Location key for childcare

By Maddy Hadfield

As the City of Ottawa begins the first phase of its plan to offer more early child care centres, Centretown parents say location should be the most important consideration.

Parents attending a public consultation at the McNabb Recreation Centre on Feb. 7 said they hope new Early Years centres will be close to Centretown and the Glebe, filling a void for easily-accessible child care services in the area.

Clara Friere, a manager with the City of Ottawa, said the consultations are designed to get feedback from the public before moving on with the planning process for new Early Years centres.

“We’re going to be collecting all the feedback and then reporting back to the province with our initial plans in the spring,” Friere said.

Friere said that the province is updating its human services system and merging all child and family programs funded by the province into one unified system of services called Ontario Early Years Child and Family Centres.

According to Friere, the new early childhood programs will be for children ages six and under, but will exclude daycare services.

Included in the services are drop-in programs, parent resource programs, playgroups and learning circles.

Parents will not be permitted to leave the building during those times.

Amy Smeltzer, whose 19-month-old son took his first steps at an Early Years Centre, said attending early years programming is what kept her sane during her maternity leave.

“I would count down practically the hours from when my local centre closed for the weekend to when I could go back on the following Tuesday,” Smeltzer said.

Smeltzer spent the first 15 months after her son was born in Toronto with two Early Years centres within a short walk from her house.

After moving to Ottawa, she said she struggles to access early years programming regularly without a family vehicle .

“We live in the Glebe, which we had assumed would have been very central and would have had access to these kinds of programs, but the reality is that the only Early Years Centre nearby is still a 35-minute walk from our house,” she said.

Other mothers agreed with Smeltzer during the consultation, saying that they have the same difficulties finding nearby services in Centretown. When asked what their ideal Early Years Centre would be like, having one within a 15-minute walk was at the top of their lists.

Another complaint from mothers was that early years services aren’t well advertised in Ottawa.

“The only way I learned about the Early Years Centre was because I was on a bus one day headed towards a parenting class at the hospital and saw another parent and asked if they were going there, too. She said, ‘No, but I do know of an amazing program that you should know about,’ ” Smeltzer said.

Mothers who attended the consultation agreed that early years programming kept them from feeling lonely and isolated. While their kids were interacting at drop-ins or playgroups, they could socialize with other parents.

Smeltzer said this makes Early Years Centres essential for developing social supports for parents.

“I’ve never in my life felt like I was a part of a community like I did with the Early Years Centre, and it was because I was getting to meet local parents who I would then run into on the street and run into at the playgrounds later, and we started to develop a real mutually supportive network,” Smeltzer said.

The locations for the new Early Years centres have not yet been determined as the city continues its analysis of the community’s needs. The province will complete its transformation of early years services in January 2018.