Support for a national child care early education program
Growing Together Child and Parent Society
Duncan, BC
EXCERPT

July 21, 2004

Hon. Paul Martin
Prime Minister

We wish to support early education for all Canadian children. Children learn long before they start school. From birth and before, up to 5 years of age, is the most vital period for brain growth and early learning, yet we do not maximize the preschool development of children in keeping with what we know from scientific and social research. Canada lags in ensuring that all families can take advantage of this unique early learning period through provision of universally accessible, non-profit, publicly funded, high quality infant and preschool programs.

Essentials of early learning include surroundings of love and trust with satisfying responses to infants’ needs to be held, looked at, heard, and cared for by parents and family. Infants learn by watching, listening and feeling, knowing the familiar faces around them. They need a safe environment in which to move and explore, crawl and learn to walk; they need attachment to familiar figures who answer their cries, talk and sing to them. As toddlers they learn by experiment and flourish in a consistently creative and interesting environment, and begin to socialize with their peers. By the age of five years they can have learned much of the activities needed for readiness to attend school, being able to communicate, solve simple self-care, and social situations, and have some expectations of how to behave.

This implies that we should respect young children and respond to their interests, not requiring them to “rubber stamp” creations, not forcing rote flash cards at them, but appreciating their particular talents and imagination, and their individuality, offering them the best situations possible to develop and learn.

Some families have the means to provide much, but all children need opportunities to develop, regardless of family’s income. As has been said, “It takes a village to raise a child” -- suggesting that children flourish most when their early lives are enriched by both extended family and community resources. If parents cannot be with their children all day, the care environment needs to supplement the home.

Communities need to maintain and enhance existing services e.g., home visiting nurse programs, family resource centers and literacy programs. Panet5s need to be aware of early childhood services and standards offered by licensed family care providers and early childhood educators in early learning and care facilities. Ideally there will be comfortable communication between parents and caregivers, as the optimal placing will offer support to the parent as well as care for the child. Parents need a range of options – informal care as well as family centres and early learning and care centers. Families who wish to be stay-at-home parents should be able to do so with community supports available.

Early learning and care facilities offering accredited programs, licensed provincially with professionally trained and experienced early childhood educators, can additionally support families by offering both parent and child programs. In such situations, families may take advantage of parent education programs and discussions about child development and behaviour. At this time, many low-income parents are not eligible for these centers and their only choice is informal but unregulated child care. From the lengths of waiting lists for early learning centers it is apparent that parents want their advantages and appreciate them. Some such centers are based next to schools or colleges where young parents can complete their own education close to their children. For parents who both need or want to work, for single parents, as well as for families who wish their young children to attend, the desire for part or full time affordable early child learning is nationwide, as well as evidence for its benefit both to children and to adult society.

Economists and early childhood educators agree that “the greatest return on investment in human development comes form investment in the preschool years” and that “experience based brain development in the early years affects physical and mental health in adult life as well as learning and behaviour”. (Fraser Mustard. Canadian Institute for Advanced research, in an article “Who knows how to build a future?” Globe and Mail, June 26, 2004)

The Canadian government has allocated funds to the provinces to improve accessibility to early childhood learning and to child care services with firm criteria attached for the use of, and accountability for expenditures. In BC the child Care Advocacy Forum (composed of six provincial child care and early childhood associations) analyzed the BC Government’s use of federal funds received, being concerned about provincial cuts in high quality, affordable child care, about reduced subsidies to needy parents, about closure of some centers and early childhood training programs, and increasing reliance on the unregulated sector to care for children. The Forum notes that BC is using federal funding to replace, rather than supplement, provincial spending on child care. Their publication of March 2004 has an analysis by a certified general accountant of impacts on child care.

The BC government received … federal funds 2002-03 for early childhood but cut ..from child care subsidies ..and used $ …taken from child care and other programs to increase spending on ‘priority’ programs such as community forums and grants to charitable organizations.

The Advocacy Forum therefore recommends that as a condition of receiving federal early childhood development funds, the federal government require provinces and territories to maintain or increase their 2001/02 baseline spending on child care and related … programs and use federal funds to supplement rather than replace provincial spending. Further the Advocacy Forum calls on the provincial government o immediately restore provincial funding to 2001/02 levels and use … funding to develop and implement a five year plan for a publicly funded child care system in BC. (BC’s Annual reporting on Early Childhood Development – Analysis of Impacts on Child Care, March 2004)

We fully support the above recommendations and urge their acceptance for the sake of our children, families and community. “The greatest natural resource that any country can have is its children.”

Margaret Cox, Cobble Hill, BC (Retired, former Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Mary Dolan (Coordinator, Growing Together Child/Parent Society, Duncan, BC, Member of Cowichan Valley Early Childhood Education Coalition)