When I think about Child Development

A child-like man is not a man whose development has been arrested; on the contrary, he is a man who has given himself a chance of continuing to develop long after most adults have muffled themselves in the cocoon of middle-aged habit and convention. By Aldous Huxley

The Whole Child

All children deserve the right to develop to their full potential and become contributing members of their community. Children need to be assessed physically, cognitively and emotionally in order to have good transition in school and to lay good foundation for their future. Pertaining to every aspect of the child, including health, nutrition, values, attitudes, beliefs and resulting behaviors. Young children are less likely to succeed in the transition to school if they in frequent fighting like hitting, shouting or any other aggressive behavior. Are unable to pay attention or follow directions, unable to cooperate with others all these would make a child find it difficult in transitioning. Most communities in Canada today maintain an individual-centered and non-integrated approach to family and children's services. In this fragmented model, people receiving services are conceived as individual cases with an array of separate needs, subject to servicing by an array of separate professional service providers. The fragmentation of training and services into increasingly differentiated domains of specialization corresponds to dominant cultural constructions of the child in psychology and education as a collection of ‘domains’ of development, each with distinct proclivities, potential, and needs for different kinds of support. In First Nations communities, practitioners specializing in different domains of child and family health and development are usually located outside of the community, not just administratively, culturally, and socially but, in the case of rural and remote communities, geographically as well. Many administrators of Indigenous communities have expressed frustration with this model in which individual service is based on a specific "need" or "problem," rather than on the functioning of the "whole person." The fragmented model sets up real challenges for contracted specialists from outside the community in "reaching" individuals in the community, while community members have similar difficulties in "finding" the specialists. Professional service practitioners who were interviewed for the current study described how simply finding a community member who has been referred to a service, such as supported child care, screening, diagnosis, treatment or rehabilitation, is often their biggest hurdle. Service delivery ends up depending on the initiative, persistence and resources of both the individual community member and the service provider. ta In countless forums and meetings, Indigenous leaders and community-based practitioners have described how, in a fragmented system that depends on having separate specialists to meet needs that are conceived as separate targets, service memory is lost when professional staff leave the community or are assigned elsewhere. There is an extremely high turnover of professionals serving Indigenous communities, particularly in the northern regions of each province and in the Canadian Arctic. Community based program administrators and external service providers interviewed for the current study explained that when service providers work as a team rather than alone, and in an integrated rather than fragmented way, then the knowledge of the needs, goals and service history of children and families is retained and passed along within a community-based family support team – leading to continuous and better coordinated services.