BY MARGARET PHILP
Social Policy Reporter
Toronto
IN her days as a young single mother on welfare, Carolyn Gee-Wingrove had a nasty habit of smacking her children.
She had already lost one son to the Children's Aid Society, and then began to hit her six-month-old son, Jerome. A few months later, a social worker was back on the doorstep of Ms. Gee-Wingrove's dreary basement apartment, threatening to remove the baby.
``I was an abusive mother,'' acknowledged Ms. Gee-Wingrove, 39, also a victim of abuse as a child.
At the urging of her social worker, she grudgingly began attending an unusual drop-in program called Parent-Child Mother Goose, in which low- income mothers learn nursery rhymes and the art of storytelling as a tool for parenting their young children.
``The program gave me a way to deal with anger through rhymes and stories,'' said Ms. Gee-Wingrove, who 13 years later is a Mother Goose teacher herself. ``I didn't enjoy Jerome as a baby until I started doing rhymes with him. It calmed me down and calmed him down.''
Celia Barker Lottridge, an author of children's books who helped to found Mother Goose, regards Ms. Gee-Wingrove as ``a shining example of what a parent with a life of disadvantage can do if they have something to work with.''
But as a program devoted to poor pre-school-age children, Mother Goose is a rarity in Canada. The few early-intervention programs typically operate on a shoestring budget, and their survival depends on fund raising that invariably distracts those running the program from their mandate to help children. At the same time, governments in Canada are scaling back their investments in early-childhood-education programs.
In France, where publicly funded nursery school is available to all children between 3 and 5, census data have shown that the longer children are enrolled in preschool, the lower the incidence of repeating Grade 1, no matter the socioeconomic background.
A massive and growing stack of research is showing that the human brain is sculptured by experiences in the first few years of life. Children's ability to think, learn and socialize has far more to do with the toys and people who fill their preschool days than the textbooks and teachers they meet later in the classroom.
Small wonder, then, that poor children are having a harder time in school than their rich classmates: Their fate is sealed long before they enter the classroom.
``We haven't entirely got the message of how critical the early years are,'' said Daniel Keating, head of the Department of Human Development and Applied Psychology at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
``If we're not taking sufficient account of what the circumstances for early optimal development need to be . . . we're not giving as great a chance for success to the full population as we are capable of doing.''
A recent Statistics Canada report says Canada's poorest children are more than three times as likely as their richest peers to be enrolled in remedial classes, half as likely to be placed in gifted programs, and twice as likely as all children to repeat a grade. For Dr. Keating, these findings say more about the lack of programs for preschoolers in Canada than about failings in the school system.
``Where we should be focusing our energy is to a large extent on increasing our investment in early-childhood education to give a maximum number of children going to school the opportunity to take advantage of what the schools have to offer,'' he said.
While tales abound of personal triumph over the adversity of poverty, the fact remains that life is a lot tougher for those who grow up in poor families.
And it's not just that poor children are frequently deprived of the books, toys and occasional excursions to the zoo that the children of middle-class parents can take for granted.
Children growing up in poor families face a higher risk of physical abuse at the hands of their parents, although not all poor children are abused. Their parents are more likely than those in middle-class families to suffer from debilitating depression. Their mothers may be children themselves, single teen-agers barely able to raise a child on their own. They more often survive on inadequate diets, making them more susceptible to anemia and infections. At the very least, poor children frequently live with parents who are in a perpetual state of anxiety over how the next rent cheque will be paid.
``If you're depressed, no matter how much you love your child it's going to be difficult to get enough emotional energy up to cuddle the child or read to the child,'' said Gillian Doherty, a child psychologist and early- childhood-education consultant in Oakville, Ont. ``It may even be difficult to find the energy to make the child a meal.''
Scientists increasingly believe that failing to stimulate a child's mind in the early years will have a lasting neurological impact that could impair his or her ability to reason, articulate and even make friends.
In the basement of the Elmbank Community Centre in Rexdale, a west-end Toronto working-class neighbourhood of townhouses and factories, the mood recently was sheer, joyful pandemonium. In a large circle on the floor, more than a dozen toddlers were bouncing and squealing with pleasure on the laps of their mothers, who were reciting nonsense verse from nursery rhymes and children's songs.
Some of the children at this Mother Goose session are very poor and live in the government-subsidized housing projects next door. A few had come with foster parents. Others were there with mothers who were pressed by social workers to attend. But there were middle-class children, too. One mother arrived with her twin boys in a new-looking minivan, eager to learn the age-old rhymes to sing to her sons at home.
``A lot of parents feel very uncertain about what they have to offer their children, especially if they're low-income and can't buy things,'' Ms. Barker Lottridge said. ``We try to give parents resources within themselves that they have to offer the child without stuff like videos and television.''
For Leslie Gerard, the mother of three-year-old Scott, Mother Goose also has given her an excuse to leave the house and socialize with other mothers. ``I was really stressed out before I started coming here. I never went out. I couldn't afford to go anywhere.''
It costs $33,000 a year to run Mother Goose out of four Toronto community centres. The Metropolitan Toronto social-services department kicks in $15,000; the rest comes from fund raising. ``We do a lot for the amount of money it takes,'' Ms. Barker Lottridge said.
``Every low-income part of the city should have a program like this. If I could, I'd make it happen. But we have enough trouble raising the money we need now.''
Not only is public funding shaky for the patchwork of early- intervention programs that help children at risk, governments in Canada are retreating from investments in social services that benefit all young children.
For example, the system of child care is under threat. The federal government has abandoned a pledge to fund a national program in that area. At the same time, it has eliminated the Canada Assistance Plan in which Ottawa and the provinces shared the cost of programs such as child care. Now there is the Canada Health and Social Transfer, a block fund in which billions of dollars has been slashed from federal spending on social programs and which leaves standards for those programs in the provinces' hands.
Indeed, the Ontario government already has proposed an overhaul of its child-care system that would weaken current standards by increasing the number of children that care givers may watch, reducing the number of inspections of day-care centres and eliminating wage subsidies for already-underpaid child-care workers.
And there's also the move that has jeopardized the future of junior kindergarten: The province has allowed school boards to eliminate JK as a way of budgeting for massive cuts in education spending.
``From my point of view, that's a serious mistake,'' Dr. Keating said.
Despite all this, child poverty suddenly has come into vogue with federal and provincial politicians.
In the February federal budget, the government unveiled an integrated child benefit that delivers a tax break to poor families but, critics say, penalizes them on their welfare cheques, leaving poor parents with no more money in their pockets than before.
And two weeks ago, the Ontario government said it would invest $40- million in early-intervention programs such as preschool speech and language services and teaching parenting skills in high-risk neighbourhoods.
A recent report from the United Way of Greater Toronto condemns government policy toward the funding of programs for young children as being ``confused, often contradictory and occasionally operat(ing) at cross purposes.''
The report says that moves by Ontario Premier Mike Harris's government when it took office to slash welfare rates and cut funding to maternity homes, women's shelters and family-resource centres ``seem at odds with the current interest and enthusiasm for improving the life opportunities for children at risk.''
``We know the first six years of life are really crucial for laying the groundwork for adult competency,'' Dr. Doherty said. ``It's very short- sighted to not invest in children before this age.''
The scientific evidence for this is compelling.
With the advent of visual-imaging technology that allows scientists to observe the brain as it functions, neurologists have found that the neural circuits of the human brain are wired by experiences after birth.
Infants are born with neurons and nerve connections (called synapses) in their brain that thrive only through the stimulation provided by their experiences. Synapses unused from lack of stimulation wither.
But at about the age a child starts kindergarten, parts of the brain are hard-wired, so it may be close to impossible to develop certain abilities such as language skills that had not been learned in the critical first few years.
The biological findings fit the mountain of sociological studies showing that children with disadvantaged backgrounds, when placed in nurturing and stimulating child-care programs, are just as prepared for the classroom as their more privileged peers.
One U.S. study comparing 12-year-olds who as babies were considered at risk of delayed development because of their poverty found that children who had been enrolled in preschool programs fared better in standard tests of reading, mathematics, writing and general knowledge, and were less likely to repeat a grade than those who had received individual tutoring between the ages of 5 and 8.
Other studies have shown that children who fail to develop social skills by age 7 are at higher risk of being ostracized by their schoolmates. These studies suggest that rejection from other children more than doubles a child's chances of dropping out of school before high- school graduation.
``One of the things high-quality child care does is level the playing field for kids receiving low-quality parenting,'' said Paul Steinhauer, a child psychiatrist at Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and a prominent child-welfare advocate.
Research findings such as these have persuaded a handful of agencies, such as the United Way, to turn their attention to this impressionable population of poor children.
In June, the United Way of Metropolitan Toronto will launch a campaign called Success by Six that will make disadvantaged children between birth and age 6 one of the agency's top priorities. The aim is to increase the $2.5-million the agency currently collects to finance early-intervention programs to $25-million - an amount the agency estimates it would cost to provide an intensive home-visitation program for the 12,600 Toronto children between birth and age 3 who are considered at risk.
``Relative to the growing body of research, we're seriously underinvested in this area,'' United Way president Anne Golden said. ``This is the area where we have the greatest leverage in solving social problems.''
Like the United Way, the Hincks Centre for Children's Mental Health in Toronto also would like to expand its services to underprivileged preschoolers. With the City of Toronto's public health department, the centre runs a program called Growing Together that provides home visits, parenting classes and social clubs for families living in the high-rise apartments of Toronto's St. Jamestown community, a densely populated neighbourhood of low-income and immigrant families. The $300,000 program is funded by the province and the Invest in Kids foundation.
``Young single parents living in a high-rise without a social-support network is a toxic situation,'' Hincks executive director Freda Martin said. ``It was never meant that one woman should bring up a child on her own.''
Dr. Martin said plans are afoot to replicate Growing Together across Canada, starting in the Montreal neighbourhood of Cote-des-Neiges.
The trouble is, as worthy as these early-intervention programs are, they touch the lives of a fraction of children considered at risk and do little to rectify the social inequalities that make children poor in the first place. Yet, as governments slash their investments in programs such as child care and welfare, they embrace a public policy that uses early intervention as the first line of defence against child poverty.
``It's bad public policy,'' concluded Martha Friendly, head of the University of Toronto's Childcare Resource and Research Unit.
``We cannot solve the problem of poor kids doing badly in school unless we do something about early-childhood-development programs. And in that respect, Canada as a country is moving backward.''
Saturday: Schools of poverty, schools of plenty
Monday: Widening the gap
Today: Early-intervention programs
Tomorrow: Some solutions
END
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