Kershaw – nurturing environments

Well we know that the early years are critical for predicting a range of things later on in the life course.  And we know that early nurturing environments, including community environments, are critical for influencing early development. So for instance, we know that the early nurturing environments, by one’s second decade, are going to influence school achievement, without a doubt, and interaction with the criminal-justice system.  As we move into our third and fourth decades, it gets at levels of health issues around obesity, diabetes, and things like mental illness and depression. And as you move on toward later in the life course you will see that the early years still are very predictive of later health and well-being.   

A nurturing community doesn’t think that we eliminate child poverty or child vulnerability by only putting up pictures of children and focusing on what children are doing. A nurturing community recognizes that children grow up with adults. And so supporting adults is just as important as supporting children. In fact you support children often by supporting adults. So a nurturing community is one that provides time, for parents to fulfill their responsibilities as parents, and their aspirations to care personally.  I mean one of the challenges that we’re running into is that sometimes people are putting more time into the labour market and we worry that that’s at the risk of having the time, but if we ask them to take more time, then we’re having people who are poor. And there’s no doubt that the income poverty is a major predictor. So we need to recognize how to put in place income supports and rely on the labour market to provide people with wages that are sufficient for them to tend to the income needs of their families.   

We have started to adopt rhetorically, this notion that it takes a village to raise a child. It’s a really lovely African proverb. But we don’t live it. And we certainly have in place a system that, even if you are rich in Canada, you’re going to find it hard to access services before your kid is aged six that you think are important. Child care services are an example. But even if your child is identified say with an extra support need, try and find some support services to address that issue. Or issues at pre-k or some of the monthly interaction with professionals who could help you recognize what are the important developmental stages from month to month to month.  We could do that. That would be nurturing.  But we’re not yet doing it because we have a vision that there’s something magical about age six. I’m not sure what’s magical about age six, but I know then as a community we become more nurturing because we’ll create schools and invite everyone to come there. And we don’t call them institutions that are robbing our families of time with their kids. We think “no, okay that’s an important place where society can kick in”. And, we’ll put in place health care, although disproportionally as, you know, people get older. So those are things that make a society nurturing.