Clause 41 - The learning and development requirements
Childcare Bill
1:30 pm
Tim Loughton (Shadow Minister (Children), Health; East Worthing and Shoreham, Conservative)
I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bognor Regis and Littlehampton (Mr. Gibb) for his great support.
I want to talk about the importance of attachment theory in babies and very young children. Conservative Members are great devotees of Sue Gerhardt’s book “Why Love Matters: How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain”, as is the hon. Member for Mid-Dorset and North Poole (Annette Brooke). I have a heavily thumbed copy if any Labour Members would like to borrow it later to be educated. They are old enough to be educated and taught one would hope. [Interruption.] And the Government Whip certainly hopes. It is calculated that about 40 per cent. of children in this country have an insecure attachment by the age of 12 months, as measured by various professionals. A lot research has shown that one can predict before the child is born—while the mother is pregnant—what their attachment classification will be at 12 months.
There are many studies and groups, such as OXPIP, the Oxford parent-infant project, which has done a lot of pioneering work, helped by Professor Bowlby’s theories on the issue and has been commissioned by Oxford social services to provide training in attachment; other similar projects are springing up around the country. They have identified that concentrating on babies between nought and two can make a lifelong impression on how the child and then adult will turn out, because of the nature of the way in which the child develops. That is why we want to separate the treatment of children below two and children over two and why amendment No. 114 would include a general reference to appropriateness in subsection (2) in the context of the way in which children are dealt with.
Children need sensitive, responsive care that allows them to express their distress as well as their contentment. The first two years are critical to a baby’s emotional development and, physically, to the development of their brain. Most toddlers have already learned their parents’ strategies for managing emotional arousal. If emotionally secure, they know that they are free to express their feelings and they are learning ways of managing them. If emotionally insecure, they will have learned to suppress or hide their feelings—perhaps to switch off from them if things are really bad—or they will have learned the strategy of making a big noise and fuss about everything that they feel. Those children are in danger of growing up unable to regulate their emotions well.
Parental behaviour and the behaviour of other carers—be that in a nursery environment—affects the development of the baby’s brain. Increasing positive arousal and decreasing negative arousal are both important and have effects on different areas of the brain. The most important kind of positive responsiveness initially is through physical touch, which is turning out to be extremely important for the development of children, but it also takes place through eye contact and pleasurable interaction such as playing games. The whole philosophy of play has come up before.
Social processes, by which the baby co-ordinates his system with the system of those around him, are what the early years in a nursery environment are all about. That is why the learning and development requirements in the clause must be deemed to be appropriate. We have moved away from this morning’s “taught” debate, but in this probing amendment we are attempting to insert the word “appropriately”.
In defining appropriateness, which will need to be defined more clearly in the guidance and regulations that will follow our deliberations, I am trying to lay down some of the ground work for what we consider is appropriate. It is all about the child’s physical and mental development. It is also about the parents. We know that babies of agitated mothers may stay over-aroused and live with the feeling that the expression of emotions explodes out of them, whereas well managed babies come to expect a world that is responsive to their feelings. A baby between the age of nought and two is still physically a part of his mother, who may be breastfeeding, depending on her milk, and who may regulate his heartbeat and so on.
We all have neurons at birth, Mr. Amess. Even you and I had neurons at birth. We may not have as many as we started with, but that may be as a result of what happened to us between the ages of nought and two. I do not wish to delve into your colourful past, Mr. Amess, and what happened to you in those crucial developmental years, but clearly something went very wrong for both you and me to have ended up in this place. We were, of course, slightly salvaged by our adherence to the party that we adhere to, unlike Government Members, who clearly had some shocking experiences before they reached the age of two. However, we all have neurons at birth.
We do not need to grow any more, but we need to connect those neurons up and make them work better for us. With more connections at an early stage, there is a better performance and a greater ability to use the brain. Between six and 12 months, there is a massive burst of these synaptic connections—I am sorry if I blind the Committee with technical stuff, but it is necessary—in the pre-frontal cortex. They achieve their highest density just when the developing pleasurable relationship between parents and babies is at its most intense. The neurons will not be functional until the child is about 18-months-old. We see that, in children who have not had the right sort of attention at an early age, the neurons are in a state of semi-chaos and are not as well connected. That is why attention is so crucial, because the brain grows most rapidly in the first 18 months. A baby’s brain doubles in weight over the first year of life, and difficult babies are often difficult because their parents or carers are emotionally unavailable to them.
That is why it is so important that if a child is not with its parents, the person with whom it spends time—a carer in a nursery—must give him the right sort of attention. It is not about ticking boxes or inspecting the nursery to make sure that the taps are in the right place and the loos and radiators work, crucial though those may be to creating the right environment. The single most important factor in that child’s development will be the contact and attachment that it builds up with its parent, or its carer in the parent’s place in a nursery or other environment. If that does not occur and stresses result, all sorts of problems can arise.
I am also making the point that happy babies are made by happy parents. Therefore, whatever we do in the Bill to make the attainment of appropriate child care even easier must be good for removing stresses from the parent and, in turn, that is good for creating a better reaction with the child.
I am trying to tease out some of the Minister’s thoughts, because I believe that she and I have the same objectives. We both want to achieve the same sort of development in the very early years for those children and make sure that their neurons are tied up neatly rather than chaotically. However, we do not want prescriptive measures to be imposed on child care environments that miss the point that we should be doing more to make sure that key workers in child care environments provide appropriate care to help those children develop. Nursery projects around the country have recognised that. The Sunderland infant programme aims to ascertain whether it is feasible, practical and economical to screen routinely for less than sensitive interaction and then to tailor interventions accordingly.
I do not disagree with most of what is in the clause, although we have concerns about how people may seek to define it. I am worried that the Government have missed a trick, because there is no mention of attachment in the Bill. I hope that it will feature in the guidance. That is why the amendments that we sought to table, but unfortunately were too late, specifically included secure attachment as one of the areas of learning and development listed in subsection (3), because we should be talking about personal and social development and about securing emotional development to positive attachments.
I would like the Government to respond to all this wonderful child psychology, which I am sure comes as second nature to you, Mr. Amess, by saying what importance they place on the appropriate treatment of very young children to ensure that they not only develop properly but, and most important, develop proper attachments with the people around them. If it is not the parents but an alternative child care environment, the key workers there must be primed, trained and alert to encouraging those appropriate attachments with the children. Nurseries should have a clear definition of a key person and clear evidence of the way in which those approaches are being implemented. Careful attention must be paid to any child expressing attachment relationships to the key person or others.
I am grateful for your sufferance here, Mr. Amess, but it is an important subject for many of us. I hope that the Minister can respond positively if not to the wording of the amendment, which is deliberately loose because it is a probing amendment, but to the principles behind it, that would send out helpful signals that the Government set great store on encouraging attachment. That is a key part of the way in which a child can develop more securely and positively in the first two years of his or her life in a child care environment away from the home. Therefore, I am keen to hear what the Minister says.