Overview: Children in Canada in the 1990s - November 1996

As mentioned at the beginning of this research paper, good nurturing environments in childhood are necessary to long-term health and well-being. On the other hand, impoverished environments create barriers to healthy development, barriers that can have long-term negative consequences for the child and for society as a whole. Children meet the world with different assets and liabilities, whether genetic, biological or socioeconomic. The task facing families, communities and society at large is to create environments that help children confront their difficulties and develop their strengths and capabilities.

The NLSCY is collecting information on the many factors that contribute to child and youth development. Children sit at the centre of overlapping social, economic, cultural and spiritual environments. At the broadest level, society and governments set the basic environment within which families raise children. The distribution of income and the distribution of community resources are obviously two of the most important influences on the healthy development of children. It is within this environment that families must make choices - subject to their resources and other constraints - about household size and structure, consumption, work and leisure, education, and the allocation of income and time. Parents also make choices about how they care for and nurture their children. Taken together, all these factors set children on their life course, at some point during which they begin to make life decisions on their own behalf about education, fertility and employment.^XXVII

The NLSCY provides an opportunity to look at the environments that are shaping the well-being and development of children in Canada and to link these environments to child outcomes. With the release of this first wave of data, we can take stock of the choices Canadian society and families have made concerning children and how these choices are affecting children now. As future cycles of the NLSCY are completed, we will be able to see the long-term consequences of the choices society and families are making today.

By way of conclusion, we will look at a few environment-outcome associations that emerge from analysis of some of the NLSCY data. It is important to remember that these associations do not prove causation between one factor and a particular outcome. Rather, they point the way to fruitful lines of research. Some of these lines of research are explored in the other research papers in this publication, but most will emerge over time as more data become available.

For our brief first look inside the "black box" of child development, we chose to examine the results of four scales: school readiness, measured by the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test (PPVT) and the Échelle de vocabulaire en images Peabody (EVIP); motor and social development; family functioning; and parental depression. We focused on the children and families concentrated in the low end of each distribution to discern whether the different populations were marked by any common environmental factors that might indicate plausible associations.¹⁹

School Readiness

Differences in household income appeared to be associated with school readiness. Using the distribution of scores on the PPVT/EVIP, we observed that smaller proportions of children aged 4 to 5 years from lower-income households (annual household income less than $30,000) fell in the normal range of PPVT/EVIP scores compared with children from middle-income ($30,000 to $60,000) and higher-income (over $60,000) households. While 25.3% of children from lower-income families had scores indicating delayed development, only 15.6% of middle-income children and 9.2% of higher-income children did.

The NLSCY provides evidence that the relationship between parent and child - in this case we focused on the results of the positive interaction scale - is also an important factor shaping school readiness. High positive-parenting scores were associated with normal and advanced scores on the PPVT/EVIP. For example, 69.1% of children aged 4 to 5 years living with a parent who had a high positive-parenting score fell in the band of normal development on the PPVT/EVIP scales. This compares with only 46.8%²⁰ of children who lived with parents who had the lowest positive-parenting scores.

Motor and Social Development

As with school readiness, positive parental interaction also appears to be associated with scores on the motor and social development scale. For example, only 13.5% of children under age 2 whose parents scored high on positive parenting showed delayed motor and social development, compared with 35.2% of children (almost three times the proportion) whose parents had low positive-parenting scores.

Family Functioning

Our initial analysis of the NLSCY data suggests that household income is an important factor in distinguishing between functional and dysfunctional families (using the scores on the Chedoke-McMaster family functioning scale). Of children living in lower-income households, 14.6% were considered dysfunctional; this compares with 7.5% of children living in middle-income households and 5.0% in higher-income households.

Not surprisingly, children living in poorly functioning families did not appear to have good relationships with other family members and their peers. Children who demonstrated problems in their relationships were more likely to live in families that were classified as dysfunctional than in families considered functional.

Parental Depression

To discern which characteristics are associated with depressive tendencies among parents, we set up cross-tabulations between the group of high-scorers on the depression scale and a list of demographic and family variables. One of the most striking associations found was with household income. Of the children in lower-income households, 17.5% lived with parents who scored high on the depression scale (that is, they had many symptoms of depression). In comparison, 8.3% of children living in middle-income households had a depressive parent and only 4.8% of children in higher-income families had a parent with depressive tendencies. In summary, children living with depressed parents were almost four times as likely to be living in lower-income households than in higher-income households.

• ¹⁹To determine the factors associated with poor scores on these four scales, we set a threshold such that roughly 10% of the children or parents who scored above this threshold were said to have a problem.
• ²⁰This is a qualified estimate that is less reliable due to the high sampling variability.