This story is a collaboration between Concordia University’s journalism department and CBC Montreal.
Five-year-old Émilie’s bedroom in Montreal is half a world away from where her mother, Shanshan Huang, slept as a child.
Huang moved from China with her husband seven years ago. She was raised by her grandparents, who she says didn’t place an emphasis on things like singing to her as a child.
Now, as she raises her own daughter, she often turns to nursery rhymes to help get her ready for bed.
A recent favourite of hers is I See the Moon and The Moon Sees Me, a gentle song in English — Huang’s second language.�
“Please let the light that shines on me,” she sings together with Émilie, “shine on the one I love.”
Huang recently sang that tune again in the place where she first learned it — the colourful basement of the Mosaik Family Resource Centre in Montreal’s west end.
Huang’s youngest daughter, seven-month-old Nicole, sat in her mother’s lap, her wide eyes seemingly entranced by the sounds and swaying of the families around her.
The nursery rhyme is just one of many taught as part of the Parent-Child Mother Goose Program, which connects kids and their caregivers by engaging them with songs and stories.
The Montreal branch has been hosted in various places in the city since the 1990s. Today, the group meets twice a week at the Mosaik Centre, housed in the cozy rooms of First Baptist Church in the town of Hampstead.
The musical and movement exercises of Mother Goose are designed to encourage language development and strengthen parent-child bonds.
But the Montreal group has also noticed another benefit: the development of community between the families that attend.
“It does forge enduring connections,” said Robin Sales, the program’s co-ordinator.
Not only does the group create “a wonderful foundation” for the literacy of the children, Sales said, it breaks isolation for parents by connecting them to other participants in the group.
“They form their own network of support in the process. So it’s a win-win,” she said.
‘I have more confidence’
Community was something Huang was lacking when she first joined the program five years ago. As a new mom and a newcomer to Montreal, Huang felt socially isolated, something she blames on the language barrier and her shy personality.
Now, Huang said, “I have more confidence.”
Her English and French skills have improved thanks to her job as a physiotherapy technician. But after a difficult pregnancy with her second child, she had to take time off work and found herself home with only her newborn for company.
“I tried to talk with her more — baby needs that,” she said. “But for myself, no one talks with me. So after four months, [once] my situation got better, I started to go outside and come here.”
Huang joined the Mother Goose program for a second time in January, and she quickly began seeing an increase in her interactions with the other parents. Now, “we are more familiar with each other,” she said.
A welcoming space
Parent Chantale Lewis said she treasures the community created within the Mother Goose sessions.
“It’s one of those rare spaces,” she said. “There are no language barriers — everyone is super comfortable here.”
Lewis already put her oldest son through the program and now attends the weekly classes with her nine-month-old son Julian.
She said her goal is to spread the word about the program to new moms who might be feeling isolated.
“If I know that there’s a program that’s helping me as a mom, having the opportunity to go and just tell others is really important,” she said.
Lewis also appreciates Mother Goose’s bilingual Wednesday sessions, which incorporate songs and stories in both English and French. “There’s a good balance of both, and that’s what’s important for us,” she said.
Allan Swetman, who is originally from New Zealand, joined the bilingual sessions so he could improve his French while spending the majority of the day with his daughter Arlowe.
“I’m trying to introduce the French songs [at home]… so hopefully she would get a bit more exposure,” he said.
“I feel like I’m at her level [of French], which is good,” he added, laughing. “And I’m slowly getting better as she gets better.”
The Swetman family first joined Mother Goose by attending sessions over Zoom, which the facilitators host on Monday evenings. The Zoom sessions started over the COVID-19 pandemic but have continued even after in-person classes restarted.
“It’s working really well,” Swetman said.
During the day, Arlowe will often signal to her father that she wants him to sing by mimicking the hand movements of the Mother Goose welcome song, Swetman said. Singing and telling stories at bedtime have also become a nightly occurrence.
“Our family has become a lot more nursery rhyme-oriented than I ever thought it would,” he said.
WATCH | Dad and daughter duo learn French together:
Parent Allan Swetman says the program has helped improve his French while allowing him to bond with his daughter at the same time.
Increased emotional health
Researcher Natasha Weber observed benefits among families while studying a Mother Goose program in Alberta for her master’s thesis. She found the sessions “created a really safe space for people.
“There was no judgment about how you’re holding or singing to your baby,” she said.
Her study also observed evidence of relationship and community building. The parents “were going to these sessions to bond with their child but ended up making friends along the way,” Weber said.
Friendships are important for lowering stress hormones, said Montreal psychotherapist Malaïka Bittar-Piekutowski. “There’s a correlation between people who feel isolated socially to being unhappy and having all sorts of difficulties.”
And the parents don’t need to become best friends to reap the benefits.
“You’ll get some needs met, even if it’s just laughing and feeling like you’re not alone in some aspects of life,” Bittar-Piekutowski said.
Impact beyond the class
Before the pandemic, Mother Goose hosted classes in other areas of Montreal, including Côte-des-Neiges, Westmount and Little Burgundy. But organizers recently decided to downsize their in-person offerings to prioritize resources.
Now, they are in the final steps of becoming an independent non-profit, separate from their current fiduciary, the Mosaik Centre. The program’s former fiduciary was the Montreal Children’s Library, where Sales was head librarian in the early 2000s.
Sales said she hopes that becoming a non-profit will help stabilize the group’s funding and sustain what they do.
While support from foundations, sponsors and donors are all important, “the holy grail of any non-profit … is to find funding that is multi-year that you can rely on,” she said. “That’s the direction I’d like to see us head.”
Lewis is now stepping up her efforts to tell more parents about Mother Goose’s free services. “I think it’s so important that programs like this get … the exposure that they need,” Lewis said. “A lot of moms and dads — they’re not aware.”
After Huang’s fourth Tuesday session since rejoining the program, she bounced Nicole on her lap while chatting quietly with a fellow mom — something she said is becoming more common.
“We are from different cultures, [have] different accents. So there’s an invisible barrier there,” she said. “[We] need the time to let people know us.” Now that she attends regularly, she said the other parents recognize her and come up to her to say hello.
Sales said these moments show the impacts of Mother Goose extend beyond the class itself, into the precious moments before and after.
“The empty spaces are where a lot of the magic happens,” she said.