Episode 1: Unlocking Potential: The Benefits of Early Childhood Education

[Music] Welcome to Better Together, the podcast series where we explore the importance of investment and support in high quality early childhood education. I am Dr. Misek Barri, a researcher in early childhood policy and a professor and program coordinator at the School of Early Childhood at George Brown College in Toronto. This is episode one where we dive into the crucial role that early childhood education plays in the development and well-being of our youngest citizens and the broader society and how federal investments are shaping the landscape of childcare in Canada. We are joined by Tinal Wong, a working mother whose life was transformed by early childhood education programs. Dr. Jean Clinton, a child psychiatrist with profound insights on brain development and economist Armin Yelnesian who discusses the economic implications of child care funding. We begin our conversation with Dr. Clinton. With me is Dr. Jean Clinton, a mother of five and a child psychiatrist for over 30 years. Dr. Clinton is also well-known as a knowledge translator, someone who gathers the knowledge from scientists, therapists, physicians and takes it to those who need it. Her primary audience are those who love and work with children. But she also wants to spark a conversation with policymakers to ensure the knowledge turns into action. Thank you for joining us Dr. Clinton. Ah, thank you. You are among the first to translate the meaning behind it takes a village to raise a child. It means we need a system, income supports, while resource schools, top quality healthcare and a clean environment and spaces and places for children and families. A big gap in our Canadian village, if you will, was early learning in childcare, something we are trying to correct with the new national childcare plan. This has long been a passion of yours. Tell us why. So why is it so important that we think about what happens in the earliest years? We know that what makes the for the healthiest outcome from children is what you've described and that's the ecosystem that surrounds children. How are the how are the adults and the systems and the policies in place that are going to ensure flourishing for kids? We often think about when we're thinking about child development, we often think about kids in school and adolescents. But what the research is now telling us from the brain science is that what happens in the very earliest years in the last trimester pregnancy through to say seven or eight that there are changes that happen in the brain that are changed by relationships, by environments, by experiences, that not only change the way that they neurons remain cell in the brain fires, but also how children's stress pathways, learning pathways, behavioral pathways get built in those very very early years because the brain is so malleable, so changeable that that is a crucial period of time that we have to think about well how do we get it right for our very very youngest citizens so that we're thinking about getting it right right from the start is crucial that we have policies that understand that we have parents who are supported and that we have caregivers who have a full array of resources to support this development. Thank you so much. You have said and I quote I often feel like I'm standing at the bottom of a cliff trying to catch children as they fall and the whole time wishing if only what do you like to see different at the top of that cliff? Ah, is such a great and a great question and I hope people get the image of that ambulance down in the valley with all the kids falling over the cliff. I consider myself an upstreamist and that means I spent 35 almost 40 years in the river of children with disorder, distress, dismay, really rushing by me as I stand in that river and I'm trying to grab them as fast as I can but you know what one of my really beloved educators Dr. Paul Steiner or said to me one day was Jean we need to be upstream preventing the kids from falling in the river in the first place. We need to be at the top of that cliff preventing kids from falling over and as I examined that along with other other great great minds like Fraser Mustard and Dan offered there was a huge recognition worldwide that in order to be upstreamist we really need to be thinking about early child development. We need to be thinking about the time when the brain is most changeable most affected by the environment that the children are living, loving and growing in and so to be upstream means to think very very deeply about how do we support parents as children's first teachers? How do we support early childhood educators early on's home childcare? How do we how do we provide the supports that they need not only to be crazy mad and love with the children that they're that they're with but also to know that the environment and the stimulation and the stress-free environments you create are so crucial for how that little brain is developing the pathways, the connections, the understanding that's going to last a whole lifetime. It's is profound when we think about that in the first couple of years of life when neurons talk to each other they cross little things called synapses and there are a million new synapses a second. It's a massive kind of a frightening responsibility so that you know I have to be honest with my five kids and my soon to be nine grandchildren. I didn't know early I sure is heck no no so when I'm with my beauties I certainly am thinking about how does my love build their brains? I love that to be an upstreamist we do have a downstream system we have a remedial system we don't have preventative care not in our early education not in our health systems we very much do have a remedial system and I love that and I'm gonna I'm gonna borrow it from you Dr. Clinton you're well upstreamist I love that as you describe the evidence for investing in children's earliest years is deep and powerful yet there are think tanks and pundits and politicians who argue that children particularly young children are the responsibility of their families it's a parental issue essentially having children is a personal choice that should not be a cost to those who have either already raised their children or who choose not to have them you have no doubt run into such arguments how do you respond to that? Oh my goodness I have for sure and I can't believe that those arguments are still around so the number one thing that I respond with is when our children do well we all do well when our children do well we all do well so what does that mean? Well you know I know you're your good friend they are mean who is the economist I was blown away when I heard her speak that if we look to the future the group of people who are gonna look after us when we're sick when we're old when we're children are the children of now and if we don't start to think about how do we create empathy compassion ability knowledge and skills in the children of today we we can't afford any discard the children they all have to do well for us as a society to thrive so that's that's a kind of economic argument that is so crucially important but the other thing when we think about when our kids do well we all do well we also need to think about well as as society, we are essentially still hunter-gatherers and that it takes, as you said at the opening, a village to raise the child, that we're not in a society or we're not biologically driven to be isolated in the raising of children, we're biologically driven to be a social species that needs the other. And in order to need the other, you need to have social policies and other policies that say when little ones and families are just starting out, we need to take them as our most precious resource, that we are going to support, we're going to cultivate, we're going to embrace in ways that selfishly, they're going to be there to look after me later, but not so selfishly, they are going to enjoy, contribute, create an environment that cares for the environment and climate and look after the planet, our most precious resources. So you know, it's an old argument, I've heard it for so many years, Emma's, but we need to get past it, we need to realize that we need to invest in our young, when we think about education, we need to be thinking not just about, you know, as people talk about back to basics, but how are we helping kids in our education system be ready for life, be ready for work, be ready for academic excellence, we need to shift the mindset so that we're thinking about flourishing rather than just meeting x, y, z criteria. Does that make sense, I hope? Absolutely, absolutely. You're preaching to the choir, I'm definitely on that side and that argument is been long around and as you said, I can't believe we're still trying to convince people otherwise. Thank you so very much Dr. Clinton for joining me today, for your time, your knowledge and your wealth of experience, it's always a pleasure. Emma is such a pleasure to speak with you and thank you so much for the amazing work that you and your colleagues continue to do, is making a difference, believe me, I know as I work in the world of early childhood educators, so thank you so so much and parents, please, please listen and love Bill Sprayns, hug your child today. The federal government has made substantial investments in early childhood education in Canada, approximately 30 billion has been invested to increase access and reduce parent fees across the country. Many provinces and territories are already at an average of $10 a day, with other jurisdictions having cut parent fees by more than 50%. Denella Wong's story is a testament to the power of early childhood education. Her son Justin was diagnosed with autism at a young age and it was the intervention from a skilled early childhood educator that made a world of difference in his development. This early support allowed Tinell to not only continue working but knowing her children were getting the support and scaffolding they deserve. The pandemic underscored just how vital these programs are as their closure brought significant challenges. Thank you for joining us today Tinell. Thank you for having me. Tinell's older son Justin is on the autism spectrum. Tinell, can you tell us a bit about Justin and how he was diagnosed? Absolutely. So when Justin was in an early childhood setting, he was at daycare at the age of 18 months. His childcare provider actually brought to my attention some deficiencies that she was seeing in his progress. And I, and he, and Justin was my first child. I wasn't really familiar with exactly what milestones he should have been reaching at that time. And thanks to the intervention of this specific ECE worker, I was able to say, okay, we need to flag this. We need to take it to his pediatrician and then we went on to the next steps and her acknowledgements were pretty bang on. Justin was within that year diagnosed on the autism spectrum disorder. So she was right to flag him. How did that progress after that? What kind of supports were put in place for Justin? And what was the role of the ECE and in all of that? Prior to the diagnosis, actually, we had to go through a lot of steps with a developmental pediatrician, a psychologist, and some speech therapists and what the early childhood education workers in his setting helped us with was they wrote letters for us. They filled out documentation to help petition for more evaluations. And she actually, the Ontario government asking for extra support within the actual childcare setting to provide Justin with one-on-one support. So she was phenomenal in assisting us with just getting him more help in those early, early days when everything was super scary to us and we had no idea which way to turn. And so what has having access to high quality early education programs meant for you for Justin, for your children? For Justin, specifically, it was life-changing because he had somebody who was educated in the field to be able to seek out and see these differences that were important to be made aware to medical professionals so that he would be able to get an early intervention because that was the most important thing, especially with all the documentation and research that I've now come across and our pediatricians are telling us that the early intervention of Justin has been the success of Justin. So the fact that we caught it really, really early in the state, you know, in the game and we could get him the help that he needed without it, we would be in a much, much different place right now. At that time, Justin wasn't verbal. Justin is completely verbal now, but it's only because we got him into the therapies that he repired so desperately at that time. And how is Justin doing now? Justin's a fighter. He's doing amazing. He's fully verbal. Now, a little too verbal sometimes, but nonetheless, he's progressing. Justin still is receiving the same types of therapy that we got, we were able to intervene at that time, but at different levels now, but he's on a progressively upward goal setting and he reaches every single one of them and it's 100% because of the fact that he had that early intervention. And can you tell me a little bit about what has early education meant for you as a working mom? I know you're a very busy working mom. And what is having early education meant for you as a working mother? Well, I mean, for sure, it affords me the time to go to work without worrying about the safety of my children, the well-being of my children, the development of my children. It gives me work life balance that I am able to have my children in a space that is only benefiting them and when they come home and I can see the leaps and gains that they're making and it's for both of my kids. Both of my kids entered into early childhood education programs at the age of one year old and they both benefited from it remarkably. The things that they were able to learn and attain and the skills that those early educators were providing them, I wouldn't be able to do that, not end work at the same time or not even at work at the same time. I am not in the fields. I'm not a professional. I don't have those skills and abilities to give the kids what our EC workers were doing. I know that during COVID, as schools shut down and child care programs closed, it affected all of us. How did that affect you not having those early education programs that you were accustomed to having? Yeah, that was a tough time for us. We had to pull our youngest out of his daycare, which was such a routine for him and he loved it. It completely destroyed my work life balance. I had to reduce my hours significantly to support Justin and Tyler's learning experience. Having a toddler at home at three years old while I am working a full-time job and my full-time job can be anywhere between 40 to 60 hours a week will force to me to actually reduce my hours down to actually 20 hours a week, which is unheard of impossible and with such a struggle, there was a lot of emotional challenges, there was a lot of financial struggle because of it. So having the kids in a setting that is conducive to their learning, to their growth, to their mental well-being is just it's critical. And then having those kids in those programs is critical for my well-being as well, especially my mental well-being. It really, really took a toll on it during COVID. I was just juggling. I am the primary caregiver in this house. My husband works evening, so he's not at home during the day, he's sleeping during the days, he's at work during the evenings, and it was quite the juggle. It was a huge, huge burden and stress on us. - We will now hear from my colleague, Carrie McQuake. - Thank you, Amice. Hi, I'm Carrie McQuake. I'm a policy analyst with the Actance Center at the University of Toronto. The Center has just released the early childhood education report. It's a deep look at the status of childcare across Canada. And here to discuss it with us is Armin Yalizian. Armin is well known as an economist, and she's a leading voice on Canada's economic scene. Thank you for joining us, Armin. - It's my great pleasure. - So Armin, you and I have talked about this before, but let's go ahead again. Low cost early learning and childcare is getting a lot of attention. Canadian parents who for not too long ago paid some of the highest fees for childcare in much of the country are now paying just $10 a day. Here in Ontario, fees have been reduced by half. Yet there are think tanks and politicians who argue that public money would be better off going directly to parents. They say that this would give parents the option of staying at home or paying a family member to look after their kids. So where do you come down on the vouchers to parents versus formal childcare debate? - Well, as you point out, Carrie, it's an old debate. And in fact, we do give money to parents to give them the option of staying at home the Canada Child Tax Benefit was effectively that money. And it's quite rich. It's $6,000 or more at this point. If you're trying to give people the bonafide choice of staying home or working, putting more money in your pocket doesn't add a single unit of high quality care to be bought on the market. - So we do know that as childcare fees are coming down, more and more parents want to use regulated childcare, but they're the waiting list are getting longer and longer. Now the federal plan includes about an additional 250,000 new spaces that are supposed to be available by 2026. But even if we make that the goal, Canada will only have enough childcare spaces for about 60% of children under the age of five. You know, that's hardly universal childcare. So with only one and two families able to use childcare, do you think the program will be sustainable, particularly if we see a changing government? - Well, I think you've answered the question with your question. (laughs) Households a generation ago or a little bit more than a generation ago could rely on one breadwinner. Now an average household to get and stay into the middle of the income spectrum you need to workers per household, especially if there's kids involved. So we are going to need more childcare, but the way we get more childcare is having a demand for more childcare. So whereas right now we are not anywhere near the 60% of children younger than five, that is changing. More and more people are getting access and as more women get access, the demand for even more access will continue. To my mind, it isn't just a numbers game. It isn't just like can you find access to licensed care or not? It's the issue of the quality of care. If both mommy and daddy or mommy and mommy and daddy are working, who's taking care of the kids? So you want to make sure that care is high quality care that actually helps parents, does the job along with parents of maximizing the potential of every child? So I mean they are going to be literally our most precious resource as birth rates continue to fall. - So having said that, I have to add another number and that is that there's been about 100,000 spaces created towards that 250,000 goal. But many of them are sitting empty because they were unable to find the staff to fill them. And while most provinces have increased wages and summer offering pensions and health plans, and this has helped in some ways. And when you see in those provinces, they're not having such a difficult time finding staff, but yet staff shortages are a nationwide problem. Why is it so hard to get people to work in childcare? - Because the treated like their babysitters, they're treated, they're offered wages and working conditions that are comparable to pet groomers if you look on the indeed job posting site. It is actually quite appalling how poorly we treat and value the people that go to work so you can go to work. But that is a historic dimension of this part of the care economy, the people that take care of the most vulnerable people, the people who are too young and too old to work and often too sick to work. If you're not a registered nurse or a doctor, you're just considered not, you basically somebody that cleans up after those who can't clean up after themselves. In an era of slowing growth where we're going to need all hands on deck because of demographics, because of more accentuated, very hot geopolitics or because of climate change, all of these things are putting a drag on growth. If you want to not see shrinking economies everywhere, you got to make sure as many people that can work are able to work and work to their potential to pay the bills for everybody, then you better start valuing these people or else you're going to be doing a lot more of that work, unpaid or these people that are too old, too young and too sick to work are not going to get care period. So you're an economist, I'm sure you advise governments to be very careful with their money, is low-cost child care a good place to be putting our tax dollars? A hundred percent. And in fact, the most recent conversation about are concerns about falling productivity vis-à-vis the United States or falling GDP per capita, which is a proxy for economic well-being anyway of a nation. These things will continue to deteriorate without such public investments because they are what permits productivity not to deteriorate. If you don't invest in the ability of people to go to work to do, to be their best use, whatever they trained for, that they are out there, they are actually finding jobs that match their skills and they're putting those skills and talents to use. That's what creates productivity. And if you do not invest in low-cost child care, you are not seeing the maximum potential of the people that already are trained and ready to go. So, yeah, it's a good place to put tax dollars. If you don't want to see continued decline in productivity and continued deterioration of GDP per capita. So, is there anything you'd like to add that we haven't asked? I would say, you know, caveat, emptor, on governments wanting to expand capacity too fast and pouring too much money after it because the private equity sharks are swimming around in the water and they will take as much money that is out there as possible because they need to turn a profit and how do you turn a profit in a labor-intensive industry like child care. The fastest way to turn a profit is to lower payroll costs. And you do that by lobbying for lower qualifications of staff, lower staffing ratios, fewer adults per child, and fewer benefits and pensions for the people that are working. And that has been the track record around the rest of the world. We better wake up and smell the coffin here in Canada because that's what's coming to a neighborhood near you. - Now, we've seen the federal government say that's going to make low cost loans available for public and nonprofit providers to expand the capacity within child care spaces. It seems as if they're kind of even going over the heads of those provinces that have been sitting on the money and not spending a bit on either new spaces or making good jobs for the people who care for kids. Do you think that is an effective strategy? - It's unenforceable words. The legislation that was just passed to codify the fact that we are spending money nationally now on child care does use the term profit in a phrase that says nonprofit. We prefer public and nonprofit. It does not rule out for profit because the provinces don't want to rule out for profit. And what we're seeing is the lack of enforceability on their statement of intent to keep it as public and as nonprofit as possible. And what we are also seeing in the provinces is private equity entering these fields and growing what we also see around the world is where private equity has entered and grown its market share in child care. The quality of care has diminished and in fact whole swaths of the provision have had to be shut down. because of bankruptcy that these operators have been saddled with as you go through round after round after round of merger and acquisition, buying and selling chains of care. So we have been given a cautionary tale from the rest of the world. And I fear that we are not paying enough attention to what has happened elsewhere. And certainly our legislation and federal intent, notwithstanding, we have no protections from not following down that same path. Thank you, Army. My pleasure and thanks very much for taking the time to reach out to me and for everything that you do. And thank you for joining us. There are seven other podcasts in the Better Together series. If you like what you heard, tell a friend or share your feedback with us at info at ec-rpa.ca. Have a great day.