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Topic Editor: Carl Corter, PhD, University of Toronto, Canada
Parents fill multiple roles in the life of their children, including the role of care giver, teacher, nurse, nutritionist, and moral guide. Yet, parents are not always able to coordinate all these roles or to provide all the resources to meet their children’s needs. As a result, most parents seek help from a variety of services (e.g., health, education, child care, social or other family support services). However, developmental outcomes vary depending on the extent to which these services are integrated together to form a cohesive system that can be easily accessed by families. Specifically, fragmentation of services often results in overall lack of coherence for children and families. When children are seen by multiple service providers, it is not rare that parents received mixed and conflicting advices limiting the effectiveness of these services. On the other hand, integrated services are more suitable to meet the needs of children by offering them and their families a variety of support services. Considering that children’s academic success is dependent not only on their cognitive development, but also on their physical, social, and emotional well-being, programs that coordinate responses across all these components produce the best results. Similarly, policies that integrate child care and education, produce more coherent experiences for children and better quality programs.
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