Early Intervention

Anna Soubry Excerpts

Tuesday 31st January 2012 Commons Chamber

[Andrea Leadsom]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Anything that helps to prevent a repeat is to be welcomed.

I want to focus on a topic that we do not often discuss in the Chamber: the importance of love. Love in a prevention context begins with conception. It needs to go on throughout the baby’s life, but the critical period is conception to the age of two years. There is a very important reason for that: a loved baby who has his needs met will generally learn that the world is a good place and that people are generally kind. That baby will grow up expecting to be able to form secure bonds, make friends and hold down a job, and will generally have more capacity to lead a normal life.

On the other hand, the baby who is neglected or abused, or inconsistently treated, suffers two profound impacts. First, the baby who is left to scream is unable to control or regulate his or her feelings. When a baby knows something is wrong, he does not know whether it is because he is too hot, too cold, bored, tried or hungry—he just knows something is wrong, and he looks to an adult carer to sooth his feelings, relax him and get him back off to sleep.

When a baby is left to scream all the time, the stress hormone in the baby’s body—cortisol—rises to a level where it harms his immune system, and that harm can be permanent. What is more, if the baby constantly experiences raised stress levels, he becomes tolerant of his own stress level. You or I, Madam Deputy Speaker, might be excited by a scary episode of “Doctor Who”, but somebody with a high tolerance of their own stress level might need to go out to stab somebody to get the same level of excitement. Being permanently left to scream therefore has a profound impact on a baby.

The second impact is even more amazing. When a baby is born, his brain is barely developed; he simply has the amygdala, with the fight or flight instinct. Between six and 18 months old, the frontal cortex—the social part of the brain—starts to develop and puts on its peak growth spurt. That growth is literally stimulated by a loving relationship between baby and carer. Playing games such as peek-a-boo or gazing into baby’s eyes and saying, “I love you” and “Aren’t you beautiful?” literally stimulates the development of the baby’s brain. Conversely, as we saw from the appalling situation in Romanian orphanages, the orphans, who had no human contact at all, literally suffered brain damage; they were unable to communicate in any way, because they had had so little human contact.

[Anna Soubry (Broxtowe) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on the debate and on all the sensible things she is saying with great passion and clear knowledge. Does she agree that it is imperative if children born into the most terrible circumstances are to be adopted, we make sure they are adopted as quickly as possible, given the excellent evidence she has placed before us this evening?

[Andrea Leadsom]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point, and I will come to it later.

If someone does not love their baby, and they do not bond properly with him in those first two crucial years, they are literally impairing their capacity to lead a normal life. The sad truth is that research shows that 40% of children in Britain are not securely attached by the age of five. That does not mean that they all go on to become criminals, psychopaths, sociopaths, paedophiles or drug addicts, but it does mean that their capacity to deal with the things life throws at them and the problems they will encounter is much lessened. They are less likely to be able to cope with holding down a job, making friends, and forming and keeping a relationship. At the extreme end, a baby will have been severely neglected or abused, and that is where we will find sociopaths. Sociopaths are not born, but made by their earliest experiences in the first two years of life.

Before we all go out and throw up our hands in despair, I want to make the case that there is a huge amount that can be done. Things do not have to be like this. If we as a society committed to making the very earliest intervention to provide the support needed for families, we could do so much in the first two years of life, when the baby’s brain has the ability to reach its full potential. We could turn things around and do great things.

The Oxford Parent Infant Project—a charity that I chaired for nine years, and of which I have been a trustee for 12 years—does precisely that work in Oxfordshire. In the past few months, I have launched a sister charity, the Northamptonshire Parent Infant Project, to do the same work. We work together with families—normally the mum, but it can be the dad or the grandparents—and the baby to help the carers understand, first, their own feelings about caring and parenting, and, secondly, the baby’s needs. We literally enable the adult to love the baby; we reintroduce them to each other, with astonishing results.

When Oxpip and Norpip get their referrals, the parents are desperate—they are about to commit suicide, infanticide or both. We have referrals from health workers, midwives and social services, which, in Oxfordshire, certainly often use Oxpip as their emergency service. If they have tried everything else, they will come to us to see what we can do. As I said, the results have been astonishing. An enormous amount can be done, therefore, to reverse this cycle of deprivation. The problem is that so often a failure to attach in those early years is the result of the parents’ own terribly unhappy lives.