Study Highlights
Understanding the Early Years is a national initiative that provides research information to help strengthen the capacity of communities to make informed decisions about the best policies and most appropriate programs to serve families with young children. This initiative seeks to provide information about the influence of community factors on children's development and to enhance community capacity to use the data both to monitor early childhood development and to create effective community-based responses. Understanding the Early Years uses three main components to collect data about the community's children from their parents, teachers and the children themselves. It also gathers information about the community environment in which the children are living.
This report is based on research conducted in the community of North York, Ontario (now incorporated into the new city of Toronto as the North Quadrant). It focuses on the results of a Community Mapping Study, which was developed to gather information about the physical and social environments in the children's neighbourhoods as well as children's programs and services.
Results indicate that North York is a community with many families with children, where green space, parks and recreational areas are generally available. The majority of neighbourhoods scored well on measures of the quality of their physical conditions. In many areas throughout the community, educational and employment levels were high and household incomes were above the national average. However, a significant proportion of children six and under (67%) were found to be living in neighbourhoods that were considered to be at higher risk of socio-economic disadvantage.
North York has a variety of programs and services available for its children in their early years, but these resources are not always distributed evenly throughout the community. Often, resources were found where the density of children was higher, in areas of both higher and lower socio-economic risk. However, over half of the children in the community lived in relatively resource-poor neighbourhoods indicating a possible discrepancy between the location of resources in North York and the location of families with young children who might need them.
This study of community resources, along with the data collected in the other components of the Understanding the Early Years initiative, should provide new evidence to help guide the development of community strategies to improve child outcomes.
What's New
