See text below.
EXCERPTS
At first, Andrea Brown just wasn't sure if it was the right move. "My children are four and 10 months, so my exposure to day-care was really limited, until it became a reality for our family," she says.
"You never want to be away from your kids but we needed something."
Brown's fears were allayed once she stopped by Beaumont's day care, one of only a handful of subsidized municipal programs left in Alberta.
She realized she learned better parenting skills just by visiting.
"I know it's a good facility and that makes me happy - but it also makes me sad because my kids love to go there and are not upset when I leave them," she says. "But I don't have to worry about them and it's been a huge resource as a parent because some of the things they do at the facility are not things I would've thought to do as a parent. And I get to take those home."
And when it comes to raising kids, the little details count.
University of Alberta child development expert Dr. Christina Rinaldi says study after study has shown that life-long patterns of behaviour can be determined in early childhood - and recognizing a child's direction is essential.
"Whoever the caregiver or parent is, if they understand a child's current skills and where their needs are, they can provide interactions that help the child's development.
Kids under six, in particular, have to develop solid emotional coping and social skills, she says.
"But there are different kinds of kids with different needs with respect to that development. So those with training or an awareness of the different temperaments we see in children are aware of strategies that work with those kids.
A MacEwan College study, Full Day Head Start: Early Intervention in Centre-Based Child Care, demonstrated that the longer kids are exposed to early-intervention programs - with a full day of care being the ideal - the better they do.
"While the dominant and preferred approach to supporting learning in all settings was child-directed, the underlying factors influencing the use of these different approaches appeared to be related to the nature and extent of funding, the funding requirements for formal assessment ... and the amount of time program staff were able to spend with each child and family," the research concluded.
It identified five key areas that contribute to that improvement over time:
- Trusting, respectful relationships developed over time between program staff and families;
- A focus on strength-based, capacity building child education, instead of focussing on a child's mistakes or deficits;
- A need to teach kids cultural diversity early in life;
- Multi-disciplinary professional support networks for parents and front-line caregivers;
- Adequate funding. "Child-care centres lack supportive social policy, adequate funding and resources and qualified staff. As a result, child-care workers have neither the time nor the resources to dedicate to the population of children and families at risk in their care."
While raising a child without any help might be a time-honoured tradition, child-care experts say, it's also a contributing factor to various social ills that begin with poor emotional development, particularly in kids from tough backgrounds.
"When you're able to target a particular problem early on, you can prevent it from becoming a bigger problem later on," says Rinaldi.
"It's an ecological system: parents are one piece of the puzzle, school is another, child care is another. And when they're all on board with providing the best quality care and they're all communicating with one another, then you have a good road map for the child to follow."
In that respect, child-care workers and community heads aren't just fighting politicians: they're also battling ignorance. In Beaumont, the 60 or so parents who use the centre get heat from other community members, says Brown.
"The people that don't need it say things like 'Oh, there's lots of people out there who can babysit,' and 'Why should I care about someone else's kid and help pay for it?' And the alternative for a lot of people is to have their kid sitting in front of a television in someone's home for eight hours.
"The fact that people find that acceptable, when the ages up until six are when kids learn and develop the most, is really discouraging to me. There have been a few articles in the local paper suggesting that people don't love their kids as much if they don't take care of them themselves and it just makes me want to scream and cry. Does the fact that you drop your kid off at a public school system that is funded by tax dollars mean you don't love them as much as kids who are home-schooled? Of course not. It's ridiculous and it's exactly the same thing."
And just as kids who move from school to school tend to underperform, so do kids presented with new role models and faces every six months at their centre.
In Alberta the staff turnover rate is nearly 50% annually.
Bill Moore-Kilgannon, with the lobby group Public Interest Alberta, says it doesn't take much research to realize that kids here aren't getting the care they could and should be.
"It's like education: from K to 12 you send your kid to school, it's paid for and teaching is recognized as an important profession. Teachers are well-paid and have professionalized their industry.
"Why from ages zero to five do we treat kids as a commodity, where we can drop them off in the morning, pick them up at night and what happens in between isn't a public concern?
"Child-care centres could be very important places for parents to come learn parenting skills, meet other parents, and break down the isolation that exists surrounding parenting. But there's no economic advantage to that."
- reprinted from the Edmonton Sun