Understanding the Early Years - Early Childhood Development in Southwestern Newfoundland

V. Looking Forward

Overall, the children of Southwestern Newfoundland were healthy and showed strong signs of positive development and readiness for learning. Parents had relatively strong parenting skills and were regularly engaged with their children in learning activities, factors which undoubtedly contribute to the community's success in achieving high levels of children's outcomes.

The community had high scores on wider community indicators describing its levels of social capital, the safety of its neighbourhoods, and residential stability.

Although many Canadian communities share at least some of these broader characteristics, each community also exhibits a variety of unique features that set it apart from others.

This is one of the reasons community-based research is so important. Research allows a community to understand how well its youngest citizens are developing and lends insight into how the obtained results came about. Investments for families and children, as well as for children's development, can be monitored over time so that effectiveness and efficiency of community effort can be improved.

This community can take pride in the success of its youngest children. However, there is room for improvement. Over 10% of its children had low scores on the Social Knowledge and Competence domain of the Early Development Instrument, and 9.5% had low scores on the nationally standardized Receptive Language Test. These early language and literacy skills are critical for school success. The most important factor for improving early language and literacy skills is the quantity and quality of language a child is exposed to. For example, children whose mothers are more talkative learn new words at a faster pace than children with less talkative mothers. Although this point may seem obvious, it is less obvious how to increase children's exposure to language. For many children, attending a high quality daycare can help improve these skills.

A. What Makes Southwestern Newfoundland Unique?

Several features stand out as unique to Southwestern Newfoundland. First, in most respects, this community could be characterized as disadvantaged in socioeconomic terms, but rich in family and community resources. Second, its parenting capabilities are exemplary. Third, it can take action to increase use of community and social resources.

Socio-economic Composition

In socio-economic terms, Newfoundland is the poorest province in the country, and this community is one of the poorer communities within Newfoundland. It had a much higher percentage of families with low levels of education and low family income than the provincial average, and a higher percentage of both mothers and fathers were not working outside of the home. The demographic maps of the community indicate that it is uniformly poor, with a few small areas that have markedly low socio-economic status.

Parenting

The parents of the community had very high ratings on all four of the measures of parenting practices. Earlier research on child development has emphasized the importance of "risk factors" such as low family income, low levels of parental education, and unemployment. Although these factors are correlated with children's outcomes, they are less important than what parents actually do on a day-to-day basis: "what matters most is the kind of family environment a child lives in: the benefits of good parenting skills, a cohesive family unit, and parents in good mental health, far outweigh the negative effects associated with poverty".¹⁶ This community is really a text-book case for making this point. Despite the low levels of socio-economic status of this community, it has overcome the odds through strong parenting within the family.

Resource Utilization

The results of this study suggest that there is room for improvement in the use of educational, cultural, and recreational resources. Although many children used recreational facilities such as parks and play spaces and educational services such as libraries, their participation rates were somewhat lower than those in the rest of the province or country in other activities. Participation in activities and use of child-oriented resources is important to a child's social, behavioural and physical development. children's participation in supervised and unsupervised sports and arts-oriented activities is associated with increased psychosocial development.¹⁷ This emphasizes the importance of addressing existing barriers to resource use such as time, cost, and looking at the distribution of certain resources. Because children and their families were not using existing resources to their full potential, their importance for development could be promoted and their presence in the community advertized.

Social Support

Increasing levels of Social Support and Social Capital could contribute to improving children's outcomes. For example, over one-quarter of the children in this community live in single-parent families. It is especially difficult for these parents to take advantage of community resources that are available. For some of these parents, having a neighbour who takes their child to swimming lessons once a week may be a tremendous form of Social Support, for others it might simply be having an affordable caregiver.

B. Summary

Southwestern Newfoundland is one of the first communities participating in the UEY initiative. Through this initiative, valuable lessons are being learned about the needs and strengths of communities with different economic, social and physical characteristics. With respect to early childhood development, valuable lessons are also being learned about how communities are working to improve children's outcomes, as well as the relative success (or lack thereof) of their efforts.

Communities will determine how their citizens will work together to improve children's early developmental outcomes. Results from the UEY initiative will inform the discussion in the community for future action.

At the same time, it is a societal responsibility -of governments, educators, community agencies, neighbourhoods and families - to make sure improvements take place for all children. Strategies that require the community to look at itself as a whole community, as well as neighbourhood by neighbourhood, will likely have more enduring effects. UEY is able to provide research results to support both.

For example, neighbourhood by neighbourhood, families may improve their outdoor play-spaces, and on a community level, concerned agencies and organizations could improve community-wide strategies to integrate disadvantaged groups. As communities document their efforts, as well as their results, effective practices will be identified.

Any community's response must consider its unique features of the area. The importance of a co-ordinated approach involving families, teachers, and all community members must be emphasised because each has been shown to be important in enhancing a child's development. Governments, community institutions, schools, and the voluntary sector in Southwestern Newfoundland must continue to work together, as each can make a valuable and important contribution. Support for families with children from the larger community network is critical.

¹⁶Willms, J. D. (in press). Implications of the Findings for Social Policy Renewal. In J. D. Willms (Ed.), Vulnerable Children: Findings from Canada's National Longitudinal Study of Children and Youth. University of Alberta Press.
¹⁷Offord, D.R., Lipman, E.L., & Duku, E.K. (1998). Sports, The Arts and Community Programs: Rates and Correlates of Participation. HRDC, Applied Research Branch Working paper W-98-18E.

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