New Labour congratulate themselves on their capacity to respond to the fact that family life is changing. Today there are more single parents, more stepfamilies, more women working. While most families had a stay-at-home parent in the 1960s, now only 30 per cent do - and these are often the poorest families. The majority of mothers leave their babies to return to work within ten months of giving birth. Our culture has shifted away from a child-centred family towards a work-centred family.
Clearly, the Government supports these developments. Many of its policies are aimed at drawing increasing numbers into economic activity. These policies range from the increase in state-funded nursery school provision and the new offer of after-school care, to Sure Start, to teenage sex education (in order to prevent new welfare dependents).
Brain research
Recent work in the neurobiology of emotional development has confirmed decades of attachment research, putting us in a much better position to understand what children need to develop emotionally. There is a substantial body of work which gives us a clear idea of how human beings are socialised into human culture and how they learn to relate to other people. This starts from the moment of birth, and in fact the most intense period of socialisation occurs in the first two years of life.
During this time, babies are learning at a phenomenal rate how to sustain their attachments to others, attachments which are a matter of life and death. They respond to the way their parental figures behave. If the parent gets agitated or angered by their needs, they learn to try to hide them. If the parent is unpredictably responsive, they learn to try to draw attention to their needs. If the parent is comfortable with their needs, they express them freely and learn that it is fine to have needs.
These experiences influence the way the baby's brain develops. Secure children, who have consistently responsive parents, develop a balanced stress response. Their biochemical systems have not been overloaded, and have been set up to cope with a moderate level of adversity; they don't overreact to minor stresses. They also have a psychological conviction, an inner sense, that life is manageable, and they adopt their parents'
attitudes to themselves, having learned how to soothe themselves and be thoughtful about their needs. The social part of their brain - in the pre-frontal cortex - also develops well, enabling them to hold back impulsive action, and to reflect on their behaviour and adapt well to others.
Emotionally insecure children receive very different messages. If they are overprotected, or neglected, they may grow up afraid of others or lacking confidence in their capacities. These children may develop a hypersensitive stress response, and quickly become overwhelmed by the stresses of social interaction. Other children who are treated harshly will tend to become harsh towards themselves and others; eventually some of these children may develop a flattened stress response. Their way of coping with repeated stress is to attempt to switch off their feelings until it reaches a critical mass, when they might explode with anger or distress. Both types of insecure children are likely to have parents who are less thoughtful, and talk less about their children's feelings - which may mean that their pre-frontal cortex ends up less well networked. They are likely to have a greater difficulty in reflecting on their own behaviour and in empathising with others.
Clearly, the way that psychological needs are met in infancy and early childhood plays a major role in determining the kinds of citizens these children become. It is less likely to be the secure children who become mentally ill, substance-dependent or depressed or who commit crimes.
Although many insecure people contribute greatly to society, they are more vulnerable to these negative outcomes. Protecting the emotional security of these children could therefore readily be justifiable in economic terms.
Emotional support
So, in the light of this new research, how do the Government's initiatives stack up? It is true that in its policy documents, the Government pays lip service to the importance of babyhood. In practice, New Labour does not seem to be able to prioritise support for early parenting. There may be various factors that contribute to this, such as an inevitable difficulty in committing to policies that don't bear immediate electoral fruit and require long-term investment. But I suspect that an equally potent factor is the difficulty in recognising the emotional needs of infants.
It is proving very difficult to put babies' needs on the map. They are inconvenient. They don't contribute to the economy. The assumption seems to be that not much is going on in their brains, so they might as well be looked after by some underpaid young girl.
In the 1950s, attachment researchers tried to get society to recognise that young children had feelings. James Robertson made films about young children who went into hospital or into residential care, to demonstrate the serious negative impact it had on their attachment relationships. He met a blank wall of denial. Staff saw children who cried as just being naughty, or spoiled. It took decades before hospital staff could allow themselves to empathise with children's distress, and to see that this might have consequences for their emotional development. Policy was finally changed to allow parents to sleep over with their child, and visit freely.
Today, Government and the public at large have the same blind spot about babies.
The Government's most recent offer is for the state to 'mind' children after school in clubs. But who will be socialising these children, who is going to be noticing their feelings and helping them to manage them? They will have to hang on to their feelings until they get home at suppertime, when there will be a brief window of opportunity before bed.
Babies have an even greater need to be kept in mind. They need continuous care from adults who can attune to their states, regulate them, and feed back to them who they are. The capacity to do this develops through an ongoing relationship. Babies looked after by people who are not 'in love'
with them may be socialised into emotional life, with corresponding biochemical pathways in the brain, without the responsiveness and sensitivity that produce emotional confidence and competence.
New Labour's policies do not emphasise the importance of very early development, or the way that the brain develops through an intense interactive process between a caregiver and a dependent. New Labour are much more comfortable talking about later parenting and emphasising parental responsibility for truanting children or anti-social behaviour, rather than talking about parental love. The Government is stuffed full of people who have not spent time with their children, who have not valued relationships above achievement and acquisition, and who hurry and hassle other parents into working and earning.
No state vision
There is no real Government vision that includes support for the early relationship between parent and baby in the first two years. While there is talk about 'enhancing the role' of health visitors, and preventing problems from arising, health visiting jobs are being cut back. Local Sure Starts could, in theory, provide support for the parent-baby relationship, but few make it a priority, preferring to focus energies on providing childcare and helping mothers to develop skills and get back to work. There is no universal provision of parent-infant psychotherapy.
There is no way of breaking the cycle by which insecure parents pass on their emotional strategies to their children. While the Government talks about dealing with causes and recognises that family dysfunction has something to do with crime and mental illness, it cannot respond effectively because it doesn't really grasp what happens in infancy.
Instead, the Government has a rationalist approach - that parents can improve children's behaviour at a later stage, by praising good behaviour and rejecting or ignoring bad behaviour. But lasting change in the child also unfortunately requires lasting change in the parent's approach, and this is not easy to achieve without ongoing support.
We need our Government to recognise that it should invest in support for the early relationship between parents and their babies, as a priority.
There should be state funding for a substantial carers' allowance or salary for parenting babies up to 18 months. There should be infant mental health specialists available in every locality, under the NHS. Instead of a state which pays lip service to emotional well-being, we need a state which genuinely values caring relationships. NW
The original, longer version of this article appears in Soundings, a journal of politics and culture, issue 31, Winter 2005, available from www.lwbooks.co.uk.
About the author
* Sue Gerhardt is a psychotherapist, both in private practice and with the Oxford Parent-Infant Project which she co-founded. She is also the author of Why Love Matters: how affection shapes a baby's brain (Brunner-Routledge, 2004).
