Children: Parenting for Success in School

Lord Northbourne Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2011 Lords Chamber

Moved By

[Lord Northbourne]

To call attention to the role of good early parenting in preparing a child for success in school; and to move for papers.

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, I welcome the three maiden speakers who will speak in this debate.

Two objectives of the previous Government were to improve the standard of education of our children in schools and to reduce inequality in society. All the evidence suggests that we can address both these problems together if we pay more attention to the first three years in the lives of our most disadvantaged children. By the age of three, the child’s brain is 80 per cent formed. Experiences during that period shape the way that the brain grows and develops.

Most parents in this country are doing a good job raising their children, but some, often through circumstances beyond their control, need more help and support from us than they are getting today. At the moment, a small but significant minority of our children are not getting the sort of early childhood parenting that they need, and then they often go on to fail in school, disrupt other learners and pull down the standard of our school system as a whole. Then, when these children grow up, they have their own children, and they will tend to bring them up in the same way. This diminishes rather than increases their life chances, and so the cycle of disadvantage is handed down from one generation to the next. This is a disaster. It is very serious.

In support of what I am saying, I shall quote from two reports from opposite ends of the political spectrum—a very proper thing to do from the Cross Benches. In the report Building Character, published in November 2009, the left-wing think tank Demos cites two separate American studies that show how a child’s life chances begin to be determined even before he or she is born. The report says:

“Different pre-birth factors, including the ill-health or stress of the mother, may be hardwiring heightened susceptibility into the developing baby even before the child is born. … elevated levels of the stressor chemical cortisol in the womb during late pregnancy have also been shown to predict negative temperament in infants at age two”.

The report goes on to cite a range of studies showing how infants between birth and three years-old are more malleable than they will be at any subsequent stage in their lives. So, it says, parents are the principal architects of a fairer society.

At the other end of the political spectrum, the Conservative think tank the Centre for Social Justice reaches much the same conclusions in its recent Green Paper on the Family, which says:

“Stable, healthy families are at the heart of strong societies. It is within the family environment that an individual’s physical, emotional and psychological development occurs. It is from our family that we learn unconditional love, we understand right from wrong, and we gain empathy, respect and self-regulation. These qualities enable us to engage positively at school, at work and in society in general”.

Many noble Lords will be aware of the classic research by Bowlby and Ainsworth and other researchers, who worked with Romanian orphans. They conclude that secure attachment and committed parenting during a child’s early years are important in enabling the child to feel safe, loved and valued. A young child needs to feel safe because it is in a terrifying new world. He or she needs to be confident that there is at least one adult whom they can turn to and trust for love and sympathy, who will always be there for them. Conversely, research shows that violence, anger or discord in the family during these foundation years are strongly negatively linked to child outcomes. So is family breakdown.

The child needs to feel loved in order to begin to learn the most important social skill of all—to love and to be loved. Through a loving relationship with the mother or other principal carer, a child learns that love is about giving as well as taking and begins to learn those relationship and communication skills, even if they are only smiles and gurgles to start with, that are at the very heart of communication in later life.

Finally, a child needs to feel valued. To feel valued enables the child to begin to build identity and self-esteem. Self-esteem is the parent of hope. Every child needs to believe that they can succeed at something. Confidence is what makes success possible. A child who arrives at school without these skills will find it difficult to fit in, settle down and learn. All too often, this leads to the child rejecting school and switching off, being disruptive, playing truant and feeling excluded. That, in turn, leads to educational failure, lack of ambition and lack of hope. The director of the Oxford centre for research into parenting and children, Professor Ann Buchanan—who, I am happy to say, is with us in the Building this afternoon—put it this way:

“Escape from social exclusion is particularly difficult for children and parents who have been rendered without hope … because of discrimination, poor social conditions, community norms that may encourage low expectations, domestic violence and child abuse”.

Those children need a hand. That is why good parenting is so crucial for the zero to three year-olds, and why how parents tackle the job, the parenting style, is so important.

The Demos report that I quoted earlier says about parenting styles:

“Using a typology that measures four different parenting styles—tough love, laissez-faire, authoritarian and disengaged—we found that ‘tough love’ children are more than twice as likely to display strong character capability in the early years than those with ‘disengaged’ parents”.

Character capabilities include social and emotional skills such as application and safe self-regulation. They include the ability to defer gratification and to concentrate, or stick to something—life skills which we all know that we all need.

So why are some parents failing their children? Nearly all mothers want to love and be loved by their child. Nearly all parents want their child to succeed. The truth is that many parents face very serious problems. Some do not know how to be a good parent because they themselves have never had any experience of good parenting. Others have failed at school. They may not know how to help their children to learn. They may not even be able to read aloud to them. Then there are many parents who suffer from a whole range of disabilities and disadvantages beyond their control: physical or mental ill health, addiction to drugs or alcohol, poor housing, poverty, debt, or a partner who is violent or in prison. They may be struggling to juggle parenting, work and sometimes also a caring responsibility for an older or sick relative. As a society, we need to be much more effective in addressing these problems. It would be incredibly cost effective to do so in the long run, and even in the fairly short run.

Then, of course, 3.5 million children are today living in broken homes. By way of evidence, the Centre for Social Justice report says,

“speaking with thousands of individuals and organisations tackling poverty at the coalface, we have found that family breakdown is often at the root of”—

other problems.

“Hence a child not growing up in a two-parent family is 75 per cent more likely to fail at school, 70 per cent more likely to be a drug addict, 50 per cent more likely to have an alcohol problem”.

I interpose here that in most cases we must not blame this on the single parent at all.

I turn now to the way forward. The previous Government devoted considerable effort and substantial resources to trying to solve these problems. Frankly, it is extremely disappointing that they were not as successful as many of us hoped. However, we must learn from their successes and failures and move forward. Reports by Frank Field MP and Graham Allen MP were recently presented to government. Both confirmed what I have long suspected: problems created in the first three years of a child’s life cast a long and dark shadow over their future.

Frank Field’s report The Foundation Years: preventing poor adults becoming poor children, published just before Christmas, presents a new strategy to abolish child poverty. This report is particularly important. Frank Field asks,

“how we can prevent poor children from becoming poor adults”,

and concludes that,

“the UK needs to address the issue of child poverty in a fundamentally different way. … We have found overwhelming evidence that children’s life chances are most heavily predicated on their development in the first five years of life”.

He concludes that parents are the drivers in determining their children’s life chances. It is not so much who the parents are—what their jobs are or what social class they are—but what they do and how they nurture their children. All the evidence shows that tough love and intellectual stimulation are what matter most.

Frank Field’s report makes several key suggestions. The first is developing a life chances indicator to measure success in making life chances more equal for children at both the national and the local level. The second suggestion is for a new tripartite education system, in which the foundation stage—from conception to the age of five—has the same status as primary and secondary education have today. Thirdly, he suggests age-appropriate teaching of parenting and life skills in all schools throughout the pupil’s school career. The fourth suggestion is for greater emphasis on antenatal and postnatal care and on parenting education at this stage of the life cycle. I urge the Government to take these proposals very seriously.

The report by Graham Allen, which was also published recently, mainly concerns itself with indentifying interventions that the state can make with children at the foundation stage. It finds, significantly, that current services are variable, fragmented and not easily accessed or understood by those who might benefit from them. It is a pretty depressing report. Unfortunately, I do not have time to discuss the Allen report proposals in detail. Many of them are good, but I have one major concern. For families raising nought to three year-olds, it is very important that interventions should not be intrusive. Even when they have problems, most parents want to feel that they are still in control. For nought to three year-olds, consistent, secure and loving attachment to a mother or some other dedicated principal carer must be by far the most important ingredient in a successful parenting programme. Ever-changing carers or foster carers, however well trained, can never replace secure attachment.

It seems that professionals and experts have now come to agree that a child’s experiences in the early years are crucial to success in school and in later life. I hope that the Minister, when he replies, can assure the House that the Government intend to respond very positively to the proposals in the Frank Field report. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Northbourne]

My Lords, when in your Lordships’ House 17 years ago I first mentioned parenting, noble Lords’ eyes glazed over. They clearly did not understand what I was talking about. If I may say so, noble Lords did a great deal better today. It has been a wonderful debate. I very much hope that the Minister will give the House an opportunity to debate this subject after the reports that he promised for the spring have come out. On that note, I beg leave to withdraw the Motion.

Motion withdrawn.