Abstract

This study portrays development indicators for Canadian children aged six to nine, and ten to 13. The indicators, 44 for the younger age group and 46 for the older, are all derived from Statistics Canada's Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth, for 1996-97. The indicators reflect aspects of development such as academic achievement and prospects, non-academic learning and activities, character development rated by parent, and parental support. Each indicator is displayed for Canada's five regions and for faith communities, by frequency of attendance at religious services.

In addition, several factors are used to estimate each development indicator, and the detailed estimates are presented. A summary of the results shows that girls "out-perform" boys in almost every aspect of development, that worship attendance has a positive association with several development indicators in each age group, that there are some faith community differences in child performance, and that children in intact families, families with a university educated mother, and with a mother who does not smoke, out-perform other children in a number of respects. All of these results hold after one considers the effect of several other factors that are strongly related to child performance. Because this is a fact book, many specific results are not summarized.

One reviewer pointed out the need to aggregate several of the indices, a "clustering of variables" in order to both simplify the presentation and improve the quality of the analysis. Also, to the extent the data allow, he thought more consistency among variables for the two age groups would be desirable. These we consider to be good suggestions to be pursued in follow-up research.