KENAN MALIK Nursery for under-threes makes
children aggressive, smacking causes long-term emotional damage, and parents
need to be taught parenting skills. The early years of a child's life are
crucial.
USHA GOSWAMI I do think that there's an awful
lot of compelling evidence that your experiences in your early years are very
important for the way you can function both emotionally and cognitively. I
think there's been a lot of very good psychology and psychiatry research showing
these kinds of things.
JAY BELSKY I have real problems with the notion
that the early years are crucial. Crucial kind of implies that if something
doesn’t happen or something does happen, then that foretells everything
thereafter.
KENAN MALIK Professor Usha Goswami, a developmental
psychologist from Cambridge University and Jay Belsky, Director of London
University's Institute for the Study of Children, Families and Social Issues.So,
who's right? Do the early years really set the tone for the rest of your life?
And if so what are the lessons for policy makers? In America the so-called
0-3 movement has won support at the highest levels. Hillary Clinton told a
White House conference in 1997 that 'a child's earliest experiences determine
how their brains are wired' and 'can determine whether children grow up to
be peaceful or violent citizens, focused or undisciplined workers, attentive
or detached parents.' In Britain, too, policy makers are warming to the idea
that we should catch them young and save society trouble later.
NORMAN GLASS The Chancellor has talked about
this century as being the century of pre-school provision and so on, and that's
fantastically encouraging and indeed he's expanded the programme enormously.
I was very cheered up when I saw that the Chancellor has launched at least
a pilot programme of free childcare for children aged two.
KENAN MALIK Norman Glass, Chief Executiveof
the National Centre for Social Research and a key instigator of the government's
Sure Start policy for pre-school children. There are now more than 500 Sure
Start programmes around the country. They are largely local initiatives that
help integrate nursery education, family support, child and maternal health
services and parenting classes.
NORMAN GLASS I became convinced in the course
of the work I did in the Treasury that early years, between birth and going
to school, were an important phase in children's lives. I certainly felt when
we launched the Sure Start programme that there needed to be more resources
for this particular sector compared to what was being spent on universities,
secondary education, primary education. So Sure Start was an early years programme
not just about child care but about health, about family support, about bringing
all these things together, and about making sure that it was delivered at
a local level. As far as the provision for nursery education for children
below the age of three, I think there is a strong case for ensuring that there
is high quality childcare.
KENAN MALIK The government is now planning a
new network of children's centres, and aims to extend free nursery provision
to children under three. But not everyone's happy. Sue Gerhardt is a psychotherapist
and author of Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby's Brain.
SUE GERHARDT It's a very contentious area, but
from my point of view babies need one to one attention. They need to be with
people who really know them well, notice how they are and respond quickly
to them. Now that I don't think is terribly likely to happen in a nursery
situation. I don't think nurseries are great for babies, and we do know that
full time care in nurseries has some quite bad effects on children who go
into that system.
KENAN MALIK The debate about nurseries has now
become a major talking point. The press here recently picked up on academic
studies that seemed to challenge the wisdom of placing very young children
in day care. 'Nurseries are turning our children into thugs', ran the headline
in the London Evening Standard. Could this really be true? Professor
Jay Belsky.
JAY BELSKY There's increasing evidence on both
sides of the Atlantic that when babies, beginning in the first or even the
second year of life, spend long hours in childcare centres and maybe even
with child minders, that as they go to school they're more likely to be more
aggressive and disobedient than are other children. That doesn't mean that
they are going to be axe murderers or thugs, as a newspaper recently said,
but they are more aggressive and disobedient than other children; and that
seems to be the case even when they've been, if you would, in better quality
or good quality nurseries and child minder settings.
KENAN MALIK Are there also positive aspects
of sending children under three to daycare?
JAY BELSKY Well there's this mixed set of findings
which is - and they're mixed only because we don't have a theory to accommodate
them. In fact there is some evidence that when children under three are in
good quality childcare, they end up starting school, especially if they have
spent lots of time in centres, being somewhat more cognitively and linguistically
skilled but also somewhat more aggressive and disobedient.
KENAN MALIK In Britain the Effective Provision
of Pre-School Education project (or EPPE) has been studying the impact of
pre-school education on later life. Kathy Sylva is Professor of Educational
Psychology at Oxford University and a lead researcher on this ongoing study
as well as a government adviser. How does she view the impact of nurseries
on the very young?
KATHY SYLVA EPPE studied thousands of children
and some of them, actually about three hundred of them, had been in some kind
of care or education before the age of two, and a very small proportion of
these children, but a statistically significant proportion, did develop behaviour
problems - mostly they were anti-social - when they were about three. So there
is some effect of early day care. It was mostly below the age of one, and
it was mostly in group settings such as day nurseries, but it was for a very
small percent of children. Many of our children who were in day nurseries
under the age of two had no increase in anti-social behaviour, but there is
a risk for a small group of children, especially in nursery, day nursery care,
and especially if they're there before the age of one.
KENAN MALIK So you're not saying that high levels
of group care for under twos causes behavioural problems?
KATHY SYLVA In a study such as ours, it's very
hard to say cause and effect. If you have a child or you're about to tell
me you have a child in a day care centre under two, your child is probably
- as are most children - going to be just absolutely fine. If she's a girl,
she's almost certain to be fine.
KENAN MALIK As it happens, my daughter Carmen,
who is eleven months old, attends a day nursery three days a week. It allows
me to make programmes such as this. Am I worried? Not really. The studies
suggest that if you take 100 children from the general population and compared
them to 100 children who attended nursery before they were three, there would
be just one more anti-social child among the early starters than among the
population at large. If Carmen does become a teenage tearaway, I doubt if
I'll be able to put the blame on her starting nursery early. And Norman Glass,
founder of the Sure Start programme, wouldn't expect me to.
NORMAN GLASS I, in the course of the work that
we're doing on Sure Start and subsequently, looked at a lot of the research
on child development. There are various kinds of evidence here. We're talking
about some evidence that's been done on early brain development, no one study
is crucial - it's social science, you don't get a kind of crunching result
- but the weight of the evidence seemed to me to be pushing you towards saying
that early years were of particular importance.
KENAN MALIK But what's interesting is that you
have two groups of people, both of whom agree that early years are important,
are critically important - one of whom say it's so critically important that
you shouldn't send them to day care because that damages them for the rest
of their lives, and those who say that it is so critically important that
you should send them to day care because it sets them up for the rest of their
lives. How do you resolve that?
NORMAN GLASS I think that it's an unfortunate
polarisation. I would certainly subscribe to the view, and that certainly
was what lay behind the Sure Start programme, that families are very important.
There was the work from our cohort studies here, our birth cohort studies
in the UK, which seemed to show that many of the factors which affected children's
subsequent lives were present very early on in their lives in terms of parental
involvement and so on, for example, and the intention was certainly to enable
parents to do a better job. But there are also studies which quite clearly
show that high quality childcare, education, play and so on, can make a big
difference for children, particularly for children from deprived areas. It's
there in a way to supplement and encourage parents.
KENAN MALIK Yet many parents cannot but feel
guilty about leaving their children to be looked after by strangers. Such
guilt is probably strongest among middle class parents who often see their
decision to place a child in a nursery as a lifestyle choice rather than a
financial necessity.
EXPRESS HEADLINE The grim reality of our
nurseries.
KENAN MALIK The headline to a recent Sunday
Express leader article in the wake of the BBC1 Real Story programme
‘Nurseries Undercover’ in which nursery staff were secretly filmed
shouting at two-year old children, calling them idiots when they cried for
their mother, laughing at them and teasing them. The leader continued.
EXPRESS ARTICLE The other day I was
out for coffee with another mother who sends her one year old boy to nursery
three days a week because she wants and needs to work. I had to whisk away
the newspaper lying on our table before she could see
the headline: 'Are Nurseries Bad For Babies?' and feel even more miserable
about a life that already pulls her in too many different directions. For
the thousands of mums and dads all over the country with children in nursery,
the unkindness and bullying in Real Story were the stuff of nightmares.
KENAN MALIK But if middle class anxieties are
helping fuel the current furore about nurseries, it's not middle class children
that really concern policy makers. Kathy Sylva.
KATHY SYLVA The EPPE data show that middle class
families actually are pretty good at helping the child learning. That means
it's important to focus on helping parents support learning at home on more
disadvantaged communities because these are the communities where the parents
don't use the strategies that seem to be successful in supporting their children's
learning.
KENAN MALIK Doesn't this smack of a certain
kind of patronising view of non-middle class families?
KATHY SYLVA I don't think it's patronising.
It might be that in the middle class there are other kinds of needs. Maybe
the middle class need training on not to give their children too much money,
not to give them too many choices about restaurant meals.
KENAN MALIK Oh well, I must remember to take
my daughter to Pizza Express rather than Gordon Ramsay's. All this leaves
policy makers with a dilemma. They want greater access to nurseries for disadvantaged
children, because they worry that their parents may not be up to the job.
But good quality nurseries are expensive. And those who can afford private
nurseries - middle class parents - are increasingly anxious about the whole
idea of day care for the very young. Underlying all this is the belief that
a young child's experiences indelibly shape his or her future life. In the
past, data about the importance of infancy came largely from psychological
studies. These days, early years advocates are turning to more high-tech areas
such as neuroscience for evidence. Unlike Norman Glass, psychotherapist Sue
Gerhardt thinks that young children should not be placed in nurseries. But
she too looks to brain science to back her particular theory of why the early
years are so crucial.
SUE GERHARDT I use the term 'the social brain',
I think, as a kind of shorthand really to refer to all the systems that manage
emotion in the brain. One of the striking things is that these parts of the
brain develop in response to the experiences that the child has. In particular,
what I'm referring to is the pre-frontal cortex. Loving relationships, pleasurable
relationships apparently trigger off a kind of cascade of hormones which actually
help the pre-frontal part of the brain to develop.
KENAN MALIK And you're saying that there is
a particularly sensitive period for the development of this part of the brain?
SUE GERHARDT Yes. The first two years in general
are when this part of the brain gets going. We can say that during babyhood
these systems are very easily upset by stressful experience you know like
being left alone for too long or being treated abusively. And what happens
is that high levels of the stress hormone cortisol are released. They're very
toxic to developing systems in particular.
KENAN MALIK Others, however, are more wary about
the data. Professor Usha Goswami of Cambridge University.
USHA GOSWAMI I think some groups are now beginning
to measure things like cortisol response, for example, but that would be through
cheek swabs, it wouldn't necessarily be within the brain itself, and to make
analogies about the effects of cortisol in stress systems and so on. But I
think that they're quite extreme, the circumstances that are imposed on children
being measured. Something like your mother being clinically depressed. It
doesn't mean something like your mother putting you in day care for six hours.
I think everybody has hypotheses and you can see data that does or doesn't
seem to fit with your hypotheses, but to use data from extreme groups to make
arguments about the general population is always risky.
KENAN MALIK Much of the data on the importance
of early years has, indeed, come from children placed in extreme circumstances.
For instance, the early studies demonstrating the importance of the mother-child
bond were conducted by psychoanalyst John Bowlby on children in wartime nurseries.
These were grim places, more like factories than nurseries, and a world away
from today's day care centres. Today much is made of the experience of children
brought up in Romanian orphanages during the Ceaucescu regime and of the psychological
and neurological damage they suffered. But can the experience of these children
really tell us anything about the lives of ordinary youngsters? The American
neuroscientist Steve Peterson has said, only half-jokingly, that, as far as
brain development goes, the only advice he'd give parents is 'Don't raise
your children in a closet; don't starve them; and don't hit them over the
head with a frying pan.' Psychologist John Bruer, Director of the James S
McDonald Foundation, in St Louis, Missouri, agrees.
JOHN BRUER There is no neuroscientific research
that supports the claim that the first three years are critical for all these
various kinds of development and that is the only time educators can usefully
intervene to help children. The fact of the matter is people involved in the
debate are for the most part not scientists, are not neuroscientists at least;
they're policy people, educators, psychiatrists, social workers. There are
clearly critical periods for certain kinds of development - typically vision,
hearing, acquiring a first language. Beyond that, the evidence is very slim.
But the belief that there are long-term consequences from early childhood
that carry into adult life across a wide range of skills and abilities, we'll
find that claim is not warranted.
KENAN MALIK But is John Bruer right? Usha Goswami
is currently setting up a Centre for Neuroscience in Education at Cambridge
University. What does she think about the idea of a 'critical period' in brain
development?
USHA GOSWAMI Well, if you're wondering about
how the brain develops, the first ten years are a really important time because
the metabolic rate of the child's brain is much higher than that of the adult's
in those early years and we know that an awful lot of connections are forming
and also being pruned in those years. There's great plasticity. There's actually
plasticity throughout life though. The adult brain also can form connections
at a rapid rate. For example, if someone's had a stroke, when they recover
function that's because the brain is busy growing or re-growing connections.
So in that sense the child's brain is not more plastic than the adult's.
KENAN MALIK The critical period, then, is not
simply the first 3 years, but could be the first 10 years, or even throughout
your life. Psychotherapist Sue Gerhardt accepts this, but nevertheless insists
that babyhood is special.
SUE GERHARDT The brain is plastic and it goes
on being plastic throughout life, as I understand it, so that there's always
hope and there's always the possibility of developing one's brain in positive
ways throughout life. But the point about babyhood is that it's a very concentrated
period where all sorts of systems are being set up and they're very vulnerable
to being damaged. This is also when there's a great burst of connections in
the pre-frontal cortex and it's when the baby really becomes a social being
and becomes attached to his parents in a way that we can actually measure
by the age of one.
KENAN MALIK The finding that most brain connections
- or synapses as neuroscientists call them - are established in infancy has
excited some policy makers, especially in America. The state of Florida requires
that all nurseries play Mozart every day in the belief that classical music
helps establish more synapses. In Georgia and Tennessee every mother who gives
birth is sent home from hospital with a classical CD. But does a well-connected
brain really make for a better baby? John Bruer.
JOHN BRUER One of the simple-minded inferences
that's drawn from this increased synaptic connectivity in early childhood
is that good parenting or good early childhood programmes should preserve
as many synapses as possible, and somehow that the number of synapses you
have equates to how intelligent you will be later in life. It can turn parenting
and early childhood education into kind of synaptic bean counting and that
claim is not warranted. And one of the examples one could give is Fragile
X Syndrome, which results in severe mental retardation as the result of over
production of synapses, and maintaining those synaptic connections into later
life. So there's really no simple linear mapping from how many synapses you
have to how smart you are or how well adjusted you are.
KENAN MALIK The trouble with much of the scientific
data is that it is not easy to interpret, especially if you're trying to jump
from brain science to social policy. Professor Usha Goswami.
USHA GOSWAMI Most of the things we know about
early brain development come from research on animal systems - for example
the rat - so the research showing this early synaptogenesis in the first three
years was done with rats. And, for example, when the rats were given a more
enriched environment, so instead of being in regular cages they had lots of
things to play with and to stimulate them, then there was more synaptogenesis
in those animals. But it's a big leap to go from the rat brain to the human
brain and particularly to then make arguments about enriched environments
in the early years.
KENAN MALIK Where then do the claims that neuroscience
provides the evidence for the importance of particular experience for the
development of the infant brain, where do those claims come from?
USHA GOSWAMI My guess is that it would be largely
from studies in animal model systems. There are very few research groups around
the world who actually do neuroscience studies with children. There are many
problems in doing such studies with children. The major technique that we've
had until recently was pet imaging, which uses radioactive tracers which you
clearly cannot give to children. We also have magnetic resonance imaging now
and certainly in the States, laboratories are beginning to do that kind of
work with children and with infants. Again there are artefacts in that kind
of data if you move too much, so that's been a big problem because children
tend to move a lot inside the scanner. There's also the technique of EEG,
which is what we use ourselves, which is non-invasive - you put electrodes
on the scalp of the child or the baby and you can measure the brain's electrical
changes to different events. But that field too is in its infancy in terms
of understanding what those changes might signify.
KENAN MALIK Depending on whom you talk to, the
scientific evidence shows that the first years are crucially important or
it shows that they're not. It tells us to send young children to nursery,
and it tells us to keep them at home. Perhaps the truth is that the evidence
simply isn't there to allow us to make these kinds of calls. But then, you
don't need science to tell you that young children respond best to parental
love and affection. And there may be good social and political, as opposed
to scientific, reasons for expanding nursery provision. Indeed, the Cambridge
historian Dr Deborah Thom suggests that social concerns have long shaped our
view of the very young.
DEBORAH THOM These ideas are often contested.
But what we see happening in the late 1940s is a certain agreement about the
importance of the bond with the mother, with the primary caregiver, in the
sense that that's the fundamental basis of emotional functioning and development.
That to some extent diminishes in the years after the founding of the welfare
state when it has practical achievements in terms of infant welfare provision,
clinics, monitoring of general development. It diminishes to some extent in
the 60s as people begin to look a bit out from the mother and more at other
effects on a child's life. And to some extent then concentration moves away
from the early years and into nursery schooling and schooling, and sociology
begins to play a part in how people think about children. Early years comes
back to some extent with anxieties about how well some parents are performing
their task that we get re-emerging in the 1980s.
KENAN MALIK Is today's preoccupation with young
children also driven by wider social concerns? Government advisor Kathy Sylva.
KATHY SYLVA We have found from relatively robust
statistical analysis that investment in a young child's care and education
probably does pay off. We found, for example, that high quality provision
was related to children being less likely to be identified as having special
educational needs. They are very expensive. The early years part of education
has really demonstrated its worth. It's up to other areas of education to
demonstrate that they too have effects, positive effects.
JOHN BRUER It particularly concerned me in the
United States when policy discussions began emphasizing the first three years
of life. Policy people were saying well let's take money away from remedial
education or education in the prisons and put that money into early childhood
because if we did that, we can eliminate the need for remediation, we can
eliminate the need for educational programmes in prisons in the sense that
there might be fewer people in prison down the road.
KENAN MALIK John Bruer. Similarly in Britain,
one of the arguments for the introduction of university top-up fees was that
resources should be targeted where they could really make a difference - at
the very young. There is another way, too, in which the emphasis on the early
years can have a wider impact. By turning childhood into such a precious commodity,
policy makers win acceptance for the idea that adults must be taught how to
protect that commodity. So policies about children become ways of shaping
the behaviour of adults, especially parents. Hence, for instance, the growing
number of parenting classes which now come as part of the government's Sure
Start package. It's not a new idea, suggests Deborah Thom.
DEBORAH THOM There were extensive motherhood
classes in the years before the First World War. You had institutions called
Schools for Mothers, which were designed to get working class women operating
more hygienically and more sensibly. You get the re-emergence of such institutions
at the end of the Second World War when local authorities are very worried
that a generation of women who've been getting their hands roughened in factories
may find it very hard to get back to the task of rearing children and doing
it properly and authentically. There is this assumption that people don't
know what they're doing and don't do it very well, and that if you teach them
they can learn.
KENAN MALIK In a way you're saying that parenting
classes or mothering classes is driven by a view that certain groups of people
- the working class, the disadvantaged - are unable to look after their children
properly.
DEBORAH THOM I think historically that's true.
They're designed to remedy what people see as deficiencies.
KENAN MALIK Of course policy makers wouldn't
put it like that. They talk about social equality and helping the disadvantaged.
But one can't help feeling that the old notion of 'remedying deficiency' is
at least an undercurrent to the fashion for parenting classes, as it is in
the wider nursery debate. Professor John Bruer thinks it's time to take a
more relaxed view of infant life.
JOHN BRUER What we have surrounding this issue
of the first three years is more of a political debate than a scientific debate.
People will show improved educational outcomes as long as they have improved
educational opportunities, and to think that an intensive dose of affection
and caring in the first three years of life is going to provide insulation
to deal with the various environments, good and bad, that you will deal with
later is really unwarranted. I'm not saying the early childhood years are
unimportant, but they are no more important than other stages in our development
and education.
KENAN MALIK As a parent I fuss and fret over
my child and worry incessantly about her future. That's inevitable. It's unhealthy,
though, for society to do the same. Certainly, the first years of a child's
life are important. And certainly we need a rational childcare and education
policy, which encompasses the needs of children, parents and society as a
whole. But there is no evidence that the first years of life indelibly shape
an individual's future. Let's not make believe that we can solve society's
problems just by catching them young.