My Experience with RSS Feeds

After adding Rachel’s Blog into my RSS feed, I read through other feeds I’ve been getting. As of this week, there are about 71 total feeds I’ve received. 28 of those are news. One of the news articles I thought was especially interesting is the “Reach Out and Read program promoting childhoodliteracy” article by The Toronto Star. Reach Out and Read have a goal of having every child processing a home library of at least five books by the time they enter kindergarten. I think this is a really good idea, and can contribute to higher literacy for children. However, I think their idea of having parents read with children is unrealistic for many families in Canada.

                                  Fan, L. (CC) 2015.  

While children have school and can read after school, parents have to work when their children at in school, make grocery trips after work, pay bills after work; shovel snow, mow the lawn, clean the house and cook after work.  What would the parents then find time to relax, have romantic time and generally time for their own mental health and well being? At a time where mental health issues are exploding across the Canadian population, I think it is easy to grasp onto the interest of a specific group of people while forgetting others. Health care, health promotion, or capacity building is not about re-allocating resources to increase the health of only a segment of population that can afford to spend as much time with their children as they like. The ultimate goal should be to improve the overall population health of everyone.