates words, first spontaneous and deliberate word uttered around age one	engages in task variation and deliberate experimentation, has some sense of cause-and-effect in a specific situation
Two years	able to walk and climb stairs, eye-hand co-ordination sufficiently developed to allow manipulation of large objects	increasing self-confidence, will move a considerable distance from caregiver when exploring	interested in playing along side other children, but not actually with them in a joint activity	can string two or three words together in a simple sentence, e.g., Alook truck@	begins to move from reliance to replica objects, e.g., a doll, in pretend play to use of substitute objects, e.g., a pillow for a Ababy@
Three years	skilled at climbing and jumping. Fine motor co-ordination sufficiently developed to permit manipulation of small objects	beginning to regulate own behaviour, tries to handle emotions such as frustrations but still needs adult help and guidance	interested in playing with other children. Has difficulty sharing because of difficulty taking the perspective of another	has some basic idea of grammar, e.g., adds As@ for a plural, asks questions, forms multi-word sentences	shows some basic understanding of categorization, e.g., can sort by colour or by shape, but makes mistakes
Four years	can control a pencil and cut with scissors	can control own emotions, such as anger or frustration, in many situations with minimal adult assistance	plays with other children. Is able to take turns and engage in co-operative activities	can join simple sentences together to describe a past or present action or experience	reliably sorts by colour or shape, but not by both simultaneously
Five years	able to write letters, turn book pages without tearing them	has some ability to stop and think before deciding how to act, is curious about the world outside the home	has basic peer relationships skills, e.g., knows how to enter a group	can hold a prolonged conversation and express ideas	by the end of the year, can sort by both colour and shape simultaneously

Physical Well-being and Appropriate Motor Development. During early childhood, children begin to walk, climb stairs, ride tricycles and play outdoors with their friends. While they develop the physical ability to be independent and the judgement to cope with their independence, small children rely on the adults in their lives to ensure that their environments are safe. By the time children enter school, they must have the physical skills to sit for prolonged periods, hold a pencil, and turn the pages of a book. To succeed in school, children must also be healthy enough to attend school regularly and to concentrate on their lessons.

The National Council of Welfare's 1997 report, Healthy Parents, Healthy Babies, showed the importance of social programs and income supports to ensure that children are born healthy to healthy parents. Poverty and the lack of good prenatal care frequently results in babies born with low birth weights, long-term disabilities and developmental delays. Good nutrition and stimulation from the very start are essential to the healthy development of children's brains and bodies.

To make sure that their children can achieve optimal physical development, parents must be able to provide safe and healthy environments for their children and make sure that an adult is present at all times to supervise. Good quality early childhood programs that involve parents in learning about their children's needs have been proven to help parents provide safer environments for their children and to improve health outcomes from lower rates of childhood injuries and poisonings to higher childhood immunization rates. Studies of many early programs show that parents who are given the information make the changes that improve their children's lives.¹⁹

U.S. Head Start programs have found that children who participated in their programs have better immunization rates and better nutrition. As a result, children have higher growth rates, higher levels of iron and other beneficial nutritional elements.²⁰ Children whose mothers benefitted from good home visiting programs in New York State's Appalachian region had 40 percent fewer injuries and poisonings and made 35 percent fewer visits to the emergency department than children in the comparison group.²¹

Programs that support parents are also key to reducing the risk of child abuse. Parents are most likely to become abusive when they have low self-esteem, lack parenting skills, live in poverty and lack family support, so interventions that affect these risk factors reduce the risks to their children. Good quality child care that provides parents with a short break from looking after their children, or provides regular care while parents work or attend training programs takes some of the pressure off parents. At the same time, it ensures that young children are always provided with the supervision they need for safety.

Emotional Health and a Positive Approach to New Experiences. When children develop happy and secure attachments to adults who care for them well, they learn to trust that they will be taken care of and can learn to take risks on their own. The security and emotional stability that children develop through secure attachments help them to develop the skills they need by the time they enter school, where they must be able to try new tasks, be persistent in repeating exercises and be able to protect themselves from the fear of failure.

Parenting that promotes optimal child development combines responsiveness to children's needs with discipline. Results from the National Children's Survey show that very good parenting can help children in high-risk situations to achieve developmental results that are equivalent or even better than children in more favourable situations who did not benefit from such good care.²² The National Children's Survey results also show that certain risk factors make it particularly hard for parents to provide this care. Low social support, family dysfunction and depression in caregivers have significant negative effects on children's outcomes.

Parents who are poor face extra obstacles in providing their children with emotional stability. Young children are especially vulnerable to the strains of coping with their families' economic stresses. A study of children in Sudbury, Ontario, found children whose fathers' jobs were uncertain worried tremendously, and the younger children in this study - in this case, grade 6 students - worried more than the older children. Children whose fathers' jobs were at risk fretted about many things that were not related to their fathers' employment - such as their mothers getting sick or going away or someone dying.²³

Strong early childhood programming that involves and supports parents helps to reduce many of the emotional risks to families and children. The National Children's Survey researchers recommend several early childhood interventions to promote the emotional development of children. These include providing social support for families, intensive services for children exposed to multiple risk factors, training for parents to help them understand the impact of their parenting styles, and providing community-based parent support programs such as accessible, welcoming parent resource centres.²⁴

Young children's emotional needs are also met by adults outside their families. Children often form secure attachments with more than one caregiver - if those caregivers know them well enough to respond to each child's special needs and respond to them promptly and warmly. Even very young children can have secure attachments to their mothers and fathers, as well as having secure attachments to a few other adults who take care of them regularly and know them well, such as their grandparents or regular child care providers. Researchers have found that when children are secure with their caregivers, they are more likely to be curious about the world around them and more likely to play with others.

Children's attachments to the adults in the programs they attend are very important. Many studies have shown that children have very similar reactions to their caregivers as they do to their parents. When the caregivers are consistent, studies show that the children and caregivers have more interaction with each other, and the children are less anxious and less likely to be socially withdrawn or aggressive. When there is a high turnover in caregivers - as there often is in Canadian programs - children show less secure attachments to caregivers, spend less time in social activities and more time wandering aimlessly, and have lower scores in language development and lower perceptions of their own competence.

Community-based programs for children and families in Canada are plagued by very low funding. Too many programs provide low salaries and benefits for the people who look after children and have too many children per staff person - all conditions that have been proven again and again to increase staff turnover. High staff turnover damages the quality of children's programs by disrupting the important emotional connections between children and caregivers.

Having staff trained in child development has also been proven to increase the ability of programs to encourage children's development and to ensure that the interactions of adults with children are appropriate for the children's ages and needs.²⁵ Despite this evidence, Canadian programs do not receive adequate funding to attract and keep highly trained staff and to provide them with the on-going training to keep their skills up to date. A 1998 report on the Canadian child care work force found that the cost of formal child care training posed a serious obstacle for students who expected to receive low salaries once they were trained, and the low levels of funding made it very difficult for child care organizations to provide training for their staff.²⁶

Many studies have shown that community-based programs play an extremely important role in providing support to parents and in working with children directly. Ensuring that programs for young children have the funding to attract and keep qualified staff who can support children's emotional growth must be a priority for Canadian social policy.

Age-appropriate Social Knowledge and Competence. Six-year-old children are expected to be able to conform to acceptable levels of behaviour in public places. This means learning to control their behaviour, co-operate with others on assignments, show respect for adult authority and communicate their feelings and desires in socially acceptable ways. By the time they enter school, children must know how to play with others, make and keep friends, and make judgements of their own.

Very young children are self-centred. They slowly develop a sense of the world around them and the needs of others by watching others and by getting direct instructions. The involvement of caring adults is essential. Instructions to "Say hello to Mrs. Jones," to wave goodbye and not to hit tell children how they are expected to treat others.

At first, children play one-to-one games with the adults who take care of them. At about 15 months, they develop an interest in playing near others. As they develop, children begin to be able to put themselves in someone else's position. With the guidance of adults, children learn the "rules" of playing that allow them to be accepted by others - for example, how to share toys, how to play without hitting and how to enter a group. Children have to learn to be accepted by other children. Children who are not accepted by others carry lifelong emotional difficulties and are far more likely to drop out of school.²⁷

Children also benefit from opportunities in child care settings and drop-in programs where adults other than their parents supervise their play. For children whose parents are socially isolated or who lack the skills and confidence to provide guidance to their children, the social opportunities of these programs are very valuable. In fact, studies of early childhood education programs such as the High/Scope Perry Preschool in Michigan show that the positive effects on children's socialization last. Children show better behaviours in school, are more likely to complete school, are less likely to be involved in crime and are more likely to form stable families of their own when they become adults.²⁸

Age-appropriate Language Skills. By school age, children must be able to understand the communication of the children and adults around them and to communicate with others. Children develop these skills when adults spend time with them talking, playing and reading stories.

The most sensitive period for language acquisition is between nine months and five years of age. After that time, children remain quite sensitive to language for another two years. Later in life, language acquisition is still possible, but takes a lot more effort.²⁹

Language skills are obviously key to communicating with others, but they are also part of general learning. The idea that things are "symbols" for other things is part of learning skills such as reading and math. Children who do not master these skills become very frustrated and are less likely to succeed in school. Poor language skills in early childhood are among the predictors of later delinquency. Evidence from several studies suggests that good language skills developed early in life may even help to protect children against later behavioural problems.³⁰

Dozens of studies have shown that good quality early childhood programs have a remarkable impact on children's language skills, which in turn affect their ability to get along with other people. In Sweden, children who entered public day care as infants had higher scores on verbal tests and in school subjects than the children who entered day care later.³¹ Swedish children who participated in child care continued to benefit from these experiences when they were tested at ages eight and 13. In the words of the Swedish researchers, "The results indicate that early entrance into day-care tends to predict a creative, socially confident, popular, open and independent adolescent.³²

The High/Scope Perry Preschool Program in Michigan found that within three months of entering the program and immediately after the preschool program, children significantly outscored others on non-verbal intellectual performance, on vocabulary and on psycho-linguistic abilities. Long afterward, at age 27, former participants of the Perry Preschool Program had completed significantly higher levels of schooling, had far fewer arrests, higher earnings and more stable adult family lives than non-participants from the same backgrounds.³³

Age-appropriate General Knowledge and Cognitive Skills. The two major cognitive goals for preschoolers are the ability to understand the concepts of symbols - that is, how one thing represents another - and the ability to understand the concept of relative quantity - that is, understanding that one thing is bigger than another.³⁴ Good language skills, knowing the alphabet and knowing how to count help children to understand ideas about order and putting things into categories.

The most intense and sensitive period of cognitive development is the preschool period. A child starts to develop cognitive skills by watching others, by playing and by listening. Children learn about cause and effect by experimenting, by throwing toys down the stairs or off the high chair during meals. They learn about the senses by putting things in their mouths, playing with toys, playing with other children and talking with adults.

Good quality preschool programs have been proven to have significant effects on the cognitive development of children considered to be at risk. Although there is some evidence that early I.Q. gains "fade out," other gains related to cognitive development are remarkable. Children who have attended good quality early childhood programs are less likely to be placed in special education classes, less likely to fail a grade, are more likely to achieve higher levels of schooling and less likely to come in conflict with the law.³⁵

The Abecedarian Project in North Carolina worked with children whose mothers were young, Black single parents with less than high school education. The program provided preschool education for the children with a particular emphasis on stimulating language development. The program included very strong support services. Parents were encouraged to participate in group sessions on a wide variety of topics related to parenting and family development. They had the assistance of social workers who provided personal counselling and some direct help with issues such as housing and welfare. A team of on-site nurses and pediatricians provided medical care for the children. Children began attending at extremely young ages, most at about eight weeks of age.

The results from the Abecedarian Project are impressive. At every testing occasion from infancy to the end of preschool, children significantly outperformed children from similar backgrounds who had not attended the program. Despite the very high risk factors, Abecedarian children were six times less likely to score within the mildly retarded range than were children who had not benefitted from the program. When the program examined the results for children at the highest risk of poor cognitive development - that is, the children of mothers with low I.Q. scores - the results were even more marked. The children of low-I.Q. mothers appeared to be especially responsive to intensive, high-quality preschool interventions, and were particularly vulnerable without it.³⁶

Study after study shows that children's development benefits enormously from high quality early childhood programs. Research from around the world points to several key ingredients for quality in early childhood programs:

health and safety provisions that ensure children's well-being;

an environment that ensures the programs work well for children and the staff;

staff-to-child ratios that ensure that caregivers and children have enough time with each other learning and forming relationships with each other;

groups of children that are small enough to allow the children to spend time with each other and their caregivers;

caregivers with specific training in child development and early childhood education so that they know how to respond to young children's needs;

staffing that is stable so that children have a chance to develop trusting relationships with the staff; and

programming that is appropriate for children's developmental levels and individual needs.³⁷

Successful programs for the most disadvantaged children must also put a priority on working with children in the context of their families and working with families in the context of their surroundings. The particular pressures of raising children in poverty and stress make it all the more important that disadvantaged parents get the supports they need with their own lives to make sure that they are able to provide for their own children.³⁸

ENDNOTES CHAPTER III

1. Federal, Provincial and Territorial Advisory Committee on Population Health, Strategies for Population Health: Investing in the Health of Canadians (prepared for the Meeting of the Ministers of Health, Halifax, Nova Scotia, September 14-15, 1994). (Ottawa: Health Canada, 1994).

2. R.G. Evans, "Introduction," in Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not? (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994), pp. 5-7

3. R.G. Evans, "If Not Genetics, Then What? Biological Pathways and Population Health," in Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not? (New York: Aldine de Gruyter, 1994), p. 163.

4. R.G. Evans, "Introduction," pp. 11-15.

5. Health Canada, "Towards a Common Understanding: Clarifying the Core Concepts of Population Health," (Ottawa: Health Canada, 1996).

6. Sandy Landy and Kwok Kwan Tam, "Yes, Parenting Does Make a Difference to the Development of Children in Canada," in Growing up in Canada: National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth. (Ottawa: Statistics Canada, 1996); and David P. Ross, Katherine Scott and Mark A. Kelly, Overview: Children in Canada in the 1990s, (Ottawa: Applied Research Branch, Human Resources Development Canada, 1996), p. 44.

7. Canadian Institute of Child Health, The Health of Canada's Children. (Ottawa, Canadian Institute of Child Health, 1994), pp. 44-45, 52, 61, 122 and 143.

8. Nicholas Zill, Kristin A. Moore, Ellen Wolpow Smith, Thomas Stief and Mary Jo Coiro, "The Life Circumstances and Development of Children in Welfare Families: A Profile Based on National Survey Data," in Escape From Poverty: What Makes A Difference for Children? (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

9. Nico Trocm�, Kwok Kwan Tam, and Debra McPhee, "Correlates of Substantiation of Maltreatment in Child Welfare Investigations," Child Welfare in Canada: Research and Policy Implications. (Toronto: Thompson Educational Publishing, 1995), pp. 20-21.

10. Brett Drake and Shanta Pandey, "Understanding the Relationship between Neighbourhood Poverty and Specific Types of Child Maltreatment," Child Abuse and Neglect, Vol. 20, No. 11, 1996.

11. Ellen L. Lipman, David R. Offord and Michael H. Boyle, "Relation between economic disadvantage and psychosocial morbidity in children," Canadian Medical Association Journal, 151 (4), 1994.

12. David P. Ross and Paul Roberts, "Does Family Income Affect the Healthy Development of Children," Perception, Vol. 21, No. 1, January 1997.

13. National Crime Prevention Council, "Resiliency in Young Children," (Ottawa: National Crime Prevention Council, November 1995); and Paul D. Steinhauer, "Developing Resiliency in Children from Disadvantaged Populations," (unpublished report for the National Forum on Health, Health Canada, 1996).

14. However, some important positive effects remain even when I.Q. results fade. Children who participated in Head Start were less likely to fail a school year or to require placement in special education. Janet Currie and Duncan Thomas, "Do the Benefits of Early Childhood Education Last?" Policy Options, July/August 1997, and Frances A. Campbell and Karen Taylor, "Early Childhood Programs That Work for Children from Economically Disadvantaged Families," Young Children, May 1996

15. Craig T. Ramey and Frances A. Campbell, "Poverty, Early Childhood Education, and Academic Competence: The Abecedarian Experiment," Children in Poverty, Aletha C. Huston, editor, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

16. Gillian Doherty, Zero to Six: The Basis for School Readiness. (Ottawa: Human Resources Development Canada, 1997), pp. 1-2.

17. Same, p. iii

18. Same.

19. Campbell and Taylor.

20. Same.

21. David L. Olds, Charles R. Henderson, Jr. and Harriet Kitzmann, "Does Prenatal and Infancy Nurse Home Visitation Have Enduring Effects on Qualities of Parental Caregiving and Child Health at 25 to 50 Months of Life?" Pediatrics, Vol. 93, No 1, January 1994.

22. Landy and Kwok Kwan Tam.

23. Katherine J. Pautler and John H. Lewko, "Children's Worries and Exposure to Unemployment: A Preliminary Investigation," Canada's Mental Health, September 1984.

24. Landy and Kwok Kwan Tam.

25. Gillian Doherty-Derkowski, Quality Matters: Excellence in Early Childhood Programs. (Toronto: Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 13.

26. Jane Beach, Jane Bertrand and Gordon Cleveland, Our Child Care Workforce: From Recognition to Remuneration. (Ottawa: The Child Care Sector Study Steering Committee, 1998), p. 116.

27. Doherty, pp. 30-32.

28. W. Steven Barnett, "Long-Term Effects of Early Childhood Programs on Cognitive and School Outcomes," The Future of Children, (www.futureofchildren.org) Volume 5, Number 3, Winter 1995; and Lawrence J. Schweinhart, Helen V. Barnes and David P. Weikart, Significant Benefits: The High/Scope Perry Preschool Study Through Age 27. (Ypsilanti, Michigan: The High/Scope Press, 1993).

29. S. Begley, "Your Child's Brain," Newsweek, February 19, 1996.

30. Hirokazu Yoshikawa, "Long-term Effects of Early Childhood Programs on Social Outcomes and Delinquency," The Future of Children: Long-term Outcomes of Early Childhood Programs, (www.futureofchildren.org) Vol. 5 , No. 3, Winter 1995, p. 53.

31. Bengt-Erik Andersson, "Effects of Public Day-Care: A Longitudinal Study," Child Development, 60, 857-866, 1989.

32. Bengt-Erik Andersson, "Effects of Day-Care on Cognitive and Socioemotional Competence of Thirteen-Year-Old Swedish Schoolchildren," Child Development, 63, 20-36, 1992.

33. Schweinhart, Barnes andWeikart, pp. 69-70 and 222-227.

34. Doherty, pp. 53-55.

35. Sarene Spence Boocock, "Early Childhood Programs in Other Nations: Goals and Outcomes," The Future of Children, (www.futureofchildren.org) Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter 1995; Campbell and Taylor; Lisbeth B. Schorr, Within Our Reach: Breaking the Cycle of Disadvantage (New York: Anchor Books, 1989); Schweinhart, Barnes and Weikart; W. Steven Barnett, "Long-Term Effects of Early Childhood Programs on Cognitive and School Outcomes," The Future of Children, (www.futureofchildren.org) Vol. 5, No. 3, Winter 1995.

36. Ramey and Campbell.

37. Gillian Doherty-Derkowski, Quality Matters: Excellence in Early Childhood Programs. (Toronto: Addison-Wesley, 1995), p. 13.

38. Schorr, p. 257.

TOP

CANADIAN PROGRAMS FOR TWO- TO SIX-YEAR-OLD CHILDREN AND THEIR FAMILIES

With the enormous changes in family structure and the dramatic increase in the employment of mothers, families and children have a greater need for early childhood care and education programs than ever before. Families that can afford it often send their children to private nursery schools. Family resource centres fill the gap in some parts of the country. Public kindergarten is available to most children, but affordable, accessible and good-quality child care is still extremely hard to find.

During the winter of 1994-1995, the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth found that 32 percent of children eleven or under - 1.5 million children - were in some form of non-parental care while their parents worked or studied. Another million children had been in child care at some earlier point in their lives.¹ This means that a little more than half of all Canadian children experience some form of child care some time in their lives.

Despite the enormous number of children who use the services and the impact these services have on them and their families, Canada still has no real system of early childhood care and education. A maze of programs for young children and their families has developed across Canada, delivered by many different organizations with a variety of goals. Because of the efforts of dedicated service providers, many community-based programs across the country provide good services. But since there is no system of early childhood services to ensure enough affordable spaces, parents often rely on sheer luck to find the programs they and their children need - if programs that are suitable for their families even exist in their communities, and if they can afford them.

We can only describe the current state of children's services as chaotic, with a gross shortage of high-quality and affordable services, an excess of underfunded programs with poorly paid and poorly appreciated staff, and chaos created by the fragmentation and targeting of existing programs. When the federal government replaced the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP) with the Canada Health and Social Transfer in 1996, the few national standards that were in place disappeared.

In each part of the country, the different policies and administrative structures have fostered different approaches to serving children and families. Most provinces and territories still rely on a mix of commercial and non-profit child care with a wide range of fees and subsidies and provide some rules about the maximum number of children, the qualifications of staff, and the health and safety standards of the places children stay. Free kindergarten, on the other hand, has been a part of the school system in most provinces for a century.

Quebec's Family Policy

The one strikingly different arrangement is in Quebec, where a comprehensive new family policy introduced in 1997 is working to integrate family benefits, paid parental leave, child care and kindergarten. Child care will be available for all preschool children whose parents request it for $5 a day by 2001 - and as little as $2 a day for certain families with low incomes.

Quebec replaced several financial support programs for families (the baby bonus, an income supplement for families with children who received welfare and the universal family allowance) in the autumn of 1997 with one unified family allowance. Families with children now get a unified allowance from the provincial government as well as the Canada Child Tax Benefit from the federal government.

Poor families with earned income as opposed to income from government programs may also qualify for benefits from the Parental Wage Assistance Program. Benefits are based on earnings during the previous year and can be as high as $3,784 a year depending on family size and circumstances.

Maternity and parental leave is part of the federal unemployment insurance system. Eligible families are entitled to 15 weeks of maternity leave and ten weeks of parental leave for either parent, including adoptive parents. Benefits are calculated at 55 percent of the gross earnings of the parent who is taking leave. Parental leave can be extended a further five weeks in cases of adoptions with specific medical conditions. Pregnant workers can begin their unemployment insurance maternity leave as early as eight weeks before the birth.

Provinces and territories can provide additional benefits for families. All provinces and territories provide 17 or 18 weeks of unpaid maternity leave under provincial legislation, but Quebec now provides the most generous parental leave benefits in Canada. Because of major reforms to labour standards in 1991, Quebec now provides 18 weeks of unpaid leave for mothers and 34 weeks of unpaid leave for the mother, father or adoptive parents. Workers on maternity or parental leave have the right to return to the same job with any salary increases and rights that would have been received if they had been at work. For example, workers are entitled to all salary increases, accumulation of seniority, rights to apply for other jobs, and participation in insurance and pension plans with the employers paying their regular share. Both the mother and father are also entitled to five days of leave at the time of the birth or adoption and a further five days of unpaid leave to take care of children in emergencies. Workers do not have to work a specific period for the same employer before taking parental leave, which eliminates the problem of discrimination against pregnant women.²

The Quebec government has developed several initiatives to fill some of the gaps in federal unemployment insurance benefits. The federal program requires that all recipients wait for two weeks before they receive benefits - even when they are on leave for maternity, paternity or adoption leave. Quebec currently provides a maternity allowance to cover the waiting period. If specific work poses potential hazards to pregnancy or nursing, the Quebec workers' compensation plan provides pregnant workers with safer work in the same workplace or leave with benefits worth 90 percent of their salaries for the full term of the pregnancy.

Quebec is currently negotiating with the federal government an integrated system of parental leave that combines federal unemployment insurance with provincial programs. Under the Quebec proposals, mothers would be entitled to 18 weeks of maternity leave at 70 percent of gross earnings. Fathers would be eligible for three weeks' leave, either parent could take seven weeks of parental leave, and adoptive parents would be eligible for 12 weeks - all at 70 percent of earnings, provided the parent earned $2,000 during the previous year. Quebec plans to eliminate the two-week waiting period altogether.

The best-known part of Quebec's family policy is its child care component. Universally available, affordable child care is being phased in until every child in Quebec is able to get child care for $5 a day - and less if their families have low incomes. The $5-a-day contribution entitles children to a maximum of ten hours a day of child care, one meal and two snacks, and all the educational materials the children use at child care.

As of September 1997, all five-year-olds whose families wish to use the service have free full-time kindergarten with $5-a-day after-school care organized by the education authorities. Kindergarten remains optional, but even before the reforms, 98 percent of five-year-olds already attended kindergarten.³ All four-year-olds have part-time or full-time junior kindergarten or child care for $5 a day. Additional free early intervention services are available for four-year-olds whose parents receive welfare.

As of September 1998, all three-year-olds also have $5-a-day child care. Care for younger children and infants and school-age children is being phased in and will be available for every child under 12 by September 2001.

A new ministry responsible for family and children's services took over the responsibilities of the Quebec secretariat for the family and the bureau for child care services. Existing regional councils of development which have representatives from local governments, non-governmental organizations and the child care sector participate in planning the number and mix of child care arrangements in each region.

The new child care services are intended to be non-profit, community-based and parent-controlled after a five-year transition period. The plan is that all child care will be provided by Early Childhood Centres ("Centres de la petite enfance"), which are new organizations that incorporate many of the existing non-profit child care centres. The Early Childhood Centres are independent of government and have boards of directors in which two-thirds of the members are parents. All Early Childhood Centres now provide a mix of types of child care, including care in the centre and care in the homes of providers. Each Early Childhood Centre provides child care in the centre or in family homes for a maximum of 350 children. The Centres oversee the development of the child care spaces, including the supports to providers taking care of children in their homes.

Child care centres currently provide three-quarters of the spaces, but as more spaces are created for the youngest children, 56 percent of child care spaces will be in centres and the rest of the spaces will be in the homes of providers. Centres are intended to be a hub of family services and will provide a range of other family support services including weekend, evening, part-time and respite care and parenting classes.

Commercial child care will be encouraged to convert to non-profit care, but will be permitted to continue to provide services to parents who pay the full cost of service. Government quality controls over the ratios of staff to children, staff training and salaries, programs and financial reports will continue. During the transition years, while the expansion of the public system cannot keep up with the demand for services, the government has bought spaces in commercial child care which are available to families for $5 a day. It also increased the ratio of four-year-olds per child care worker from eight to ten.

As Table 4-A on the next page shows, these policy changes represent an enormous growth in Quebec's child care sector. The first three rows show the child care spaces that will be available to children under five by March 31 of each year. The first row shows child care spaces in centres, the next row shows child care spaces in family day care, and the third row shows the total child care spaces.

The government of Quebec has not released information about the percentage of children who will have access to child care under the new system. The bottom row of the table shows estimates by the National Council of Welfare using the number of children four and under in the 1996 census. By March 31, 2005, child care should be available for 38 percent of Quebec's youngest children. Of course, very few children under 12 months are in child care since most parents take the maximum maternity and parental leave, so the number of children needing care is probably slightly lower than we have calculated.

Comprehensive child care is not cheap. Quebec estimates that child care in centres costs about $22 a day, or $17 from the government and $5 from the parents. Care in family day care is about $15 a day - $10 from the government and $5 from the parents. For the fiscal year 1997-1998, the costs of all operating grants, subsidies, the development of new services and the training of staff was expected to cost $287 million. This included the costs of child care for five-year-olds and part of the year for four-year-olds. In fiscal year 1998-1999, Quebec expects its costs to be $427 million to cover the additional costs of the partial year of services for three-year-olds and much more extensive development of the infrastructure of child care programs.⁴

<>TABLE 4-A
DEVELOPMENT PLAN FOR CHILD CARE SERVICES IN QUEBEC

FOR CHILDREN FOUR AND UNDER, 1997 TO 2006,

Places available by March 31 each year

1997 to

1998

1998 to

1999

1999 to

2000

2000 to

2001

2001 to

2002

2002 to

2003

2003 to

2004

2004 to

2005

2005 to

2006

Spaces in centres

62,336

68,200

73,400

77,700

82,100

86,700

91,400

95,300

97,400

Spaces in family day care

21,628

30,400

43,300

52,300

59,800

67,300

74,800

75,700

75,900

Total available spaces

83,964

98,600

116,700

130,000

141,900

154,000

166,200

171,000

173,300

% of Quebec children four and under with a child care space

18%

22%

26%

29%

31%

34%

36%

38%

38%

The family policy - and especially the $5-a-day child care component - has been wildly popular in Quebec. The implementation of such a large reorganization and expansion of services has not been without problems. Some parents, service providers and advocacy groups have raised concerns about the organization and flexibility of services and the quality of child care during the expansion. Evaluations will tell more about how effective the family policy is.

Three challenges stand out: 1) combining information about families' incomes and eligibility for provincial family benefits in a way that is simple and fast enough to provide income supports to families quickly, when they need the money most, 2) ensuring the flexibility and quality of child care, and 3) ensuring that families that depend on welfare receive adequate incomes.

The National Council of Welfare is concerned that the family policy has not yet provided increases in incomes to families on welfare. However, the Council is impressed by the commitment of Quebec to ensuring the well-being of families with young children by creating a simplified, integrated and universal approach to policy and programs with a focus on child care. Assuming that the early problems are ironed out, Quebec's family policy will stand out as a pioneering approach to family supports in North America and will provide a sensible, logical model for the rest of the country.

Child Care in the Rest of Canada

In the rest of Canada, child care continues to be provided with no clear sense of direction. Child care is severely compromised on three fronts: the availability of spaces to meet the needs of children and their families, the affordability of care and the quality of the services provided.

Accessibility. The number of children who use child care does not even approach the number of children who actually need care. Families use child care to help balance jobs or schooling with their family responsibilities and because children benefit from the opportunity to participate in high quality early childhood education. Most European countries determine the "need" for child care by assuming that all children benefit from good early childhood education, so need is calculated by comparing the number of child care spaces to the total number of children. Sweden, for example, provides child care for 58 percent of all the children in its population under six years old, not just the children whose mothers have paid jobs.⁵ By contrast, Canada had regulated spaces for only nine percent of all children under twelve in 1996.

In Canada, the need for child care is usually measured using the numbers of children with mothers in the labour force, leaving out all the children who might use child care for other reasons. Table 4-B on the next page shows the need for child care for children under 12 years of age, but the following comments focus on the needs of children between three and five. The National Council of Welfare will look at child care for school-age children in a future report.

The first two of the columns for children three to five years old show the total number of children in each province and the total number of children with mothers in the paid labour force. The final column for that age group shows the percentage of children who need care because their mothers are working.

In Newfoundland, for example, there were 21,781 children ages three to five in March 1996, and 12,213 of those children had mothers in the paid labour force. In other words, 56 percent of the children in the age group needed some form of child care.

The percentage of children in the three-to-five age group who need child care ranged from 52 percent in New Brunswick to 70 percent in Prince Edward Island. The average for all ten provinces combined was 60 percent of the children in the age group.

TABLE 4-B NEED FOR CHILD CARE IN CANADA, MARCH 1996
	Birth to 2 Years Old			3 to 5 Years Old			6 to 12 Years Old			Total Birth to 12 Years Old
	Total children	Children with Mothers in Paid Labour Force	% of Children Needing Care	Total children	Children with Mothers in Paid Labour Force	% of Children Needing Care	Total children	Children with Mothers in Paid Labour Force	% of Children Needing Care	Total children	Children with Mothers in Paid Labour Force	% of Children Needing Care
Newfoundland	19,344	10,166	53%	21,781	12,213	56%	56,861	32,969	58%	97,986	55,348	56%
Prince Edward Island	5,309	3,794	71%	5,892	4,106	70%	13,906	9,588	69%	25,107	17,488	70%
Nova Scotia	33,146	18,803	57%	36,933	21,219	57%	86,343	53,055	61%	156,422	93,077	60%
New Brunswick	26,662	14,972	56%	28,949	15,170	52%	70,425	43,224	61%	126,036	73,366	58%
Quebec	275,026	163,666	60%	290,252	160,866	55%	627,028	399,561	64%	1,192,306	724,093	61%
Ontario	439,851	262,157	60%	458,643	276,775	60%	1,024,079	710,770	69%	1,922,573	1,249,702	65%
Manitoba	44,985	24,837	55%	46,939	30,105	64%	106,311	75,944	71%	198,235	130,886	66%
Saskatchewan	40,059	24,750	62%	44,529	29,766	67%	107,127	79,583	74%	191,715	134,099	70%
Alberta	116,518	71,838	62%	124,515	82,343	66%	289,243	211,372	73%	530,276	365,553	69%
British Columbia	141,582	77,844	55%	143,659	84,186	59%	337,797	244,910	73%	623,038	406,940	65%
Total	1,142,482	672,827	59%

<>TABLE 4-A DEVELOPMENT PLAN FOR CHILD CARE SERVICES IN QUEBEC FOR CHILDREN FOUR AND UNDER, 1997 TO 2006,
Places available by March 31 each year	1997 to 1998	1998 to 1999	1999 to 2000	2000 to 2001	2001 to 2002	2002 to 2003	2003 to 2004	2004 to 2005	2005 to 2006
Spaces in centres	62,336	68,200	73,400	77,700	82,100	86,700	91,400	95,300	97,400
Spaces in family day care	21,628	30,400	43,300	52,300	59,800	67,300	74,800	75,700	75,900
Total available spaces	83,964	98,600	116,700	130,000	141,900	154,000	166,200	171,000	173,300
% of Quebec children four and under with a child care space	18%	22%	26%	29%	31%	34%	36%	38%	38%