Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Human Early Learning Partnership have made B.C. the only jurisdiction in the world with an atlas that can show at a glance the relationships between child vulnerability patterns and socio-economic conditions for every neighbourhood and school district.
The B.C. Atlas of Child Development shows factors that combine to impact early child development and provides an unprecedented policy tool for improving the well-being of children. A child’s vulnerability is measured by school readiness as this developmental stage is pivotal to their success in later life.
The Atlas’ colour-coded maps are based on teacher evaluations of 44,000 children in almost every kindergarten class in B.C. and census data. The Atlas is available at http://ecdportal.help.ubc.ca/atlas/BCAtlasofChild
Development_
CD_22-01-06.pdf.
“We now have an amazing amount of data to look at what is going on in communities,” say Paul Kershaw, lead author of the Atlas and an Assistant Professor at UBC’s Human Early Learning Partnership (HELP). “The Atlas allows everyone to not only ask how we are doing in raising our young children, but also how we as a community, and a country, can do better.”
“The B.C. Atlas will help us to work with communities and policy makers to develop strategic approaches to healthy child development in B.C.,” says Linda Reid, Minister of State for Child Care. Since 2001, Reid has been instrumental in facilitating HELP funding from the Ministry of Children and Family Development for an annual amount of $2.5 million.
“The Atlas explores how different environments create different developmental outcomes for children,” says Clyde Hertzman, Director of HELP and Canada Research Chair in Population Health and Human Development. “It helps answer policy questions on how to promote healthy child development.”
Hertzman, an epidemiologist, led the province in applying the Early Development Instrument (EDI), a research method that measures children’s school readiness along five domains of development: physical health and well-being, social competence, emotional maturity, language and cognitive development, and communication and general knowledge.
Four years in the making, the B.C. Atlas reveals that factors contributing to a child’s vulnerability include:
- a greater share of families headed by a lone parent
- a larger share of men performing no child care in a typical week
- a greater share of residents who speak a foreign language at home
- a smaller share of men in management positions
- a greater male-female earnings gap
“Policy makers are often uncomfortable talking about sexism, or racism or class politics,” says Kershaw. “But findings from the Atlas suggest that we all need to consider these issues more carefully if we are committed to creating nurturing neighbourhoods in B.C. and across Canada.”
The Atlas combines EDI and B.C. Census data to discern which of more than 1,000 socio-economic variables relate significantly to neighbourhood vulnerability patterns among kindergarten children.
Kershaw says the B.C. Atlas of Child Development reveals that some neighbourhoods are achieving favourable child development outcomes despite difficult local socio-economic circumstances.
For example, the community of Vernon has several neighbourhoods with vulnerability rates well below what would be expected based on their socio-economic circumstances. Conversely, a nearby school district (Central Okanagan) has socio-economically “advantaged” neighbourhoods with higher vulnerability rates than might be expected.
The Atlas was funded by the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development, the B.C. Ministry of Health, and HELP, a research institute in UBC’s Faculty of Graduate Studies. The Atlas relies on the interdisciplinary structure of HELP, a network of more than 200 faculty, researchers and graduate students from six B.C. universities: UBC, UBC Okanagan, Simon Fraser University, University of Victoria, University of Northern B.C. and Thompson Rivers University.
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