Last month's Budget announcement that working parents will from 2015 be able to claim back 20 per cent of their nursery, childminder or nanny costs up to a total of £1,200 per child will be a welcome development for many families struggling in the current economic climate. And in the short term, it may seem like a positive solution. However, there are other more subtle and long-term consequences to childcare and family welfare provision that is driven primarily by the politics of economics and fails to take the biological, emotional and social needs of the young child into account.
Humans are the only species of mammal which deliberately separates its young from the mother for economic and social reasons before it is able to fend for itself. Mammal means 'one who suckles its young', and due to the size of the human brain relative to the mother's pelvis, human babies are the most helpless of mammals at birth, dependent on the mother to provide for every need. In biological terms, the first nine months of post-natal life are a continuation of gestation outside the womb. This secondary gestational relationship is not purely physical but encompasses emotional, social and cultural development.
When a child is born, it embarks on the first love affair of life - unquestioning dependence and devotion to the person who provides for its physical and emotional needs - and the nature and security of that relationship will have a lasting influence on its life and future relationships.
Anthropologists and experts in child development have recognised that during the first two years of life the mother acts as a child's 'auxiliary cortex'.1 The quality of care, interaction and communicative empathy that a child receives from its mother and other caregivers helps to sculpt the neural pathways involved in self-regulation, the more concrete results of which will only be fully realised in adolescence and adulthood. This is one of the reasons why neglect and abuse in the first years of life can have major psychological and social repercussions for the remainder of life unless nullified by other positive life experiences and relationships.
Attachment - the process through which a child forms a lasting emotional bond with the people around it - is nurtured through the primary relationship with parents and strengthened through close family and social ties. Key elements in the attachment process are proximity, continuity and sympathetic reciprocal communication (physical, emotional and linguistic). There are critical stages in the attachment process which begin in the first hours after birth and which peak at approximately nine months of age, just the time when statutory maternity pay ends and many women are forced for financial reasons to return to work.
FIRST SEPARATION
For an infant who has become securely attached, this first separation from the primary source of love is like the loss of a love affair. Yes, children can and do adapt to this separation; yes, other caregivers can provide adequate care and in some cases may do a better job than the natural parent, but these are social adaptations out of kilter with children's developmental needs and biological design.
Children's ability to cope with separation is linked to development and particularly the development of language skills. By three years of age, physical development has furnished a child with the rudimentary abilities to flee, fight for and feed itself if needed; motor skills have enabled it to navigate through its immediate environment and thereby to satisfy curiosity and a desire to explore and discover; language makes it possible to understand that separation is temporary and the primary source of love will return. In other words, skills acquired over time through development give the child the tools to adapt to different environments. When the demands of the environment exceed the slower process of evolutionary development, the difference will be seen in behaviour.
Studies which have investigated the impact of childcare at different ages have revealed conflicting findings. Many point to more precocious cognitive development in children who attend nursery education from a young age (particularly important for children from deprived backgrounds),2 but a meta-analysis of 101 childcare outcome studies from many countries published in peer-reviewed journals between 1957 and 1995 found robust evidence of adverse outcomes associated with non-maternal care in the areas of children's infant-mother attachment security, their socio-emotional development (including increased anger, anxiety, and hostility in boys, and over-dependency, anxiety, and depression in girls), and in their behaviour (including hyperactivity, aggression and non-compliance). They found no support for the belief or findings of other studies that high-quality daycare is an acceptable substitute for parental care.3
Others have examined cortisol levels - a physiological marker of stress - in children aged three to five years in daycare and found that children who attended daycare demonstrated higher levels of cortisol than children in their homes. Children who attended high-quality programmes showed a decline across the school day, whereas children who attended programmes rated as unsatisfactory demonstrated an increase in cortisol level across the day.4 The second of these studies found that, 'quantity of time spent away from home, as well as age of the child, appear to be mediating factors'.5 From three years of age, children appear to benefit generally from experience of good quality childcare, but before the age of two years there is evidence of a proportional relationship between increased time spent in childcare and negative social and emotional and behavioural signs.6 (Some negative influences appear to be ameliorated if childcare is of good quality and provided by a consistent carer or secondary family members with whom the child was already familiar, grandparents, for example.)
GOLD STANDARD?
While negative findings may appear to be temporary, which improve with habituation, Jonas Himmelstrand, a Swedish sociologist recently speaking to a group of MPs at the House of Commons hosted by the campaign group Mothers at Home, advised that Sweden - a country for many years held up as the 'gold standard' for flexibility and availability of state-funded child care - is now reaping the fruits of a generation of children who spent many hours separated from their parents in the early years.
He warned that teenagers in Sweden today, who had been forced to spend long hours in daycare as toddlers, are experiencing psychological problems such as anxiety, poor school performance, unmanageable behaviour at school and are dangerously attached to their peer group with one of the worst discipline problems in schools in the OECD. In Sweden, 95 per cent of two- to five-year-olds are in daycare, a trend which started in the 1980s when daycare centres were recommended as the best way to bring up a child. One of the reasons he suggested for the rise in discipline problems was that, 'daycare means that parents have lost a grip of their responsibilities. They cannot set limits'.
Adolescence tends to witness the re-igniting of issues unresolved in toddlerhood. A study that investigated the relationship between non-relative childcare during the first four and a half years of life and academic achievement and behavioural adjustment at age 15 seems to confirm this, revealing that while there were benefits to academic achievement, higher hours of childcare accrued at four and a half years of age were linked to more risk taking and impulsivity at 15.7
These findings are not intended to heap guilt and anxiety on parents who either have no choice about returning to work to support the family, or parents who make a choice to work. Rather it seeks to highlight that the relentless trend by successive governments to provide economic incentives to mothers who return to the workplace in the early years, versus mothers who stay at home, ignores the developmental needs of children in the early years and potentially carries social consequences for the future.
Instead of simply looking at short-term economic support, we should be looking at longer-term solutions, which place the needs of the developing child at the heart of policy. The role of parenting, and particularly motherhood in the first two years, should be highly valued by society.
Of all the jobs available, the one that has the greatest individual impact on society in the future is parenting. It is also the one in which every parent is equal. In addition to helping families economically, we should also be seeking ways to enable mothers to spend as much of the first two years of life with every child as possible, before they return to work.
Sally Goddard Blythe is director of The Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology and author of seven books on child development. www.sallygoddardblythe.co.uk
FURTHER READING
What Babies and Children Really Need by Sally Goddard Blythe, Hawthorn Press (2008)
REFERENCES
1 Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self by A N Schore, Laurence Erlbaum Associates, Hove (1994)
2 EPPE Study www.dfes.gov.uk/research
3 A meta-analysis of the published research on the effects of non-maternal care on child development by C Violato and C Russell in: The Changing Family and Child Development, editors: C Violato C, M Genuis, E Paolucci, Ashgate, London
4 Children's cortisol levels and quality of care provision by M Sims, A Guilfoyle and T S Parry, Child Care, Health and Development, 32/4: 453 (2006)
5 Research: New studies link long child care hours to behavior problems by A Silver, http://www.attachmentparenting.org/support/articles/artresearch.php
6 Early child care and cognitive outcomes associated with early child care: results of the NICHD study up to 36 months, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, Maryland: NICHD (April 1997) Research Network.
7 Do effects of early child care extend to age 15 years? Results from the NICHD Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development. www.nieer.org/pdf/Effects_of_Early_Child_Care_Extend_to_Age_15.pdf.
