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"non-cognitive development is important and clearly lacking in government supported child-care." I really doubt this. FYI I live in Quebec, and on my Highstre

"non-cognitive development is important and clearly lacking in government supported child-care." I really doubt this. FYI I live in Quebec, and on my Highstreet there are a handful of daycares where normal businesses/stores/restaurants would be. Because they are small and common, it seems everyone is only a few hundred meters from their childcare around here. There are so, so many correlating factors that I'm going to say it's really difficult to measure these things. + The amount of marijuana that people smoke has skyrocketed in recent years, and they smoke young here. I know that smoking pot in early years i.e. 13-14 is bad news. + The number of children born to non-married and cohabitation parents is very high these days. + Quebec has a very different culture than the rest of N. America. They are chill here these days. For a lot of complex cultural and political reasons, I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. They don't seem to care about much at all. I'm just throwing up some examples, I have no idea what it is, but I suggest that the issues in later education are due to a bunch of factors and that prevalence of childcare isn't really the big one. Maybe, but I doubt it. Also I should add that this 'universal childcare' thing is a huge deal. It really changes things. In the ROC ('Rest of Canada') or the US, it's getting stupid expensive to have children. Here in Quebec ... it seems 'normal' to have kids. Just a few dollars a day. My sister in BC is a Finance Director with 3 kids and she only breaks even on daycare (!!!) essentially doing her job so she still has it when the kids are out. That's insane. All political issues and massive costs/taxes aside ... having cheap, really local daycare is a hugely relevant thing to communities and parents.

arandr0x 8y ago
I also live in Quebec and I've been told by people that the education system (meaning primary and secondary education) has changed quite a bit, not for the best, since 1997. In addition, one of the measures in the study is hyperactivity and anxiety in school age children, and what I've heard relative to that is there are more diagnoses because before children were not being detected that young. I would have liked the study to try harder at controlling the effect, for example by comparing cohorts in regions where use of the government funded childcare is more/less common. Quebec has plenty of remote regions where people are more likely to rely on extended family for care. The comparison group for the crime rate effect is the rest of Canada -- what the data essentially says is, at the time of data collection, you were more likely to be a criminal as a Quebec teen vs a teen in the rest of Canada if you were born in 1998-2000, instead of 1993. The authors interpret this as "exposure to child care", but the more appropriate meaning is probably that younger teens are more likely to commit crimes in Quebec. It would be difficult to see why -- except there are also more high school dropouts in Quebec and the school system means 17 year olds are a lot more likely to have the kind of freedom that lets one commit crimes in Quebec. IDK, on this one, I buy the correlation but not the causation. (They break up crime by type and they're not overwhelmingly drug crimes though. So whichever is the cause for this effect, it's not solely drug related.)
dsfyu404ed 8y ago
> I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. If you and pretty much everyone around you believed X and the rest of the country just did Y anyway every time you can't blame them. If you're not in control of your own destiny why bother since what you do won't matter?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Quebecers have more 'control over their destiny' than at any time in history, so if that were the case this were an issue, it would have been evident generations ago. There's a 'laissez faire' in this generation that is not there in the previous. Admittedly it's a pretty unscientific observation though :)

arandr0x 8y ago

I also live in Quebec and I've been told by people that the education system (meaning primary and secondary education) has changed quite a bit, not for the best, since 1997. In addition, one of the measures in the study is hyperactivity and anxiety in school age children, and what I've heard relative to that is there are more diagnoses because before children were not being detected that young. I would have liked the study to try harder at controlling the effect, for example by comparing cohorts in regions where use of the government funded childcare is more/less common. Quebec has plenty of remote regions where people are more likely to rely on extended family for care. The comparison group for the crime rate effect is the rest of Canada -- what the data essentially says is, at the time of data collection, you were more likely to be a criminal as a Quebec teen vs a teen in the rest of Canada if you were born in 1998-2000, instead of 1993. The authors interpret this as "exposure to child care", but the more appropriate meaning is probably that younger teens are more likely to commit crimes in Quebec. It would be difficult to see why -- except there are also more high school dropouts in Quebec and the school system means 17 year olds are a lot more likely to have the kind of freedom that lets one commit crimes in Quebec. IDK, on this one, I buy the correlation but not the causation. (They break up crime by type and they're not overwhelmingly drug crimes though. So whichever is the cause for this effect, it's not solely drug related.)

dsfyu404ed 8y ago

> I would say there is a defeatist, antagonist attitude (for the last 100 years), but in the most recent generation ... it's like they also have a kind of 'given up' attitude. If you and pretty much everyone around you believed X and the rest of the country just did Y anyway every time you can't blame them. If you're not in control of your own destiny why bother since what you do won't matter?

sonnyblarney 8y ago
Quebecers have more 'control over their destiny' than at any time in history, so if that were the case this were an issue, it would have been evident generations ago. There's a 'laissez faire' in this generation that is not there in the previous. Admittedly it's a pretty unscientific observation though :)