The Dominion - maternal health

Early Life's Long Reach Forward

stephlaw — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 09:19:18 +0000

Can a parenting co-op in Cape Breton save the economy?

HALIFAX—A report released in January by the Canadian Paediatrics Society (CPS) outlines a simple adjustment in family services that would lead to an economic revolution in Canada, and it’s all about facilitating early childhood development.

The society’s 2012 status report, Are We Doing Enough, showed that for every dollar spent in the early childhood years, the government could see $4 to $8 in return to society. It noted, in particular, the provincially funded early learning and childcare program in Quebec, which undoubtedly played a role in increasing the number of women in the workforce by four per cent, and in increasing the provincial GDP by $5.2 billion.

But the report said that the federal government isn’t doing enough to advance early learning and childcare programs across the country.

A group of young women in Inverness, an old coal-mining town in rural Nova Scotia, are not waiting around for the government to catch on. With the help of a municipal councillor, the women have decided to start the revolution in their town.

“There is a lack of honouring the role of the child and the woman in building a pluralistic, empathetic world,” says Jim Mustard, a councillor for the County of Inverness. There is little in the way of public services aimed at enriching the lives of people ages zero to five, he notes, even though these are the people who determine the health and vibrancy of a community.

In an effort to support the county's population of young families, Mustard, along with seven mothers, formed the Inverness Early Years Co-op.

Inverness, population 2,000, is a little different from nearby villages in that it enjoys a critical amount of built infrastructure: a hospital, an arena, a school, a food bank and low-income housing. “Families don’t need two cars to survive here,” says Mustard. “It’s a nest for people to land in and stay.”

Still, to an outsider, a small town in an economically depressed region of Nova Scotia may not seem like the place such an initiative might flourish, but for Diana MacLellan, a 25-year-old single mother originally from Inverness, and a member of the co-op’s board of directors, it makes perfect sense.

“I always had a baby on my hip,” she says. “I have a large extended family: 22 aunts and uncles, 52 cousins. You know, someone to turn to, everyone to answer to.” The supportive dynamic of a large, tight-knit family was common when she was growing up, but it has faded as families moved away from their rural roots in search of more economically viable livelihoods in urban centres and in oil-rich Alberta.

“We’re trying to bring that [family support] back,” she says.

The Inverness Early Years Co-op is not yet operational, but its board has been meeting since June 2010, and plans are underway to partner with the Inverness Cottage Workshop to build a space for the co-op’s services. The centre will be 11,000 square feet, and “a model of energy efficiency,” says Mustard, using local energy sources such as biomass pellets from naturally regenerating alders and solar power. The town of Inverness has already raised $700,000—one-third of the building's cost—and hopes to raise another third from the province. The board hopes the co-op will be open in eight months.

“We’re creating a platform to grow a community,” says Mustard.

Like many other towns and villages in rural Nova Scotia, Inverness suffers from a constant cutback in support services for families, Mustard says. The obstetrics unit in the Inverness hospital was cut eight years ago. Now, women in Inverness have to drive two hours to the nearest obstetrics unit, in Antigonish, to give birth.

In addition to rural hospitals losing their services for young families, Nova Scotia has also closed dozens of rural schools over the past 15 years. Last year, the federal government further cut five Service Canada offices out of rural Cape Breton.

Because a child's health begins with the mother's, the Inverness Early Years Co-op is geared towards relieving the woman’s financial stress by offering training for employment skills, while providing a place to share childcare. In-kind payments will be an option for low-income families.

“We want to have licensed childcare, an informal drop-in, with prenatal [services], breastfeeding, a playgroup, and a place for families to convene with a specialist,” says MacLellan. “The centre has to be accessible to absolutely everybody.”

The gap in services for the early years of a person's life—from in utero to age five—is a national trend. Canada ranks last among 25 wealthy Western nations in its support for early childhood development policies, according to a 2011 report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and UNICEF. Canada also comes second-last among 34 OECD nations in spending on childcare and pre-primary education.

This is ironic, given the firm Canadian roots of the interdisciplinary research that led to the groundbreaking 1999 Canadian Early Years Study: Reversing the Real Brain Drain, done by the late Dr. Fraser Mustard (father of Inverness's municipal councillor) and Margaret Norrie McCain. The study called on the federal government to establish parenting centres to support families, beginning at pregnancy. Dr. Mustard was a world-reknowned pioneer in recognizing the impact of early brain development on quality of life, and he co-authored two follow-up early years studies; the most recent was released a few days after his death in November 2011.

These early years studies stem from neuroplasticity research, which is based on the principle that your brain is “plastic.” It can learn new things through practice, but it could also lose learnt things when they aren’t practiced.

During the first few years of life, this brain development takes place at an incredible rate; it triples in size by the time a child reaches the age of three. Early years, therefore, present "great opportunities and great risks that set trajectories across a lifetime," according to the Council for Early Child Development (CECD), founded by Dr. Mustard and colleagues to continue the work initiated in the first Early Years Study. The CECD ceased operations in 2010 due to lack of funding.

Dr. Mustard and McCain's first study in 1999 argued that parenting centres would save billions of dollars down the road.

Not only do early developmental deficits, caused by poor health and environment, devastate the lives of the children in question, but they also cost Canada dearly through welfare, health care, prisons and remediation, and result in lower contributions to society, according to six economists writing for the Journal of Public Health in 2010.

"The country now tolerates an unnecessary brain drain that will dramatically deplete our future stock of human capital,” write the economists, of Canada’s lost opportunities for productivity by lack of investment in its citizens’ early years. Over a quarter of Canadian children enter kindergarten not fully prepared to learn, they report.

Early child development programs also significantly reduce the cost of mental illness, the second-leading cause of disability and premature death in Canada. Mental illness costs $51 billion per year in Canada due to costs in health care and loss of productivity.

Canada was on the road to becoming an international leader in early child development programs with a national childcare strategy, to which the federal government committed $5 billion over five years in 2004. Agreements were signed between the federal and provincial and territorial governments, which would receive transfer payments for establishing early learning and childcare plans.

But when Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper came to power in 2006, that plan was scrapped.

The 2004 vision for a national framework on early years development was crucial if Canada wanted return on its investment in early child development, according to Dr. Danielle Grenier and Dr. Denis Leduc from the Canadian Paediatric Society in a 2008 article.

"The belief that such a system can create itself in the absence of national leadership is simply flawed," they write. "At best, Canada's early childhood education and care 'system' is a patchwork of policies and programs—creating geographical and income inequities."

Nova Scotia, says Mustard, falls behind other provinces in its commitment to strategize around the link between maternal health and childhood development—it puts the least resources, out of any province, into early child development. In fact, in spite of CPS's recommendations to invest in early years education, the province's Department of Education announced on February 3 its "Kids and Learning First" plan, which would invest $6.7 million in initiatives such as a Discovering Opportunities for Grade 9, virtual courses and skilled trade courses geared to shipbuilding. But none of the funds will be dedicated to early development initiatives. The department did not respond to requests for an interview.

The Inverness initiative demonstrates an alternative angle on economics in the choice to form a co-op, distinct from a profit-driven enterprise.

“The co-op model is most responsive when trying to develop something as open as an early years centre,” says Mustard. “The model makes sense.”

“This is not about targeting families with problems,” says Councillor Mustard, “but building a centre in the community to support all parents, where all issues are put in a holistic perspective.”

Twenty-five-year-old single mother Diana MacLellan agrees with Mustard and believes the co-op model will work to improve her child’s development and health.

“The community has to have ownership in the centre, and be able to make changes and decisions,” says MacLellan.

With this co-op in place, MacLellan says women might be able to regain the community network that once existed in Inverness.

“If anything ever happened, I could walk into any house for help and support,” she says. “It's about feeling safe.”

Moira grew up near Inverness, and now lives and bikes in Halifax.

Questions? Comments? Drop us a line: info@mediacoop.ca.

Baby co-op

Fight the Fires that Be

Martin Lukacs — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 12:42:29 +0000

Women struggle to make fire-fighting profession more inclusive

LONDON, ON—Chelsea Merkt-Kit leans back casually in her chair. Her surroundings are calm. For the moment, she’s without her team, a group of men she calls her “brothers.” Her long blonde hair is pulled back into a neat and tidy ponytail. Her navy blue uniform is oversized and engulfs her petite frame.

The crest on her uniform reads the same as every man’s in the building: “Be caring, be safe, and prevent harm.” At 400 Horton Street, London, Ontario’s central fire house, these are words by which men and women alike live and die.

But Merkt-Kit isn’t who you would usually picture climbing a ladder into a burning building. The 27-year-old Waterloo native is 5’7 and 125 pounds.

“People are always surprised when they hear what I do,” she says. “Especially when I’m in a dress and heels.”

She’s one of only eight women currently working as a professional firefighter in London, a city that boasts a force of almost 400.

“Of course, it’s a male dominated profession,” Merkt-Kit admits. She cautiously explains that you need to be a certain type of woman to survive as a firefighter.

“You have to get along well with men, and allow them to be themselves,” she says.

Yet the small number of female firefighters in Canada paints a picture of a service still dictated not simply by personality, but by the sturdy persistence of gendered labour roles.

Women account for only three per cent of professional firefighters in Canada, says Paul Laffin, a data dissemination officer at Statistics Canada. In Ontario, women in firefighting are paid on average $13,500 less than their male counterparts.

Nevertheless, Merkt-Kit is among the first generation of female firefighters to benefit from earlier steps toward equality in the workplace, says Karen Simpson, an International Trustee with the International Association of Women in Fire and Emergency Services (also known as I-Women), in a phone interview from Chatham-Kent. She’s been a professional firefighter in Ontario for seven years.

She hopes that women like herself, and Merkt-Kit, can create another wave of change in the service, one which will make firefighting increasingly open and safe for women.

Over the last decade, Simpson says, training to become a firefighter in Canada has become more accessible and standardized. Women are entering the workforce with more confidence, having proved themselves physically and mentally against the men in school.

And while these systemic changes speak volumes, it’s the women who blazed the trail for the “new generation” who know best how far firefighting has come.

Women such as Kim Harrison. The team captain of the Medical Response Unit at the Kearney Volunteer Fire Department in Kearney, Ontario, Harrison has been fighting fires for 26 years.

Forty per cent of Harrison’s team are women.

“A lot of women assume they can’t join, that they don’t have enough strength,” Harrison said over the phone from Kearney. “We are trying to open doors for them.”

She does so by serving as a role model herself. Harrison gives tours of the fire station to women interested in the service, and often speaks at local schools. She urges children to use the word “firefighter” rather than “fireman.” For almost three decades, she’s been slowly working to change people’s attitudes.

“This is not a male place anymore,” Harrison says proudly.

Fire Chief Rick Phillip is thankful for her presence. For Phillip, whose wife and grand-daughter are also firefighters, women in firefighting is only natural. “They are far more compassionate,” he adds.

Overcoming the systemic difficulties that prevent women from joining the service is also necessary if Ontario hopes to keep both professional and volunteer fire squads full, says Carl G. Pearson, president of the Fire Fighters Association of Ontario.

“Half the population is female,” he said in a phone interview, adding that the assumption that female firefighters are less capable than their male counterparts is simply incorrect.

A department such as Chief Phillip’s in Kearney is a glimpse into a promising future, says I-Women’s Simpson. Yet, she says, there is much more work to be done.

“It doesn’t matter if women are as fit or better trained. If the administration is not prepared to accept women, there is going to be a struggle,” says Simpson.

Only a few weeks ago, Simpson and the I-Women organization demanded that the concerns of women in firefighting be heard at the US National Fallen Firefighters Foundation’s 2nd Annual Research Symposium.

Right now, Simpson explained, there is no data exploring the relationship between fighting fire and reproductive health, and specifically how chemicals produced in a fire can affect a woman’s ability to have healthy babies.

I-Women managed, for the first time, to get the questions of reproductive health discussed as stand-alone issues at the conference.

Simpson hopes that within the next three to five years, with adequate funding and research, the fire service will start to properly address these concerns. While the spark of change has been ignited, it’s going to be up to the “next generation” to keep “pounding their fists and stomping their feet.”

It’s probably going to depend on women like Merkt-Kit, who was married last year. Her husband is a professional firefighter in Waterloo. And while she is a face for how far the service has come, she may soon be affected by where firefighting, for women, has not yet gone.

When asked if the two had yet started a family, she smiled.

“No, not yet, but soon.”

Lisa Laventure is a graduate student in journalism at the University of Western Ontario.

Firefighter illustration