Family Background, Family Income, Maternal Work and Child Development - October 1998

The results described above may not have wide implications for the development of children and for the public policy toward children and the means of family support. When budget expenditures are fixed, difficult trade-offs have to be made when determining public problems for family support. The following questions are frequently raised. Do we increase targeted benefits toward poor families? Should child care be considered, and financed as a public service? Should quality early child care be offered to poor and lone parent families? Should programs encourage labour force participation of lone mothers and what age should the child be before welfare programs consider that mothers be compelled to reconcile their occupational and maternal roles? At what age should education in nurseries begin and what resources should be supplied by the public sector? Although results cannot answer directly these questions there are some prescriptions for policy if results are correct.

1. Policies creating more incentives, for the average not-employed woman, to work will not decrease in an important manner the human capital stock of children.
2. Increasing the income of the very poor or those who are on welfare could have the strongest positive effects. As of now, the new child tax benefit does not supplement the income of the very poor but only of the working poor families. It is also doubtful that the new work income supplements created at the provincial level are important enough to induce welfare mothers or parents to re-integrate the job market. It could be that they simply do not have the minimal skills to find work. Hence, welfare children seem be the ones who are the most at risk of not being school ready and there is little in the way of federal new policy that is changing their situation.
3. If the frequency of reading effects on PPVT scores are not spurious, programs inciting mothers to read to their children often and for a substantial amount of time could be valuable for welfare mothers. For working mothers, substitute care should include reading sessions to children. Given the low caregiver-child ratio in child care facilities, it would be surprising that one to one reading sessions be available. Government programs could be more aggressive in this regard. The child development initiatives taken by Health Canada, such as the Community Action Program for Children and the Canada Prenatal Nutrition Program, which focuses on lifestyle issues, parenting practices and parenting education, are likely to make a difference for, at risk, young children.
4. Finally, strategies that create incentives to delay first birth and to have more young women get good schooling could have strong impacts on children's outcomes as this gives a chance for mothers to invest more in human capital and increase the amount of resources available for their children.