Ottawa Public Health (OPH) offers a variety of services to parents with children 0 to 6 years of age, including Parenting in Ottawa (PiO) (e.g., website, Facebook page, and drop-ins), Ottawa Breastfeeding Buddies, the OPH telephone line, and prenatal education.
In Ottawa:
- 85% of parents with children 0 to 6 years of age in 2016 and 2017 had heard of at least one of these services or programs and 56% had made use of at least one of them. [4]
- The most known OPH parenting resources were the OPH telephone line (63%) and OPH prenatal education (55%) (Figure 6). The most used services, by parents with children 0 to 6 who were aware these services existed, were the OPH telephone line (46%), the PiO website (46%), and OPH’s prenatal education service (44%) (Figure 6).
- Parents of children 0 to 6 years of age most often identified “websites/ internet” (65%), “Ottawa Public Health” (13%), and “Ontario Early Year Centres” (now known as EarlyON Child and Family Centres) (7%) as their primary source of parenting information. “Magazines, newsletters, or other written material”, “telephone information lines”, and “schools” were very infrequently selected as the primary source of parenting information. [4]
