Understanding the Early Years - Results of the Community Mapping Study in North York - May 2001

1. Helping Communities Give Children the Best Possible Start

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Improving our understanding of the factors which help or hinder child development - and increasing community tracking of how well children are developing - are crucial to ensuring the best possible start for Canada's children.

Developed by the Applied Research Branch (ARB) of Human Resources Development Canada (HRDC), Understanding the Early Years (UEY) emerged in response to a growing recognition that the kind of nurturing and attention children receive in early childhood can have a major impact on the rest of their lives. Researchers have found that the early years of development, from before birth to age six, set the base for competence and coping skills that will affect learning, behaviour and health throughout life (see McCain & Mustard, 1999; and Doherty, 1997 for a discussion of current research in this area). These early years are critical for children's development as they shape long-term outcomes, not only related to academic and employment success, but also to children's overall health, quality of life, and ability to adapt.

UEY seeks to provide information about the influence of community factors on children's development and to enhance community capacity to use these data to both monitor early childhood development and to create effective community-based responses.

Within the city of North York (now Toronto — North Quadrant), Ontario, an innovative community effort called the Early Years Action Group (EYAG) was launched in1996. This group consists of a broad-based coalition of individuals and organizations committed to meeting the needs of children in their early years and ensuring that they are ready to learn at entry to formal schooling. Because of the congruence of the goals of the EYAG and UEY, North York served as a prototype project before the UEY initiative was piloted in other communities. The research was conducted in North York throughout 1999 (see Appendix A for more information on EYAG).

Understanding the Early Years is a national initiative which provides research information to help strengthen the capacity of communities to make informed decisions about the best policies and most appropriate programs to offer families with young children. It is designed to assist selected communities across Canada in achieving their goal of improving early child development by providing them with the necessary information to enhance or adapt community resources and services. It gives communities knowledge of how childhood experiences shape learning, health and well-being, allows them to track how well their children are doing, and to optimize child development through the strategic mobilization of resources and programs.

The UEY initiative builds on the National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY), jointly managed by HRDC and Statistics Canada. The NLSCY, which began data collection in 1994, is the definitive source of national data for research on child development in Canada. Its purpose is to increase our knowledge about the factors affecting child development and well-being. Initial research on child development has shown that community factors may impact on child outcomes (Kohen, Hertzman, & Brooks-Gunn, 1998), but only further research can show the magnitude of the impact and the mechanisms through which it occurs.

One of the main purposes of UEY is to help determine the extent and nature of community influences on child development and how these might vary from child to child and community to community. It includes three independent but complementary data collection components, which allow for more detailed monitoring and reporting at the community level. Together, this information will help fill in gaps in our understanding of the community factors which affect early child development and the ways by which a community can best support the needs of young children and their parents.

Components of the Understanding the Early Years Initiative

The Early Development Instrument: What we learn from teachers

The Early Development Instrument (EDI) (formerly called the School Readiness to Learn Instrument) is a questionnaire for kindergarten teachers. It was developped by Drs. Magdalena Janus and Dan Offord at the Canadian Centre for Studies of Children at Risk at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. EDI is designed to measure children's early development before they start first grade in the categories of:

• physical health and well-being;
• emotional health and maturity;
• social knowledge and competence;
• language development and thinking skills; and
• communication skills and general knowledge.

This assessment is not designed for rating individual children; rather, it is a population-based measure designed to indicate how children are developing relative to others of the same age in their community. It offers an indicator to a community of how well it supports children before they start school. This measure was administered in 88 public schools within the former North York School Board in the spring of 1999.

The NLSCY Community Study in North York: What we learn from parents

An enhanced community instrument based on the NLSCY has been developed to collect more detailed information from parents to help researchers assess family use of community resources and the impact of these community resources on children's developmental outcomes. Randomly selected households were chosen to participate in this voluntary survey. The information can be analyzed to determine the relative importance of community factors compared to individual and family factors on child development. The NLSCY — Community Study for North York was administered during the spring of 1999.

The Community Mapping Study: What we learn from community mapping

This report focuses on the results of the Community Mapping Study, conducted in North York in the summer of 1999. It was developed to gather information about:

• the physical and socio-economic characteristics of the neighbourhoods in which children live;
• the kinds of programs and services that were available to children aged six and younger and their parents;
• where these programs were located; and
• how these programs were being used.

Such information will be provided to communities so they can make the best use of their resources to support early childhood development.¹

Three data sources were used: the 1996 Census, neighbourhood observations (see Appendix D for details), and a program survey (see Appendix F) which compiled an inventory of neighbourhood services. Putting together the information collected from these three components will provide a framework for analysis that will not only suggest what is working well or less well, but which will also give some indication as to why services and neighbourhood resources work the way they do. This analysis will also provide the basis for community-wide discussions on both how to develop community strategies and to allocate resources with the goal of optimizing child development outcomes.

Information can be used to determine:

1. if key resources are available to all children,
2. if resources are present close to where children live,
3. how to plan, prioritize and allocate efforts to provide the most effective resources for child development (by using mapping data in conjunction with the theoretical literature regarding community influences and the data collected with the NLSCY).

• ¹ For more information on the theoretical framework underlying this research and the selection of instruments, refer to Connor & Brink, 1999.

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