This study examined early childhood education and care (ECEC) utilization in Canada, focusing on use of unlicensed home child care (HCC) from an equity perspective. Data from the 2011 cycle of the General Social Survey (GSS) were used. Across Canada, parent responses reveal that 16.6% of children between the age of 12 months and entry to school were in unlicensed HCC. Another 24% of working parents reported having no regular form of non-parental childcare. Families with higher incomes were more likely to report using center-based care. Conversely, lower-income working parents with lower levels of education were more likely to use unlicensed HCC or report using no non-parental care at all. Comparison of parent responses in Ontario, however, where government estimates for the number of licensed and unlicensed HCC spaces are available, revealed that more parents report that their children are in licensed HCC than is possible. The lack of accurate parental reporting calls into question a key assumption of current regulatory systems, which is that parents are informed consumers of ECEC services. Given that many parents misreport the type of HCC their children use, and the equity concerns raised by the overall utilization patterns we found, we argue that governments need to take a more active role in oversight and support of HCC.

We used latent profile analysis on a longitudinal dataset to examine changes in maternal and child mental health during COVID-19 and factors that may protect against declines in mental health. Participants were 183 low-income mothers ( M = 36 years) with young children ( M = 5.31 years) in the City of Toronto with data collected prior to and during the pandemic in 2020. Mothers reported on their own stress, anxiety and depression and their children's emotional, conduct, hyperactivity, peer and prosocial problems at both timepoints. We found heterogeneity in mental health changes, with 5 distinct patterns of change for mothers and 4 distinct patterns of change for children during COVID-19. The majority (83%) of mothers experienced significant declines in at least one aspect of mental health. In contrast, the majority of children (65%) experienced either no change or improvements in mental health. Interestingly, patterns of change across these groups were not differentiated by demographic characteristics such as income, education and family composition. However, for mothers, a higher degree of satisfaction with social support was associated with membership in a profile with better mental health both prior to and during the pandemic. For children, having a stable history of early childhood education and care was associated with membership in a profile that showed improvements in mental health during the pandemic. We discuss how our results support the need for proactive and global interventions for at-risk families with raised mental health concerns, and the benefits that stable early childhood education and care may provide for young children.

In the Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) sector there is a move to reduce oversight costs by reducing the frequency of quality assessments in providers who score highly consistently across time. However, virtually nothing is known about the stability of ECEC quality assessments over time. Using a validated measure of overall classroom quality, we examined stability of quality in a sample of over 1000 classrooms in licensed child care centres in Toronto, Canada over a 3-year period. Multilevel mixed-effects linear regression analyses revealed substantial instability across all types of ECEC centres, although publicly operated centres were somewhat more stable and tended to have higher quality scores. We also found substantial variance between classrooms within ECEC centres. None of the structural, child/family and neighbourhood characteristics we examined were significantly related to stability of quality ratings. The lack of stability found in our sample does not support the use of a risk-based approach to quality oversight in ECEC. Large within centre classroom quality variance suggest that all classrooms within a centre should be assessed individually. Furthermore, classroom level scores should be posted when scores are made public as part of accountability systems. Future research should, in addition to administrative data used in our study, explore how factors such as educator training, participation in program planning, reflective practices and ongoing learning might improve stability of quality over time.

No abstract