Roos – early risk factors  

Another area that we’ve been using these data for has been to try and identify who are children who, through no fault of their own, but really through their, where they were born, where they live, what their circumstances are, are really marginalized and placed at risk. The kinds of factors that we were able to look at were: number 1, was this a child of a mother who was a teen when her first child was born? We started looking at, was this a child of a teen mother? But it turns out that the child is basically at risk because the mother is at risk – for poverty. So it’s not that the teen mother, per se, is such a terrible thing if one provides support. But there’s no question that children of teen mothers are very much at risk. So that was one risk factor. 

We also looked at families who had, the child lived in. who had received income assistance. Again, poverty being the driving problem. We also looked at families where, or children – where the child had been taken into care, or the family had been offered protection services, because of, typically, dysfunctional behaviour in the family, for children in that family. And we found, one of the most interesting things we found was how broad an issue it is in, particularly in Winnipeg and the rest of Manitoba, finding a child with one of these risk characteristics. I mean, I personally don’t know many children of teen mothers or children in care or children in poverty – whose parents are on income assistance. But when you look across the province and you look at children who’ve experienced one of these characteristics in the last 10 years, 10 years of their life, we’re up to almost a third of Manitoba’s children who have this characteristic.  

So what we’ve been interested in knowing is when we have children with one or more of these risk factors, how does this seem to affect them? What is it associated with?  

So we’ve looked at characteristics such as does the child, the young woman, does the child become a teen mother herself And there’s no question that the more risk factors one has the more likely the young woman is to become a teen mother.  

We’ve also looked at how likely is a child to graduate from high school. And there’s a huge difference between, and here, we’re not talking about the most affluent group in society, we’re just saying, compared to the two thirds of children who don’t have one of these risk factors, again – enormous differences. 

We’ve looked at, is the child, when they graduate, or they don’t graduate from high school, when they become a young adult, how likely is that child to go on, receive income assistance, i.e., be unable to find a job and support themselves. Again – big differences. So, it is clearly, we’re finding these risk factors place children at – they’re very likely to not have a good start in life.