This slide summarizes a range of studies that show what it means for Canadians when they come to school at age six and are vulnerable, either physically, socially, emotionally, or in terms of their ABCs and one-two-threes. It summarizes a range of studies showing that early vulnerability relates to a range of social problems, like school failure or criminality, or health issues later on in life. Then the question is, what causes that early vulnerability?
I think we have to be careful to not just describe this as a lifestyle, as if there's some life that parents today are choosing, and it's those bad decisions of individual parents. That would mean that today we have a generation of parents who are just worse than they were a generation ago. There's very little evidence to suggest that's the case, but there's a ton of evidence to show that so much has changed from the mid-seventies to today.
Those changes include the fact that wages are going down, in particular for men, so even though we have way more adult time devoted to a labour market, households don't have any more income if you control for inflation. Income doesn't stretch further than it did in the past because housing prices are so much higher. Then people need to take on an additional mortgage to pay for things like child-care services that allow one or both parents to be in the labour market.
If we want to address these things on the screen, we need to get our family policy right.