Parents and Kids: 1)Hundreds of parents unfairly denied COVID-19 payments, acting ombudsman says; 2) Becoming a stay-at-home parent? How to transition to living on one spouse’s income; 3) Most Canadian teens have seen violence, gore online: survey; 4)Ontario’s education minister has a message for hockey parents: school comes first

1)Hundreds of parents unfairly denied COVID-19 payments, acting ombudsman says

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Sharif Hassan, June 26, 2026. 

A new report by Ontario’s acting ombudsman says hundreds of parents were unfairly denied payments during the COVID-19 pandemic because the province gave the money to someone else. 

In a report released this week, Barbara Finlay says more than $2 billion was distributed to parents and guardians between 2020 and 2023 through five different programs meant to help children whose education was disrupted during the pandemic. 

Finlay says her office started receiving complaints weeks after the launch of the first program, for a total of more than 200 by the time all five wrapped up in 2023. 

She says the programs didn’t take into consideration that some parents might live separately, creating a situation where whoever applied first would receive the payment without any verification that they had custody of the child. 

The report says several parents couldn’t receive the payments they were entitled to because relatives or even strangers with no role in the child’s care had already claimed the benefit. 

Still, it says the programs were largely successful in supporting families in need despite the fact that they were “plagued by problems” that were replicated at each phase rather than being fixed.

The programs, which were implemented under intense time pressure with insufficient resources, rolled over eligibility criteria for receiving the benefit, meaning that a parent who was denied money under one program would not be eligible for the next one, Finlay’s office said in a news release.

“Hundreds of families were denied benefits to which they were entitled,” Finlay said in the report.

“The Ministry (of Education) does not know the exact amount, because it failed to make any effort to track improperly distributed funds.”

The acting ombudsman made a long list of recommendations to the ministry, including that it design a comprehensive plan with adequate staffing, establish clear eligibility criteria for applicants and put in place a thorough verification mechanism to make sure future direct payments reach the right hands. 

The ministry has accepted all 14 recommendations, the news release said. 

2) Becoming a stay-at-home parent? How to transition to living on one spouse’s income

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Rikita Dubey, June 28, 2026

Zena Amundsen didn’t realize how tight finances could be for a single-income household after she and her husband welcomed their first baby. 

She quickly had to learn to keep track of every dollar, recalled Amundsen, a Regina-based certified financial planner at Astra Financial Services.   

For the first seven years as a parent in the mid-90s, Amundsen stayed home to raise two young children while her husband became the sole provider for the household. About 30 years later, she still draws on her experience when speaking with her clients.

Pre-planning tops her list. 

Start with a trial and run your household for anywhere between three to six months on a single income, she said. That trial will build confidence and help you understand your needs and wants while deciding what you may need to change about your lifestyle, she added.

Transitioning to a single-income household requires adjusting and cutting back on some expenses, said Tina Tehranchian, senior wealth adviser at CI Assante Wealth Management Ltd.

That means modifying your budget for dining out, entertainment, subscriptions, vacations, home renovations and vehicle upgrades. 

“The goal is not to eliminate these expenses, but to make sure they fit comfortably within the new reality,” Tehranchian said.

“In the meantime, just save the second income and see if they can cope and they can make ends meet on just one income,” she said. “This really provides a real-world stress test for the family.”

Some expenses will also go away for the stay-at-home parent, such as commuting costs, money spent on professional wardrobe, parking and childcare costs.

Some households may no longer need two cars, which can save on insurance, gas and vehicle maintenance.

You’ll know a single-income household trial is a success if you still have room to save, Amundsen said.

“Do you still have enough to fund your emergency fund for all the unexpected? Can you pay your bills and you still have room to save for your future self, meaning that retirement and pension piece,” she said. 

As the cost of living surges though, saving for all those goals has proven difficult for many Canadian families with two income sources, let alone one. Amundsen said that’s where pre-planning is crucial in prioritizing those savings.

Often, Amundsen’s clients ask her if they could reduce their pension or retirement savings as they reshuffle priorities.

It’s not a simple yes or no question, she said, it’s about being aware of the consequences and being OK with trade-offs. They need to consider the long-term consequences of losing benefits, pension accumulation and future earning power while off work. The stay-at-home parent may also need to work a few years longer after they return to the workforce to make up for the lost time in saving for retirement. 

It’s also important to know how secure the breadwinner’s job is from layoffs and the risk of sudden disabilities and healthcare concerns, Tehranchian said.

More importantly, notice how you feel with the trial and if you think you can realistically do this for a few years. 

There’s a major emotional piece to becoming a stay-at-home parent, especially when a lot is changing around you, from your lifestyle to working and socializing, experts say. 

“The spouse that’s walking away from their career or job: How are they going to feel this year, next year and in future years?” said Ryan Gubic, certified financial planner and founder of MRG Wealth Management.

He said it’s important to discuss how spending decisions will be made between spouses, whether the stay-at-home parent will still have discretionary money to enjoy life and how household responsibilities will be divided.

For a couple, it’s important to be more proactive than reactive, he said. “Rather than waiting until an issue arises … if they can talk about that proactively before it happens, it gives them both an opportunity to understand.”

However, re-entering the workforce can be difficult for many stay-at-home parents as they lose seniority or fall behind on skills needed.

Amundsen recalled having to start from scratch when she re-entered.

“I started back at a minimum wage job and I started at the very bottom,” she recalled. “I worked my butt off and I went back to university during that time while I was working full-time.”

Still, Amundsen said she wouldn’t trade the years she spent raising her children for anything.

3) Most Canadian teens have seen violence, gore online: survey

Courtesy Barrie360.com and Canadian Press

By Tara Deschamps, June 27, 2026.

As Canada edges toward legislation meant to protect youths online, a new survey suggests most teens in the country have encountered real violence or gore on the internet. 

Eighty-five per cent of the 1,007 teens who participated in an online survey in January commissioned by scholarly organization DIY: Digital Safety and the Canadian Centre for Child Protection, reported seeing either form of brutality online.

More than 70 per cent had seen videos of physical fights, 65 per cent had viewed police violence, and 52 per cent watched someone being injured or killed in a war. Ten per cent reported seeing child sexual abuse material. 

Half of respondents said they had watched footage of late right-wing activist Charlie Kirk being assassinated on stage at Utah Valley University last September, while 33 per cent had viewed mass or school shooting videos.

“The rates at which young people were seeing this and the types of content they were seeing at high rates really surprised us, and I think even surprised the folks at the Canadian Centre for Child Protection — and they’re not an easy group to shock because they see the worst of the worst online,” said Alexa Dodge, the report’s lead author and an associate professor of criminology at Saint Mary’s University in Nova Scotia.

She became interested in trying to quantify how many Canadian teens were exposed to graphic content online when hosting some focus groups.

The young people involved were telling her they regularly see disturbing content and a lot of the time, they didn’t even seek it out. It was served to them by an algorithm as they scrolled social media.

“They were telling us we see these car accidents where people die or lose a limb, and it’s really disturbing and it’s just popping up and ‘I don’t like it when that happens,’” Dodge recalled.

“I started to think this is something I’d like to know more about.”

But there was a dearth of Canadian data on the topic, especially when compared to how much info Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. are armed with.

Canadian data would give policymakers, teachers and advocates the evidence they need to shape regulations and help more teens, Dodge reasoned, so she and the researchers set out to collect the information themselves.

Almost 40 per cent of the teens they surveyed said the graphic content they were served cropped up unexpectedly in posts from strangers. 

More than 30 per cent blamed the platforms’ algorithmic recommendations for the material that showed up on their timelines. Seven per cent admitted they had searched for the content themselves.

Exposure to graphic material was most common on YouTube, followed closely by TikTok and then Instagram, the study found.

After seeing violence or gore, most of the surveyed teens told researchers they either do nothing or they block, remove or mute the account that posted the content. In the 11 per cent of instances when teens reported violence or gore to an app or platform, the reporting often did not result in the content being removed.

Dodge said that was a “really powerful” finding because it shows how much the videos stuck with some teens and how much they wish someone was doing something to remove them quickly.

Her findings were derived from an online survey conducted by polling firm Leger.

The Canadian Research Insights Council, an industry organization that promotes polling standards, says online surveys cannot be assigned a margin of error because they do not randomly sample the population.

The research was released weeks after Heritage Minister Marc Miller revealed the federal government’s plans to regulate social media and artificial intelligence-based chatbot companies. 

As part of that regulation, Miller said social media platforms, including Facebook and X, will have to block Canadian users under 16 from accessing their platform unless they follow unspecified safeguards.

Dodge suggests there are other measures that can be taken. She said platforms could be forced to ensure algorithms do not amplify or promote violent and gore content to youth.

Legislation could also require companies to issue transparency reports on how much troubling content they’re aware of on their platforms and what they’re doing or not doing to get it taken down.

4)Ontario’s education minister has a message for hockey parents: school comes first

Courtesy Barrie360.com

By Logan Miller, June 30, 2026

Starting in the upcoming school year, attendance and participation will count for a meaningful chunk of every Ontario high schooler’s final mark, and Education Minister Paul Calandra wants families to think twice before treating that as optional.

How the new attendance rules work

Attendance and participation will make up either 10 or 15 per cent of a student’s final grade, depending on what year they’re in.

In Grades 9 and 10, that figure climbs to 15 per cent. In Grades 11 and 12, it drops to 10 per cent.

Students with more than two unexcused absences won’t be eligible for that full percentage, no matter how strong their classroom work is otherwise.

Where the line is on excused absences

Illness and holy days remain standard excused absences. So does some flexibility around sports, at least for now. Parents are technically allowed to pull their kids out for something like a weekend hockey tournament that starts on a Friday.

But Calandra says he doesn’t want that loophole to become routine.

He pointed to Ontario’s high school attendance rates, which he says are among the worst in the country, as the reason the province needed to act.

“My advice to parents is, keep them in school,” he said Monday at an unrelated announcement.

“Education should be their priority. We’re going to monitor this over the next year, as I said last week, and if we have to make some additional modifications, we will.”

An exception for elite athletes

Calandra acknowledged the rules can’t apply the same way to every kid with a hockey bag.

He said the ministry has already heard from the Ontario Hockey League about how the new policy might affect serious, high-level athletes balancing school with competitive training schedules.

“High-level athletes in training, obviously, we’ll make some accommodation for that, but I say this again to the sports organizations as well: Education is a priority,” he said.

For most families, though, the message from Queen’s Park is simple: treat school like the priority it’s graded as.

This report includes information from The Canadian Press.