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Political leaders and judges have generated headlines in the last few months with landmark decisions affecting the rights of homosexual men and women. The decisions produced loud applause from the politically progressive, though there are many sticky points to work out, including the definition of marriage.

Unfortunately, the tougher issues, like how we treat families and children, are not headline-grabbers. One reason is that family issues are constantly evolving. Just when one generation thinks they have found the best recipe for the health of families and children, it is time to re-jig the ingredients.

And there are other Canadian political issues needing urgent review that grab our attention - like our defence policy, bank merger rules and relations with the United States. Yet in the hierarchy of priorities, doesn't how we treat our children and our families take precedence over all other issues governments have to deal with?

Family life needs to be protected and encouraged. All political parties can agree that providing as many children as possible with an opportunity to succeed in life should be a fundamental goal of our society. Child poverty is defined in many ways, but poverty of opportunity in children's early years is one of the most important components of the definition.

In a new IRPP study on family policy in Canada, Pierre Lefebvre and Philip Merrigan* place heavy emphasis on the early years of a child's development, from 0 to 5 years of age. This is also the time when parents need the most help to provide for them.

"There is a strong consensus among economists that investment in early childhood is cost-effective in preventing learning disabilities, school failures and social maladjustment," the study says.

They also tackle the question of employment for parents, especially single mothers, who often find themselves penalized by our retrograde welfare laws for working part-time when they need help with the transition into the workplace.

Lefebvre and Merrigan believe that inserting a child into a learning environment at an early age gives that child a head start in life. So they propose full-day kindergarten for five-year-olds and, eventually, kindergarten for four-year-olds. They propose that federal money that is now directed at early childhood development be redirected to provincial Eearly Head Start and Head Start programs.

They would scrap the Canada Child Tax Benefit and replace it with a universal family allowance system that, to begin with, would provide $2,000 a year for children aged 0-5 years and $1,000 for children aged 6-17 years. The medium-term target, depending on economic growth, would raise the amount to $2,500 from ages 0-3; $2,000 for ages 4-5 and $1,500 for children aged 6-17. And they suggest increasing paid maternity and parental leave and maternity allowances to encourage at least one parent to stay at home during the first year of a child's life.

They take a crack at the federal government's Millinium Scholarship Foundation for university students, which, they say "costs a large sum with probably little social return." They argue that "Direct grants to students are considered bad public policy relative to loans, whether income contingent or not."

There are many heretical ideas in this study, from demolishing Quebec's $5-a-day day care - because it is neither efficient nor equitable since only half of children aged 0-4 years take advantage of it - to questioning subsidies to universities. In the case of universities, they say, too much money is spent too late, because the greatest return on investment is before the child is 15.

Well more than a century ago, Western societies elevated education to a political priority because it was seen as the most important producer of human capital for a country. They understood that making sure young people - the younger the better - acquired learning and social skills made them better, more productive and happier individuals.

It is the attractive and stimulating treatise of Lefebvre and Merrigan that we should take another hard look at our education system and concentrate this time on investing our time and money in developing our children when they are younger…very much younger. And doing it for the most part with the money we are already putting in the system.

*"Assessing Family Policy in Canada: A New Deal for Families and Children," by Pierre Lefebvre and Philip Merrigan, is a Choices study published as part of the IRPP's Investing in Our Children research program.

James Ferrabee, whose column appears here monthly, is a former Southam News correspondent in Canada, Europe and Africa. He is Contributing Editor of the IRPP's magazine, Policy Options, which appears 10 times a year.

He encourages comments on this and other articles to jferrabee@irpp.org.