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This week's donation goes to Camp Ooch / Camp Trillium, a camp for families affected by childhood cancer: https://ooch.org/

During the month of August, various people (including several right here in Ottawa) are embarking on solo sailing or cycling trips of 300 km to raise funds for Camp Ooch and Camp Trillium.

With more people vaccinated, let's salvage what's left of this summer and plan for an even better summer next year once kids under 12 can be vaccinated too!

It's hard to fathom the situation right now in India. It's even more poignant when we consider that having believed the Coronavirus crisis had largely subsided in their country, India was donating its remaining vaccines, PPE and other tools of the trade to countries that at the time, were harder hit.

In recent years, India had been making substantial progress in eliminating child marriage and some of the more egregious human rights violations with regard to more disadvantaged groups. I decided to direct this week's donation to boosting a particular campaign that is within spitting distance (metaphorically speaking, of course) of reaching its target, with a week left to go:

https://www.canadahelps.org/en/charities/childrens-care-international/campaign/emergency-support-for-indian-families/

Best-selling novelist Arundhati Roy has written a compelling piece for The Guardian about the situation there, which you can read here:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/apr/28/crime-against-humanity-arundhati-roy-india-covid-catastrophe?utm_source=pocket-newtab

The Canadian government has put the brakes on incoming flights from India but we all know that viruses do not respect political or ethnic borders. Variants of concern, including the B1617 (first identified in India) are present all over the world and we won't really have herd immunity in Canada or in our home towns until we have it on an international basis.

While the arrival of vaccines against Covid-19 is certainly a good news story, we now face the minefield of establishing who gets vaccinated in the first tier, second tier and beyond. There are so many things to consider. But whoever said medical ethics was simple? It's not rocket science, it's much more complex than that!

So what about children? The people involved in the clinical trials were generally from those groups least likely to become seriously ill with the virus. Children fall into that category but were excluded for other very valid reasons. They often have stronger reactions to vaccines than adults. The question of informed consent is much murkier. Children may exhibit different symptoms from those of adults, or they may be asymptomatic carriers of the virus. And yet...

We have prioritized getting children back to school, in person where possible, because we know that education is important. We also know that for younger children especially, online learning may be difficult or inappropriate. They may also need to use public transportation to get to school, and may have more trouble than adults as far as mastering protocols like mask-wearing, hand washing and physical distancing. Their parents, on the other hand, may be better positioned to work from home, depending of course on the type of work they do.

And let's not forget that some children do get very sick and even die of Covid-19, particularly if they already have fragile immune systems and/or live in poorer neighbourhoods.

If we can't immediately vaccinate children directly, we should at least prioritize vaccination of those adults who work closely with them - teachers, child care workers, school bus drivers and maintenance staff, for example.

Once a safe and reliable vaccine for children is available, it's ultimately the parents who decide when their kids will be vaccinated. A U.S. study suggests that while a majority of parents do want their children vaccinated, uptake is higher amongst older, more highly educated parents:

https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-11-23/parents-age-key-to-whether-kids-get-vaccinated-against-covid-study-finds

https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/kids-vaccine-covid-19-1.5826606

As November is Financial Literacy Month, I thought I'd take a brief look today at the whole question of kids and money in the age of Covid-19.

My generation grew up with allowances or "pocket money". There was a certain elegant simplicity to that approach. If you were a kid who wanted some non-essential item, be it large or small, you had to make some basic decisions. Spend all your money now on candy or inexpensive toys, or put all or some of it aside, to be combined with future allowance dole-outs or birthday money until you had enough to buy that coveted item?

In elementary school from about grade two or three onwards, we also had a monthly banking day. We would bring to school any money we wanted to deposit in our accounts and the teacher would help us fill out deposit slips and put them with the money into little envelopes, that all got put into one big envelope and sent off to the Bank of Nova Scotia, which was running the school banking program in our area. In return, we were all issued little bankbooks so we could see the interest accruing. I think there was also a regular newsletter geared to kids' interests, encouraging us all to save up for a new bicycle or set of Lego or our first year's tuition at Oxford... well, you get the picture.

Cash really was king in those days. Nowadays, not so much. And the shift towards contactless payments and online shopping has only intensified since the pandemic began. This may not be too much of a problem for adults who are well-established in their lives and careers, but what about children? Not only have they had no opportunity to establish a credit rating but for younger kids at least, their world is centred around tangible objects and tangible risks and rewards.

Financial institutions have of course been quick to recognize the spending power, both current and future, of kids today, and are eager to indoctrinate them in consumer culture. There are now a number of pre-paid or debit cards out there specifically designed to appeal to kids, which means appealing to their parents too. It must be pretty overwhelming for those parents, even if they've grown up with a laptop on every lap as well as a chicken in every pot!

Here's one review article looking at some of the available options:

https://wellkeptwallet.com/debit-cards-for-kids/

While the reviewer is situated in the U.S., many of the cards she describes are available in Canada too. Some of them were developed in the U.K. or other places.

Canada.ca does have a page detailing the various pre-paid cards available in Canada, although I didn't notice any mention of which are recommended for children or teens under the age of majority:

https://www.canada.ca/en/financial-consumer-agency/services/payment/prepaid-cards.html

I've become somewhat comfortable with online shopping myself over the past few years, but I still prefer in-person shopping for most items (usually with a list) when that's possible. And there definitely are still disadvantages to shopping online - purchases that get lost or delayed in transit, are not what you envisioned, or are completely unsuitable and need to be returned. And near the top of my list, implications for privacy and security of personal information - something that is even more worrisome if you're considering letting your kids loose online!

Today's donation goes to the Crossroads Children's Mental Health Centre, geared to mental health support for Ontario youngsters up to the age of twelve:

https://crossroadschildren.ca

The mental health of children, whose social and educational lives have been turned upside down by the ongoing pandemic, has been very much in the news lately with plans for a return to school in the fall currently being developed. Six months is a long time in the life of a child, and that's how long most of them will have been shut off from school life when September rolls around.

Anxiety, depression, emotional problems, loss of basic academic, language and social skills - those are just some of the issues we as a society are going to have to deal with as we prepare to get kids back to school and other routines of daily life. And the adults facilitating this transition have their own challenges to cope with too.

With patience, persistence and targeted but flexible support measures, we'll get there. It won't be easy and it won't be cheap. But children - and people in general - can be surprisingly resilient and we can't afford not to try.

Over the past few days, more new openings have been announced. Beaches. Art galleries. Restaurant patios. Drive-in and drive-on movie venues. Pandemic-style day camps. It's a start. But at what point do the health benefits of a bolder approach outweigh the risks of a second wave or a setback to progress already made? Are we perhaps already at or past that point?

Now that school is out - the class-zoom as well as the class-room - kids and families are going to want to take full advantage of our all-too-short summer. Summer camp is mostly not an option. Ditto for a lot of family vacations, certainly the ones that involve flying to far-flung destinations. Families will be stay-cationing in limited-sized, distanced or masked droves. Even if they stay in their own neighbourhoods, playgrounds and play structures remain off limits. A couple of months is a long time in the life of a child, particularly one who has already been cooped up at home for four months, due to circumstances beyond her control and in some cases beyond her level of understanding too!

It does seem to me that we could open a few more things. What about the Agricultural Museum, for example? A lot of that is outdoors or semi-outdoors. Maybe selected library branches (for browsing, I mean), at least the children's sections? Family-friendly restaurants usually have easily-cleaned surfaces too - couldn't their eat-in sections be re-opened soon, even if some tables had to be closed off to ensure reasonable distancing?

Politicians and large organizations are pretty eager to tout our progress when it suits them - for example, when they're ending the pandemic pay for front-line grocery workers or limiting pay raises for nurses - yet far less inclined to help those who could benefit the most.

Children, after all, do not vote. But their parents do. And so will they, in a few more years!

For those of us in our sixties and beyond, chances are the phrase "aging in place" has mostly positive connotations. But if you're six or eight or ten, those words might have a rather more ominous sound to them. Like, maybe we'll be old and grey before this whole thing is all over and we'll be allowed to hang out with our friends again? So today I'd like to look at some of the issues that affect children, particularly school-aged kids.

First off, what about the children of partners who are divorced or otherwise estranged from each other? What impact will quarantine, self-isolation and social and physical distancing have on shared custody arrangements and on visits (whether supervised or unsupervised) between noncustodial parents and their kids? Non-supervised visits by noncustodial parents living in the same city might be just about doable, but what about if they live in different cities? Or even different countries? What if that noncustodial parent has a few children in two or more different locations? And I haven't even begun to discuss visits by other significant adults in the child's life like aunts, uncles, grandparents and close family friends.

What about kids in foster care or group homes? Or those who, for one reason or another, SHOULD be there but won't be?

Mind you, lack of intervention can have a positive side too, if it means no more school suspensions or expulsions for the girl with a skirt too far above her knee, the boy with the hair growing too far below his shirt-collar, or the child with green hair who is male on Mondays and Wednesdays, female on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and gender-fluid on Fridays, weekends and holidays! No more unnecessary and intrusive visits and interventions and child-confiscations by overly suspicious Children's Aid Society caseworkers either. False allegations of abuse, or even simple misunderstandings that could have easily been addressed and resolved at a much earlier stage, have ruined many a parent's life and career, as a study of Dave Brown's columns over the years would show!

But I want as well to look at some of the potential downsides of the interruption of schooling and other formal instruction on children's well-being. Let's face it: school isn't just about learning the three R's - it also has a very important socialization component to it. If anything, the early grades are MORE about socialization than they are about book learning, particularly nowadays with one- or two-child families far more common than when I was growing up. I'm thinking, for example, of the "Values, Influence, Peers" programs in Ontario schools in the 1980s and 1990s (and maybe still today, for all I know). Or the Peacemakers program in school playgrounds, where older kids got to wear cute little blue vests and do some on-the-spot dispute resolution during recess time. All that will fall by the wayside now.

Another issue is second-language learning and retention. In Quebec, most schooling is in French. But at home and in the community, chances are the kids speak a mixture of English, French, "franglais" and possibly other languages as well. In Ontario, French immersion has become a kind of de facto streaming system for any kids who are doing reasonably well in school, or at least not struggling to master the basics. But their parents may be unilingual anglophones, or may have a native language that is neither English nor French. Perhaps the children would normally go to Saturday morning schools to do some fun activities in the language of their parents or grandparents and this, like most group activities, has now been put on hold or at best, moved online. With major restrictions on socializing, the language of children will be the language of the home and the nuclear family, regardless of how official or widespread it is in the community. And by the way, Ontario kids had already lost a lot of days of school to labour unrest even before pandemic-related measures took hold.

A large part of a school-aged child's life is of course also the extracurricular activities. Team sports. Scouts and guides. Music and art lessons and gymnastics and swimming. Visits to museums, art galleries, libraries, bookstores, parks, playgrounds and farmers' markets. Most of which has now come to a screeching halt. A huge disruption of their daily life.

To be sure, there might be a few small pleasures to be had in the forced proximity of the family unit - less rushing about from place to place, getting to know each other better over shared meals, board games, storytelling, puzzle-solving, photo albums and the like. But togetherness has its limits too, and over the next few weeks and months, those limits will be severely tested as family members increasingly get on each others' nerves - even if their interactions are normally fairly harmonious. We will need to cultivate mental and imaginary distancing as well as the physical kind. We will need to learn to be absent in the moment, or for a few moments, to escape the relentless onslaught of bad news.

Under pandemic conditions, is each household destined to become its own distinct society? An interesting Canadian cultural mosaic consisting of microscopic tiles?