Search

Health care policy positions breastfeeding as an important part of the solution to household food insecurity; however, there are critical gaps in our knowledge of the relationship between breastfeeding duration (exposure variable) and household food insecurity (outcome variable). Our objective was to examine this relationship. A cross-sectional study was conducted from 2008 to 2016 of healthy urban children (N = 3838) who were 0 to 3 years old and recruited from The Applied Research Group for Kids (TARGet Kids!), a practice-based research network in Toronto, Canada. Total breastfeeding duration was collected from parent-reported questionnaires. Household food insecurity was measured using 1-item and 2-item food insecurity screens. Multivariable regression analysis was performed adjusting for prespecified covariates. The median total breastfeeding duration was 10.5 months (interquartile range, 6.0–14.0), and 14.7% of households were food insecure. After adjusting for child characteristics (age, sex), maternal characteristics (age, ethnicity, education, employment), and family characteristics (number of children, single parent family, neighborhood equity score), there was no significant association between total breastfeeding duration and household food insecurity (odds ratio, 0.99; 95% confidence interval, 0.98–1.01). Although low-income families had an increased odds of being household food insecure (P ≤.001), we found no significant association between total breastfeeding duration and household food insecurity at varying income levels. We found no association between breastfeeding duration and household food insecurity, regardless of family income. Although breastfeeding is associated with improved child health outcomes and considered to be part of the solution to household food insecurity, interventions focused on social determinants may provide more promising targets for the prevention of household food insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: While we have some understanding of the impact caring for children with complex care needs has on families, little is known about how these families experience participation. This longitudinal qualitative study aimed to extend our limited understanding of how the changing geographies of care influence the ways that Canadian families with children with complex care needs participate in everyday life. The findings in this article focus on parents'' conceptualizations of participation including their perspectives of participation involving themselves, their children, and their family unit. Sixty-eight parents from 40 families took part in the study. Conradson''s (2005) conceptualization of therapeutic landscapes that focuses on the relational dimensions of the self-landscape encounter guided the study. Data collection methods included ethnographic methods of interviewing and photovoice. As a summary of their views, parents within this study described participation as a dynamic and reciprocal social process of involvement in being with others. For participation in everyday life to be meaningful, the attributes of choice, safety, acceptance, accessibility, and accommodation had to be present. Participation was valued by parents because it resulted in positive outcomes. Overall, meaningful participation contributed to them and their children having a life. Having a life referred to being involved in a place where families feel that they belong, are accepted, and are able to contribute to the landscape they participate in. The decision to choose to participate became contingent upon the availability of resources and the parents'' ability to harness them. Harnessing resources referred to the work parents must do to get the necessary resources to make it possible for them and their children to have a life. Having a life for parents required significant physical, mental, psychological and spiritual work by parents. At times the personal resources of parents were so taxed that the possibility for meaningful participation was something less than what they desired. The families'' stories raise questions of societal obligations to promote meaningful participation. This study lends support for further improvements that may enrich the lives of families with children with complex care needs. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article examines the growing hegemony of the bourgeois family pattern among the Canadian working classes that accompanied the development of a welfare state and focuses on the legal institutionalization and regulation of childhood and sexuality in Ontario and British Columbia, particularly during the inter-war years. The discussion centers on similarities and differences between the provinces with respect to two major issues: first, the enactment of criminal and quasi-criminal legislation, ostensibly universal in application but directed primarily at poor children and the adults responsible for them, to force compliance with middle-class standards of morality and family life; and, second, the administration of many such statutes through the Toronto, Ontario and Vancouver Juvenile Courts. In Canada, as in other jurisdictions, demands for implementation and refinement of legislation aimed at upholding the norms of childhood and heterosexual marriages were accompanied by demands for new enforcement mechanisms.