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The Globe and Mail, Friday, May  5, 2000

Children and success: It matters where they live

By Alanna Mitchell


A year in the life of the Canadian family
So what's the recipe for raising successful children?
Much research has been poured into this in recent years. And most of it has looked at how the family -- especially the composition and wealth of the family -- affects children.

Now, a groundbreaking Statistics Canada survey is providing a glimpse of how a neighbourhood may influence a child.

Through the National Longitudinal Survey on Children and Youth, Statscan is tracking about 22,000 children as they move through babyhood to the teen years. It catalogues the changes they go through and tries to figure out what effects these changes have on the lives of children. It also compares the situations of different children, and how well they do in life.

The applied-research branch of Human Resources Development Canada has used some of these data to publish initial findings on neighbourhoods.

The results show that the more affluent a neighbourhood is and the better its residents are connected with each other, the more ready the children are for learning at school. The implication is that children from wealthier areas will do better in school, and therefore better in life, than children from poorer neighbourhoods.

"Children growing up in affluent neighbourhoods that are safe and have high levels of cohesiveness appear to be at an advantage in terms of competencies associated with school readiness," says the study by British Columbia researcher Dafna Kohen and others.

The findings stem from examining toddlers (aged 2 or 3) and preschoolers (aged 4 or 5) and comparing their scores on certain tests with family income and neighbourhood characteristics.

The study was deliberately done to measure children in the critical years before they started school. The data were taken from the first round of the longitudinal Statscan survey, from late 1994 to mid-1995.

Toddlers were assessed in terms of their motor and social skills and what problem behaviours they displayed. Preschoolers were assessed for their skills in language and for any behaviour problems.

Affluence was defined as a family income greater than $50,000 a year. Poverty was a family income of less than $20,000 a year.

The study found that the greater the percentage of affluent families in a neighbourhood, the fewer behaviour problems the children showed. In the case of toddlers, 23 per cent of those who lived in poor neighbourhoods had high scores for behaviour problems. In the wealthier areas, that was 11 per cent.

The children in wealthier neighbourhoods also did better on language tests. In predominantly poor neighbourhoods, 24 per cent of the children scored low on the tests, compared with 13 per cent of children who lived in mostly wealthier places.

The study's authors attribute some of the phenomenon to the fact that having affluent neighbours helps children develop well. That means such neighbourhoods may contain adults from other families who monitor children, serve as role models or exert informal social control. In turn, that makes a neighbourhood safe.

The policy implications are important, the authors say. They revolve around improving conditions for the poorest children. That includes making sure they have access to services that tend to cost money: nurturing, stimulating, supportive, caring and safe environments.

"Investments in healthy child development have been demonstrated as being more cost-effective than dealing with long-term consequences such as delinquency, criminal involvement and mental-health problems," the authors write.



Copyright 2000 | The Globe and Mail

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