Canada's Kids: Thriving? Or Just Surviving?
New research tells the epic tale of our nation's children and their families
in the 1990's.
by Donna McCloskey
The story of Canada's children is as vast and complex as the country itself; so
the most that can be done in these few pages is to trace a bare outline of the
plot. It will be up to you, the reader, to imagine the young faces behind the
facts, and to understand that the issues revealed are not just words; they
are the hopes, fears and tears of real families.
The Vanier Institute's version of the story is told mostly through excerpts
selected from two excellent publications: CCSD's The Progress of Canada's Children 1996 and Statistic
Canada's Growing Up in Canada. Both draw on many sources, especially
the first results from an ongoing initiative called the National Longitudinal
Survey of Children and Youth.
To begin, let's set the scene with some of the most telling facts we now
know about Canada's kids.
Canada's Kids: The Facts
(all quotations are from The Progress
of Canada's Children, except where otherwise noted.)
Canada's Kids: Who do they live with?
Good News
Bad News
Trends
Canada's Kids: Are they healthy and safe?
Good News
Bad News
Canada's Kids: Are they socially well-adjusted?
"If two-year olds had access to the kinds of weapons teenagers have, they'd
kill each other."
-- Dr. Richard E. Tremblay, as quoted in The Progress of Canada's Children
Good News
Bad News
Observations
Canada's Kids: How are they doing at school?
Good News
Bad News
Canada's Parents: How are they doing?
Good News
Time Crunch
Money Crunch
Canada's Families: How do parents' problems affect their kids?
- "Having a hostile parent negatively influences a child's ability to form
relationships, more so than any other aspect of a family's background."
- "Children living with parents who have serious depression problems tend
to have difficulty getting along with others and at school."
- "The fact that babies in low-income households are more likely to be born
at a low birth weight indicates that we still have much to do to improve
maternal and infant health."
- "Persistant family poverty has resulted in 1.4 million poor children." (Editor's
Note: This 1994 figure rose to 1.5 million in 1995.)
- "Children in poor households are twice as likely to have low scores on school-readiness tests
as children from families with greater economic resources."
- "The more socio-economically disadvantaged the family, the higher the risk
that the children will make use of indirect aggression, as well as physical aggression."
-- from an article by Tremblay and others in Growing Up in Canada.
- "Children who are constantly around smoke are at a greater risk for all
kinds of health problems."
-- Kristen Underwood, Canadian Institute of Child Health, as quoted in The Progress of
Canada's Children.
Canada's Kids: The Issues
Growing up is such a risky, complicated business that it seems nothing short of
a miracle that anyone emerges from it as a functioning adult. And yet, the National
Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) shows that, on the whole, children
in Canada are growing up healthy -- physically, emotionally and socially. Here
at the Vanier Institute of the Family we rejoice that this is
so, but our rejoicing for the majority is tempered by our sorrow for a less-healthy
minority. The authors of an overview article in Growing Up in Canada: National
Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth remind us that "averages
almost always conceal disparities, and in the survey results we see that a number
of children were experiencing difficulties. If neglected, these difficulties or
less positive outcomes may lead to ill health, inferior school performance,
unsatisfactory social relationships and ultimately poor labour-market opportunites
down the road." (Ross, Scott & Kelly)
To discover why some children blossom while others fail to thrive, researchers
have analyzed the NLSCY data and identified some of the parental circumstances that seem
to make life more of a challenge for children. Some of the risk factors are: parents
with low levels of income, education or social support; single or teenage parents;
parents with four or more children; and dysfunctional or depressed parents. Parents
in any of these circumstances will be cheered to know that the effect of any one of
these circumstances is usually small; a single risk factor does not doom a child
to failure. Only those children exposed to four or more risk factors scored
significantly lower in terms of their relationships, helping behaviour, and
vocabulary. It's the cumulative effect of multiple risk factors that
makes a child especially vulnerable.
Can good parenting reduce the effects of these potentially negative factors? Yes
it can, according to Dr. Sarah Landy and Kwok Kwan Tam (Growing Up in Canada)
. Parenting that stresses positive interaction can be "a protective
factor for children in at-risk environments," improving their ability to cope
with stressful situations. In fact, with positive parenting, the "at-risk" child
functions as well as -- or even better than -- the child who lives in a more favourable
situation but with negative parenting. In other words, the survey confirms what most of us
have suspected all along: that good parenting is crucial to a child's development.
Unfortunately, good parenting can be difficult to achieve in the midst of the
complexities of modern life. The excerpts and quotations below highlight the issues that stand
out for me as the greatest challenges for families today: poverty and economic
insecurity; the problem of balancing work and family time (especially if you're the
only adult in the house); and the stresses caused by couples breaking up at
a rate unprecedented in Canadian history.
More kids live in poverty
- "A child in Canada is now more likely to be poor than a child in 17
out of 18 industrialized nations around the world. Only the United States has a
worse record for child poverty than Canada."
-- Campaign 2000
- "Child poverty has very real downstream consequences: higher mortality,
poor school performance, substance abuse, decreased mental health and increased
illness."
-- The Honourable David C. Dingwall, Minister of Health
- "Even with government assistance, many children in Canada are poor. In 1994, one
in five children under 18 years lived in families with incomes below Statistics
Canada's low income cut-offs, including many whose families had incomes far below this
poverty line. In fact, the average income of poor families with children was
$8,300 below the poverty line. Another 220,000 children lived in families
with incomes within 10% of the poverty line. (In 1994, the Statistics Canada low
income cut-off for a family of four in a large urban centre was $22,039.)"
-- From The Progress of Canada's Children
Most poor kids live with two parents, but a disproportionately high number
of Canada's poorest children are found in one-parent households.
More kids live with one parent
"In 1995, there were over 1.1 million lone-parent families, an increase
of 60% from 1981. In the past, most lone-parent families were created when one parent
died. Today, divorce and separation are the major causes of lone parenthood....
"Today, 86% of lone-parent families are headed by women, and these families are far
more likely to experience poverty than those headed by men -- 56% compared to 33%. The
reason is two-fold. Women who are employed generally receive lower wages than men,
while unemployed women, primarily single mothers with young children, must rely
on income security programs such as social assistance that set benefit rates below the
poverty line. Recent cutbacks in social assistance in many provinces will create
increased hardships for all recipients, 40% of whom are children and youth....
"Living in a lone-parent family is not necessarily a long-term prospect. For children
born in the early 1970's, their first experience with living in a lone-parent family
lasted an average of 4.2 years."
-- From The Progress of Canada's Children
More kids live with economic insecurity
What is economic security? The Progress of Canada's Children defines
it as:
"an assured standard of living that provides families with a level of resources
and benefits necessary to participate economically, politically, socially, culturally and
with dignity in their community's activities."
Why is economic security important for children?
"Economic security is one of the most critical influences shaping child development. Family
income, which is one element of economic security, is linked directly to the basics
of life -- shelter, food and clothing. Children in families with greater financial
resources generally have more secure living conditions and greater access to social,
health, educational, and recreational opportunites -- important factors shaping
positive and healthy development. On the other hand, children from low-income
families are at significant social, physical and emotional risk. They are more
likely to experience periods of economic insecurity that can harm healthy development, and
to suffer the effect of poverty throughout their lives.
"In addition to available monies, economic security refers to the stability and
source of income. Parents who experience unemployment face a sudden drop in income, while
many others who still have jobs are fearful of the continuing cycle of cutbacks and
downsizing. Due to high unemployment rates, families feel insecure about their
economic futures and many are unwilling to make major purchases or investments."
--From The Progress of Canada's Children
Who has time for the kids?
The Problem:
"In recent decades, Canadians have coped with insecurity by giving up control
over their time. Parents with young children go out to work. More people work longer
hours, or have two jobs, or try to combine work and study. When you add up their total
paid and unpaid commitments, many people work well over 100 hours a week."
-- Judith Maxwell, President of the Canadian Policy Research Networks, writing for
The Ottawa Citizen
Some Solutions:
"What is even more important than income redistribution is the redistribution
of time -- more family time for working parents and more working time for the
unemployed."
-- Judith Maxwell, quoted in The Globe and Mail
"Canadian parents need help balancing their work and family demands. Canadian
decision-makers and employers must take public policy and corporate measures to support
families and help them deal with the issues and challenges involved in work/family
conflict."
-- Linda Duxbury and Christopher Higgins, professors in Canadian university
business schools, quoted in The Progress of Canada's Children
More kids live with complex, changing relationships
"Many children witness the separation of their parents, and these separations
are occurring earlier in the child's life. Approximately 8% of Canadian children born in the
early 1960s experienced their parents' separation by the time they were six years old. In
contrast, 18% of children born in the early 1980s saw their parents separate by age six. In the past
20 years, the number of young children affected by a marital break-up has tripled....
"Changing family structures and shifting marital relationships mean that many
children today experience a much more complex world of social relationships than did
their parents. They must deal with multiple family members including custodial
and non-custodial parents, step-parents, biological siblings, step-siblings
and half-siblings."
-- From The Progress of Canada's Children
To Be Continued...
The NLSCY will reveal its true value in years to come.
Many of the facts you've been reading came out of the National Longitudinal
Survey of Children and Youth conducted in 1994/95 by Statistics Canada, on
behalf of Human Resources Development Canada. Researcher examined
the lives of 22,831 children -- newborns to eleven-year-olds from every province
and a multitude of backgrounds. But the story doesn't end in 1995. Statistics
Canada will re-visit the same children every two years into adulthood, looking
at a range of family, household, and community characteristics that affect
child development.
Why does Canada need such a massive survey? To address a major information
gap on Canadian children and how they develop over time. Below, Growing
Up in Canada describes that gap and how the NLSCY will fill it:
"The child development process can be likened to a 'black box'. We see
children and their environments go into a box, and we see them come out transformed. We
know that interactions take place within, but we can't see inside to directly observe
how they take place. The difficulty of seeing inside the box is primarily
a reflection of the enormous variability and complexity of the child
development process. With so many influences on child development and so
many different children, it is hard to isolate the impact of any one factor or influence.
"If child development were a physical science (which it certainly is not), it
would be possible to perform laboratory experiments under strictly controlled
conditions -- we could see directly into the 'black box.' Since we have no
such laboratories, the best substitute is to have comprehensive ("holistic")
studies that track a child's development from conception through adulthood. These
are known as longitudinal surveys and studies.
"To date in Canada we have not had such a holistic survey. We have a few
regional and local studies that attempt to track the influence of one or a few
factors on certain child outcomes. But until now we have not had a national
study that looked at virtually the totality of a child's environment to determine
how it influences a wide variety of outcomes broad enough to encompass what
is normally considered 'child development.'
"The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) now dramatically
changes this situation for the better. This ambitious study, launched by the federal
government, takes us a giant step further in our ability to understand child
development. The NLSCY provides a unique opportunity to study the progress of children
from infancy to adulthood. The results of this survey, once it has been operational
for several years, hold great promise for sorting out the processes at work in the
'black box' of child development....
"However, it must be cautioned that as useful as the findings from this
first release are, they still represent only a snapshot for 1994/95 -- albeit
the best snapshot of children and youth we have ever had.
"Cross-sectional snapshots are limited to telling us which environmental
conditions were associated with certain outcomes at the time of the survey. We do
not know how long they were present or how long they will persist. For instance, two
children of similar age may both be living in low-income households today, but they
may exhibit different outcomes (e.g., school readiness, motor and social skills). One
child may have been in a low-income family for only a year, while the other may have been poor
for many years. The snapshot does not reveal this -- and what tomorrow will bring for either child
is, as yet, unknown.
"The power of the NLSCY is that it will allow us to turn this static snapshot into a
'video.' To continue the example above, the survey will let us follow these
two children for years so we can study how low income and other influences are
affecting their development. If these children escape from the adverse influences
of poverty, we can examine which protective factors contributed to that escape: the
type of child care, friendships, parenting, family structure and so forth. Only
then will we obtain a better look inside the 'black box' of child development."
-- David P. Ross, Katherine Scott and Mark A. Kelly
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The children participating in this ground-breaking survey will eventually
teach us more than we have ever known about the kinds of homes, schools and
communities kids need if they are to thrive and grow up to become the
protagonists of their own lives.
Essential References on Canada's Kids
Here's how to get your own copy of the publications excerpted here.
Growing Up in Canada: National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth
This 160-page book summarizes the findings of the first survey cycle, and includes analysis by experts
from many fields, especially child development. Included are articles such as: "Stories about Step-families," "In
the Beginning: Looking for the Roots of Babies' Difficult Temperament," and "Do
children become more aggressive as they approach adolescence?" Available in English
or French for $25 at Statistics Canada Regional Reference Centres, or from:
Statistics Canada
Operations and Integration Division
Circulation Management
120 Parkdale Avenue
Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0T6
Tel: (613)951-7277 or, for credit-card orders only: (416)973-8018
Fax: (613)951-1584
E-mail: order@statcan.ca
The Progress of Canada's Children
A magazine-style annual report on the well-being of Canadian children, youth and families,
The Progress of Canada's Children is based on a large database of information -- especially
the NLSCY and other Statistics Canada surveys. This very readable 64-page report can
be purchased, in English or French, for $7(minus 15% for purchases of 50 copies
or more). Contact:
Canadian Council on Social Development
Publications
441 MacLaren, 4th floor
Ottawa, Ontario K2P 2H3
Tel: (613)236-8977; Fax: (613)236-2750
E-mail: council@ccsd.ca
Internet: http://www.achilles.net/~council/
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Donna McCloskey is the editor of Transition, the
quarterly magazine of the Vanier Institute of the Family.
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This article appeared in Transition (March 1997), published by the Vanier Institute of the Family.
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Posted by the
Vanier Institute of the Family, July 1997.
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This site was initiated by the Canadian Child Care Federation and produced under contract to
 Industry Canada. |
Ce site a été développé par la Fédération canadienne des services de garde à l'enfance et produit avec l'aide de
Industrie Canada. |
