Connections - One mother's story
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With thanks to the Attachment Network of Manitoba for sharing this video
[On Screen text]
It’s often said that children are our future, our most precious resource. Yet20 – 25% of children in Canada are considered vulnerable. (National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth) That’s almost one million children who may not develop to their full potential. The social cost of those outcomes could be staggering…but there are ways to make a difference…
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Chelsea: Can you tell me, are you okay with kids in the building? I can call you back later. Hi, I’m calling about the apartment for rent. [baby laughing/talking] Baby want to look at the puppy? Hi, I’m calling about your apartment for rent. [baby laughing/talking] I was wondering if you were okay with pets and kids…and are you okay with pets or no? [baby laughing/talking] Oh, okay thanks. [baby laughing/talking] Are you okay with cats or…oh no, no, there’s two.
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Title: Connections
Narrator: We’re all wired to connect. We form relationships. We make friends. Many of us are members of large extended families. Wherever we find ourselves we seek to build community. Sociologists suggest our drive to belong, to connect is more than a psychological need, that living in community has a direct and positive effect on children. It’s a behavior that has its roots in the biology of early child development.
[background interactions]
Dr. Rob Santos : It used to be assumed that sort of babies are born as blank slates, they didn’t really know very much, they didn’t do very much, they kind of just sat there, cried now and then and we fed them. But the truth is with the new research is that babies are already born with an enormous amount of knowledge about how the world works and is organized and how to live within that world. What they rely on caring adults for is to help shape that learning further in all domains of development. So their physical development, social development, emotionally and in terms of their learning ability. So that sculpting that occurs it really depends on the interactions that the child has in every way with caring adults.
I’m Chelsea Hudd a 22-year-old single mother to a 14-month-old. I was living in Vancouver for 12 years and then moved to Toronto to try living with my parents to go back to school but that didn’t work out. So I came back here. I was living with a friend of mine, they have a one bedroom apartment with basically an oversized walk-in closet that we were staying in with no window, in the basement. And there was me, my friend, er partner and their two children, 3 and 4. So there were basically 6 people in a one bedroom apartment. It’s just not working for anybody involved. Do you know if you have Paradise Lost? But I didn’t really have
anywhere else to go other than a shelter and I didn’t want to put him in that environment so… [baby sounds] Probably the hardest time I’ve had finding an apartment; either it was because I’ve suddenly acquired my soon to be ex-husbands bad credit or it was because I was being judged, they didn’t think that I could afford the rent because I was a single parent or the fact that they didn’t want somebody on welfare living in the building or the fact that they didn’t want children in the building, which you’re technically not be able to do, but they do anyways. Or my cat was an issue. Or anything, it was just one thing after the other and it was exhausting for him to be out…not toddler wants to go looking for apartments, it’s very boring.
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Dr. Rob Santos: The research is clear now that in basically every sphere of a child’s life there’s a direct or indirect impact on their development. So everything from employment to poverty to the level of equity in a community from a socioeconomic or cultural perspective, to even housing. The quality of the housing in the community itself impacts child development.
[parent child interactions]
Dr. Rob Santos : In addition to the things I think we take as givens that a child needs enough food and water and warmth and physical safety, the way the brain develops in the early years is heavily dependent on the presence of nurturing relationships, on the presence of caring adults in the child’s life. Such that they talk about the sculpting of the connections in the child’s brain really depends on that
interaction.
[playing sounds]
Dr. Rob Santos: Look across the life course from when a child is conceived through their life into adulthood, the most enormous point of activity in terms of brain development are in the early years.
[children playing]
Dr. Rob Santos: Although a baby is born with all the neurons in the brain that an adult has, about 100 billion, stars in the milky way is a way of thinking of how complex the brain is…most of those neurons are not well connected and hence they’re dependent on experiences of the child in the first few years and in the pregnancy period.
[child laughing]
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Dr. Rob Santos: Around age 2 and 3 probably if you looked from a developmental perspective that’s the time when there’s the most connections in the brain because the child’s brain is so active. In fact if you define being smart as the ability to learn new things, babies far and away out pace adults in terms of their ability to learn. They are literally geniuses in terms of the way they approach the world.
[children playing]
Dr. Rob Santos: A great study that Emmy Werner did starting in the 50s that followed a group of kids who grew up in Hawaii and these are children with a number of disadvantages against them, that those that had access to extended kith and kin, the extended family despite all the challenges on their parents, did better over time. They had better chances of development. Family resource programs are one example of societies attempt to address what you talked about earlier which is to provide that kind of broader connection to other people, provide that sense of belongingness that I think really is innate. You talked about whether this is a societal thing. It is, but it’s also something that’s clearly embedded in our biological or our genetic heritage if you want to call it that. Across all societies you see those different societies develop different kinds of ways of providing a sense of community, a sense of belonging at the family level but also at the community level. And so family resource programs I think are being equally modern day examples of that.
[children singing]
Family resource program personnel: We try and make sure that we have a very individualized welcome to each person as if we were welcoming them in our own homes. And then try and say a nice goodbye as well. So what happened to me in circle time is I was keeping an eye out for people either arriving or leaving. And I noticed a mother grabbing her child and leaving and she had some tears and she had just put her phone back in her pocket. So I said, what’s going on? She said, it’s fine, I’m just going. But I sort of said do you want to talk and then she had just received a call for the 7th apartment that she was trying to rent was turning her down. So we just had a bit of an exchange, I asked if she wanted to talk about it and she was relieved about that.
[children playing]
Chelsea : It’s my saving grace. When I lived in Toronto I went to a drop-in center there too and I don’t know how parents do it without it. Every time I see somebody who is you know walking down the street or I’m talking to somebody in a coffee shop with a kid, I tell them about it because I honestly don’t know how I’d do this every day with such an energetic kid without somewhere like that that you could just go and he could run and I could have a moment.
[children playing]
Emily: How’ it going Chelsea?
Chelsea: Some minor issues in getting an apartment.
Personnel: I’ve been kind of going through the same thing but I just found one that I happened to drive by on Broadway…
Chelsea: I have no idea what I would have done if I hadn’t have met Emily.
Emily: I found this apartment finding service thing that I paid for online. And I’d be happy to share it with you because…
Chelsea: Fifteen before I found this one and hopeless, I was just at the end of my rope. This was the first place that didn’t do a credit check, that didn’t do background check. It was…I would have taken anything. I’m really glad that the government helps them and I’m really glad that they fight so hard to stay where they are and that they’re fighting hard to develop their program and get it to other people because I think it’s really necessary for parenting to have…it takes a whole community to raise a child and that’s definitely true. And without that there is no community. Western culture is that you do everything at home on your own and that’s impossible. It’s impossible for a person whether they be single or married, to do everything with no support and no help.
