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Abby is facilitating this week.

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Victoria is facilitating this week.

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Amalu is facilitating this week.

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Madison is facilitating this week.

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This is my example of human in P.A.T.H, Madison

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In a bid to address mounting concerns from child care operators, Ontario has unveiled a timeline for a revamped funding formula under the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program. The move comes after multiple delays by the government and persistent warnings from operators about the program's sustainability without adequate funding approaches.

The government's current revenue replacement model, based on outdated fee rates, has fallen short of meeting the evolving needs of child-care providers, with concerns raised about rising expenses such as staffing, rent, and supplies.

The new funding model, now expected to take effect in 2025, aims to address these concerns by transitioning to a cost-based approach with further details coming soon.

Amidst this anticipation, child care operators and advocates express cautious optimism about the forthcoming revised funding model.

"It has certainly been a long time in coming, which, again, I hope means that they've taken the time to get it right, because I think that's what's really important at this point, that we have a solid funding scheme for child-care programs so that we do see some stability in the sector," said Carolyn Ferns, policy coordinator for the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care.

The call for stability and reliability in funding remains a priority for operators and advocates alike. They emphasize the need for a solid funding framework that not only covers legitimate costs to keep programs operational but also incentivizes the provision of high quality services, particularly in underserved areas, and facilitates future expansion to meet growing demand.

In anticipation of the release of a new funding approach, the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care and the Association of Early Childhood Educators Ontario have published a policy brief by Dr. Gordon Cleveland that outlines what a new Ontario child care funding formula should do in order to be successful.

This brief summarizes what elements should be considered, what options exist, and how to evaluate the efficacy of any new Ontario funding proposal. This document will help inform the community's evaluative processes, feedback and further refinements to Ontario's forthcoming funding approach.
Read the policy brief here

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Ontario to release new child care funding formula, implementation scheduled for 2025 - Child Care Now

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In a bid to address mounting concerns from child care operators, Ontario has unveiled a timeline for a revamped funding formula under the Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) program. The move comes after multiple delays by the government and persistent warnings from operators about the program's sustainability without adequate funding approaches.

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This is an example of HUMAN in P.A.T.H.

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‘National Day without Child Care’ brings to light cost of early childhood education

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The cost of early childhood education is on the rise. ‘National Day without Child Care’ sheds light on how much families have to pay.

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Early childhood education was largely missing from the budget, undermining other education spending

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Research consistently shows access to early childhood education can effect literacy, schooling and life in general. Its relative absence in a budget supposedly focused on education is baffling.

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A new study led by UC Davis researchers finds widespread differences in brain development between autistic boys and girls ages 2-13. The study, published recently in Molecular Psychiatry, found sex-specific changes in the thickness of the outer layer of the brain, called the cortex.

The findings are notable because so few studies have addressed cortical development in autistic girls, who are diagnosed with autism less often than males. Nearly four males are diagnosed with autism for every one female.

"It is clear that this sex bias is due, in part, to underdiagnosis of autism in females," said Christine Wu Nordahl, a professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the UC Davis MIND Institute and a senior author on the paper. "But this study suggests that differences in diagnosis are not the full story -- biological differences also exist."

The brain's outer layer, the cortex, is made up of distinct layers comprised of millions of neurons. These fire in sync together, allowing us to think, learn, solve problems, build memories, and experience emotions. Until about age 2, the cortex rapidly thickens as new neurons are created. After this peak, the outer cortical layer thins. Previous studies have found that this thinning process is different in autistic children than non-autistic children, but whether autistic boys and girls share the same differences had not been examined.

"It's important to learn more about how sex differences in brain development may interact with autistic development and lead to different developmental outcomes in boys and girls," explained Derek Andrews, lead author on the study and an assistant project scientist in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and at the MIND Institute.
A changing cortex in childhood
The research team studied the brain scans of 290 autistic children -- 202 males and 88 females, and 139 non-autistic, typically developing individuals -- 79 males and 60 females. They used sex assigned at birth to categorize the children.

All participants were in the MIND Institute's Autism Phenome Project (APP), one of the largest longitudinal autism studies in the world. The project includes the Girls with Autism Imaging of Neurodevelopment (GAIN) study, launched to increase the number of females represented in research. The researchers took MRI scans at up to four time periods between the ages of 2 and 13.

They found that at age 3, autistic girls had a thicker cortex than non-autistic girls of the same age, comprising about 9% of the total cortical surface. Differences in autistic males when compared to non-autistic males of the same age were much less widespread.

In addition, when compared to males, autistic females had faster rates of cortical thinning into middle childhood. The cortical differences were present across multiple neural networks.

"We found differences in the brain associated with autism across nearly all networks in the brain," Andrews said.

He noted that it was a surprise at first that the differences were greatest at younger ages. Because autistic girls had a more rapid rate of cortical thinning, by middle childhood, the differences between autistic males and females were much less pronounced.

"We typically think of sex differences as being larger after puberty. However, brain development around the ages of 2-4 is highly dynamic, so small changes in timing of development between the sexes could result in large differences that then converge later," Andrews explained.
The importance of long-term studies of both sexes
These findings make it clear that longitudinal studies that include both sexes are necessary, Nordahl said.

"If we had only looked at boys at age 3, we may have concluded that there were no differences. If we had both boys and girls, but only investigated differences at 11 years of age, we may have concluded that there were very few sex differences in the cortex. We needed to follow both boys and girls across development to see the full picture," she explained.

This was why Nordahl, who now directs the APP, launched the GAIN study in 2014. "The APP had a wonderfully large sample of about 150 autistic boys, but only about 30 autistic girls. This was too few autistic girls to really examine how they might be similar or different to boys, so we worked to increase the representation of autistic females in our research," she said.

GAIN is unique, and Andrews said he hopes other researchers will follow suit in including more autistic girls in autism research. "Autistic females represent about 20% of the autistic population. Any successful effort to understand autism will need to include autistic females."

Co-authors on the study include Kersten Diers and Martin Reuter of the German Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases; Devani Cordero of Massachusetts General Hospital; and Joshua K. Lee, Danielle J. Harvey, Brianna Heath, Sally J. Rogers, Marjorie Solomon and David Amaral of UC Davis.

The study was supported by the National Institute of Mental Health (R01MH127046, R01MH128814 and R01MH103284), the National Institute of Child Health and Development (P50 HD093079) and the MIND Institute Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities Research Center (P50 HD103526)

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children's health; psychology research; nervous system; staying healthy; autism; gender difference; learning disorders; child development

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Key differences in brain development between autistic boys and girls

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A new study finds key differences in the development of the cortex between autistic boys and girls ages 2-13. The study found sex-specific changes in the thickness of the outer layer of the brain, called the cortex.

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