Parents and Families

New Safe Sleep for Your Baby Booklet

Take a few minutes to read this important information on how we can help babies sleep safely and share it with families!

Affirmation and Celebration: New Report Offers Recommendations for Supporting Multilingual Preschool-Age Children during the Pandemic

Affirming and celebrating all language practices supports children’s identity, and social and emotional well-being, as well as fosters their learning and development. That’s the top message from a new report that focuses on ways that parents, family members and other adults can help multilingual preschool-age children cope with the stress and trauma of the continuing COVID-19 pandemic. Nurturing Your Preschool-Age Multilingual Child Amid COVID-19: The Important Role of Languages describes the language development of multilingual children and how to nurture them through daily conversations and other interactions.

Multilingual mental health resources for newcomers

As part of the Promising Practices in Accessing Virtual Mental Health: Supporting Refugees during COVID-19 project, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Ontario Ministry of Health, service providers working with newcomers and refugees share these multilingual mental health resources.

Making Caring Common

Making Caring Common has a variety of resources for families, parents, and caregivers. They offer activities, tips, resource lists, and discussion guides to help you and your team foster kindness and caring with the children in your program.

Newcomer Tips for a Fire-Safe Winter

Mississauga Fire is proud to serve a vibrant and growing community that is home to many new Canadians. To ensure that family homes are safe this winter, they've put together a helpful list of winter fire safety tips and translated them into multiple languages. It's full of great information and resource links that you can share with the families you work with as they establish roots in your community!

5 Ways Immigrant Parents Support Children’s Home Language Learning

It is important to preserve and develop a child’s home language for their cultural, linguistic, and social development. Yet, languages other than English are often not welcomed or encouraged the way they should be in classrooms. Here are 5 important ways that immigrant parents pass along their important linguistic, cultural, and social knowledge to support children's home language learning.

Building Responsive Relationships Remotely

Science tells us that responsive relationships—like those with serve and return interactions—between children and adults, adults and other adults, and children and other children help buffer us against the effects of ongoing stress. These relationships act as a core building block for resilience and help us navigate life’s ups and downs. How do we maintain and promote responsive relationships during the coronavirus pandemic? Harvard Centre on the Developing Child reached out to care providers and others on the frontline of the early childhood development field to learn how they are building relationships with families from afar. Here are their tips for navigating remote interactions with children and families during this unusual time.

Preventing and responding to children’s exposure to intimate partner violence

The risks of intimate partner violence intensified due to the pandemic context. The Encyclopedia on Early Childhood Development has launched an infographic summarizing the latest knowledge on the consequences associated with children’s exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) and on ways to mitigate and avoid them. We invite you to share this infographic with your networks, as we all work together to put in place, as quickly as possible, the most promising interventions to reduce the distress and hardship of domestic violence.

Newcomer families’ experiences with programs and services to support early childhood development in Canada: A scoping review

It can be difficult for families with young children to navigate early childhood development supports. In particular, newcomer families often encounter additional barriers and require resources, programs, and services that are tailored to their unique assets, experiences, and needs. A team of researchers conducted a scoping review of the literature published between 2000 and 2019 to explore what is known about newcomer families’ experiences with programs and services to support early childhood development in Canada. Their report identifies common themes and the need for informed, meaningful and culturally relevant policies, programs, and services for newcomer families to support their children’s well-being.

Share 8 Great Reading Tips with Families (in 16 languages)

There are many ways that families of English language learners (ELLs) can support language and literacy at home. Colorín Colorado has a beautiful new series of 8 posters and reading tips for families - and they are available in 16 languages so you can easily share them with parents!