General Methods

We first connected with parents when their infants were between three and eight months old. All parents in the study were on the City of Toronto’s child care subsidy wait list and had expressed interest in securing centre-based child care for their children before the age of 12-months.

We used collect information from parents over the phone at different points (which we refer to as “waves”). In Wave 2, we met parents at community centres near their homes to collect additional information about parenting and children’s development. By the time we reached our third wave of data collection, the COVID-19 pandemic was already affecting families in countless ways. 

More information about the topics we asked parents about and the measures we collected as part of the CCM study is available here.