Cynthia Livingston loves being home with her two-month-old son Owen, but when her maternity leave runs out next April she doesn’t know if any childcare spaces will be available.

Infant care spaces on P.E.I. are extremely difficult to find. According to provincial data, of the estimated 2,948 full-time spaces across the province, only 192 are for children under two.

That’s why Livingston, like many parents, has her name on several childcare waiting lists. She had to start getting on those lists when she was still pregnant to have even a hope of getting an open space by the time she resumes work next spring.

Her choice program for little Owen is at the C.H.A.N.C.E.S. Family Centre in Charlottetown. She got on their list in November, but there are still over 100 people ahead of her.

She’s got her fingers crossed for C.H.A.N.C.E.S., especially because many of the early learning centres she called told her they couldn’t even put her on a wait list.

“I was just told ‘call back in June’ because they didn’t know if they would have anything available because they might close due to financial reasons,” Livingston said. “It made me feel really anxious because I have a year’s maternity and I know that I have to go back next April and if you’re on a waiting list it’s really just a waiting game.”

Livingston is not alone.

Parents across P.E.I. looking for child and infant care within the next year are finding their search confusing and difficult since most centres do not know how they will look or whether they will even remain open within the next few months.

The big idea here of helping our kids to have the best start possible in life is admirable. What is going to crater the idea is that those who designed the plan have offered a simple process to a complex project.The key elements of the new system cannot be known in advance. The assumption here is that they can - this is the fatal flaw.

Everyone seems caught and confused.

The Centres have to make up their mind by July 1 - but the information needed to help them do this is not available yet.

Parents don't know what to do either.

With only about 2,900 places planned - there is no answer yet to the question of what to do about the more than 4,000 kids in the age group. No specifics too about the most vulnerable.

Families and centre owners in rural areas seem especially worried.

It seems that centres in the rural areas will have to make the additional decision to merge to bring their numbers up. Not an easy call. Rural parents are concerned that merged centres will be too big and too far away. It seems also that rural owners will not be offered a buyout.

There is a real risk that there may be even fewer places in rural areas where many of the most vulnerable live. Is this a plan or a factor that was not anticipated?

Parents want choice. But what seems to be on the table is a bureaucratic process that makes all the decisions.

It also seems that the plan is to allocate places in the new system by the use of a list: "The province also has a plan to deal with the childcare waiting lists. A centralized wait list will be created and managed by the Early Childhood Development Association (ECDA). But details about how it will operate and who will be given priority once the list is created have yet to be worked out."

So parents will have no choice about where they will send their children.

The process designed to implement this is not working. The officials have to make it all up as they go and are already way behind as they must be because so much cannot be known.

We don't know yet how any of the centres might operate. We don't know the curriculum either. These centres have never operated. How will they work? It's like Apple showing a box with a nice picture but no phone and no idea how the phone will work.

There is no plan for the vulnerable. The group that are most at risk and that create risk for all the others is not in the plan at all. This is like BP assuming that all will be well when they drill a deep water hole.

There is no plan for how to knit the entire system from Prenatal, family outreach, to daycare to centres to kindergarten. What we have to do is build a system that is interoperable. This is like Apple building phones, laptops and iPads and not spending a minute on how they might all work together.

So what to do?

What is on the table here is a complex change that cannot be planned up front. This is the key point that those that planned this missed.

My advice - TIME OUT!.

Take a year - define the outcomes we need - this has not been done. the only outcome that has been decided is to build a new and unknowable system in a year.

What outcomes? How to have a seamless continuum from conception to kindergarten that includes the child AND THE PARENTS. What are the key elements and what is SUCCESS. How will it be measured?

Build some key Beta nodes and see how they work. They wont all work well at the get go. For we don't know how to do this. This is how to see operationally how all the parts and the whole works.

Then in 2012 all will know how this will all work.

This is such an important initiative. So much is at stake. We can do this - we can build a great system but not unless we acknowledge that we have to shift the process from Simple to Complex.

One in five teenagers leaves school illiterate and innumerate despite two decades of education reform, research shows. More than 100,000 lack the basic skills needed to function in society.

A study found there has been little or no change in the last 20 years in the proportion of youngsters rendered unemployable because they have such a poor grasp of words and numbers.

About 17 per cent of 16 to 19-year-olds are functionally illiterate, according to the study led by Professor Greg Brooks from the University of Sheffield.

It's the same here on PEI - maybe a bit worse - same in the US.

All the investment in the UK and in the US has been made in the school system itself. But as we can see here - to no avail.

What if we looked at the home as the starting place and the "Early Years" as the opportunity?

Reducing early vulnerability is the key to strong economic growth and development

 

From HELP website:

The government of B.C. has committed to lowering the provincial rate of early vulnerability to 15% by fiscal year 2015. This goal is both commendable and achievable.

With support from the Business Council of British Columbia, United Way of the Lower Mainland and Vancouver Foundation, HELP has completed a groundbreaking research project that quantifies the costs and benefits of addressing early vulnerability in BC.

The resulting report 15 by 15: A Comprehensive Policy Framework for Early Human Capital Investment in BC dramatically illustrates why all of us – individuals, businesses and governments – should care about the real brain drain in BC today resulting from early vulnerability.

Here is the 2009 Strategic Plan for BC that shows the goal of reducing early vulnerability in young children to 15% by 2015.  See page 22 Download Strategic_Plan_Sept_2009

Source Jane Boyd - Here is how BC is planning to face this issue - My hope is that on PEI we can make this THE ISSUE rather than the current focus that seems to be about the daycare organizations.

Here is how BC open the issue:

The stock of human capital in British Columbia is key to its long-term economic success. This means early child development is a critical issue for business leaders, because the years before age six set in motion factors that will determine the quality of the future labour force.

Today, only 71% of BC children arrive at kindergarten meeting all of the developmental benchmarks they need to thrive both now and into the future: 29% are developmentally vulnerable.

While the poor are more statistically likely to be vulnerable, the majority of vulnerable children in BC reside in the more populous middle-class. Early vulnerability is a middle- class problem.

A rate of child vulnerability above 10% is biologically unnecessary. At three times what it could be, the current vulnerability rate signals that BC now tolerates an unnecessary brain drain that will dramatically deplete our future stock of human capital.

Economic analyses reveal this depletion will cause BC to forgo 20% in GDP growth over the next 60 years. The economic value of this loss is equivalent to investing $401.5 billion today at a rate of 3.5% interest, even after paying for the social investment required to reduce vulnerability.

Unnecessary early vulnerability in BC is thus costing the provincial economy a sum of money that is 10 times the total provincial debt load.

The implication is clear: governments, businesses, bankers and citizens have ten times as much reason to worry about the early child vulnerability debt as we have reason to worry about the fiscal debt. Reducing early vulnerability is therefore necessary for BC.

The region you live in also makes a gigantic difference in how you will live. There are certain high-trust regions where highly educated people congregate, producing positive feedback loops of good culture and good human capital programs. This mostly happens in the northeastern states like New Jersey and Connecticut. There are other regions with low social trust, low education levels and negative feedback loops. This mostly happens in southern states like Arkansas and West Virginia.

If you combine the influence of ethnicity and region, you get astounding lifestyle gaps. The average Asian-American in New Jersey lives an amazing 26 years longer and is 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree than the average American Indian in South Dakota.

When you try to account for life outcome differences this gigantic, you find yourself beyond narrow economic incentives and in the murky world of social capital. What matters are historical experiences, cultural attitudes, child-rearing practices, family formation patterns, expectations about the future, work ethics and the quality of social bonds.

The PEI Government is getting close to revealing a new policy for Early Childhood.

While they do this, the Health Care Budget hits 500 million and will reach 1 billion soon.

While they do this, we know that over 60% of Islanders leave school unable to read a complex sentence.

While they do this, we know that PEI will have only about 500 kids leaving high school a year in 15 years time.

Who is going to do the work, pay the taxes and cope with all the revolutionary change to come for PEI?

That is the context surely!

Obesity 'often set before age of two'

More than a quarter of children in Britain are overweight The "tipping point" that sets children on the way to a lifetime of obesity often occurs before the age of two, say US researchers. A study of more than 100 obese children and teenagers found more than half were overweight by 24 months and 90% were overweight by the age of five. A quarter were overweight before they were five months old, the researchers reported in Clinical Pediatrics. In the UK, around 27% of children are now overweight. The children in the study - who had an average age of 12 - were all overweight or obese by the age of 10.   Getting parents and children to change habits that have already taken hold is a monumental challenge fraught with road-blocks and disappointments Dr John Harrington, study leader Although the reason for rapid weight gain in early life is not well understood, contributing factors are likely to be poor diet, early introduction of solid food, and not getting enough exercise, the researchers said. Eating behaviour They added that food preferences may be set by the age of two, so changing a child's eating behaviour at a later stage may be difficult. Study leader Dr John Harrington, an assistant professor at Eastern Virginia Medical School, said the results should be a "wake-up call for doctors". He went on: "Too often, doctors wait until medical complications arise before they begin treatment. "Getting parents and children to change habits that have already taken hold is a monumental challenge fraught with road-blocks and disappointments.

Changing school food obviously has a huge potential impact on the obesity epidemic.

But as we can see here it all starts at home. It all starts with habits.

This is why my daughter and her colleagues at Real Food For Real Kids have targeted daycares and kindergartens.

Once set a food habit is so hard to undo. But what if you set a good habit?

Curing cancer is so hard - but this is not - we know what has to happen to have a massive change in health and life'e potential.