Frank Field, Graham Allen, Iain Duncan Smith and the relentless rise of ‘parent training’

1. Frank Field, Graham Allen, Iain Duncan Smith and the relentless rise of ‘parent training’ Ellie Lee Director, Centre for Parenting Culture Studies

2. Prior research: Infant feeding Themes informing policy and maternity services: • Increasing breastfeeding rates as a way to address health and social inequality • Decision to breastfeed and practice of breastfeeding marker for an approved parenting style • Breastfeeding maximises ‘attachment’ and ‘bonding’ (and bottle feeding, especially with formula milk, associated with impaired bonding) • Breastfeeding (especially for many months and even years) can solve large social problems because is good for the brain (IQ and EI)

3. ‘Why Love Matters’ ‘Breastfeeding itself inactivates the mother’s own stress response; her amygdala expresses less CRF [Corticotropin Releasing Hormone], presumably removing anxious, fearful feelings; whilst the prolactin generating by breastfeeding provides a feeling of tranquility. The breastfeeding state of mind facilities her ability to calm her baby and to manage his stress….. ……She is then potentially more able to inhibit her baby’s stress response and to ensure that his cortisol levels remain low. This is achieved through her presence, her feeding and her touch. The baby is protected from stress and discomfort and his brain responds by growing more cortisol neurons. A brain well stocked with cortisol receptors through this early experience will be better able to mop up this stress hormone when it is released in the future. This furnishes the baby’s brain with the capacity to stop producing cortisol when it has helped deal with a source of stress. The stress response will be quickly turned off when it is no longer needed… [If this does not happen] ….a reactive stress response will have been set up’. Sue Gerhardt, Why Love Matters, How Affection Shapes a Baby’s Brain (Chapter title, Melancholy Baby, How early experience can alter brain chemistry)

4. Some points about contemporary parenting culture more generally…… • Claim that ‘the science says……’ is a central theme in any example of child rearing practices • There are more and more instances where claims are made that evidence from brain science explains why a particular way of parenting is best e.g. feeding, sleeping, discipline, pregnancy behaviours • Parenting is now routinely represented as a skill-set that can be both taught and learned through reference to scientific evidence about how to parent well • The idea that there is a ‘science of parenting’ underpins the work of the ‘parenting expert’ or ‘parenting practitioner’ (or lactation consultant) • Politics is powerfully informed by these notions • The social construction of the ‘parenting problem’ in this way has (and is having) important effects for ‘pre-political’ institutions

5. Focus on policy: Policy statements under the Coalition The Independent Review on Poverty and Life Chances ‘In June this year [2010] the Government announced that Frank Field MP has been appointed to lead and independent review into poverty and life chances. The main aims of the Review are: • Explore how a child’s home environment affects their chances of being ready to take full advantage of school • Generate a broader debate about the extent and nature of poverty in the UK • Recommend potential action by government and other institutions to reduce poverty and enhance life chances for the least disadvantaged, consistent with the Government’s fiscal strategy • Examine the case for reforms to the poverty measures, in particular for the inclusion of non-financial elements’

6. Policy statements under the Coalition The Early Intervention Commission ‘In July this year [2010] the Government announced that Graham Allen MP had been appointed to lead an independent review into early intervention. The review will focus on: • the identification of best practice in the field of early intervention • the dissemination and delivery of best practice • new ways to fund early intervention in the future. The review defines early intervention as those programmes which ensure thatbabies, children, and young people build a strong bedrock of social and emotional capabilities to fulfill their potential and help break intergenerational transfers of disadvantage and underachievement. We are focusing on those early interventions that build the ability to improve outcomes for their target group in a cost effective way’.

7. Joined up thinking • Public Health ‘Starting well, through early intervention and prevention, is a key priority for the Government…..increased numbers of health visitors, working with children’s centres and GPs, will lead and deliver the Healthy Child programme, alongside the evidence-based Family Nurse Partnership (FNP) programme. These services, working with partners, will support families to build community capacity as part of the Big Society. Supporting parents with parenting programmes has a positive impact on both parents’ and children’s wellbeing and mental health. The Healthy Child Progarmme also includes breastfeeding support and a range of proven preventive services’ (Healthy Lives, Healthy People: Our strategy for public health in England, 2011) • Education and the Pupil Premium Sure Start for 2 year olds from disadvantaged backgrounds • Political consensus eg Seeing through the new Labour project; early intervention as a consensual political project Labour says, ‘It’s all a really good idea but you have to fund it’ eg Demos and CSJ arguing just the same thing eg Wider areas of support e.g. pro-breastfeeding campaigns, campaigns / initiatives around parental mental health

8. Key proposals Frank Field’s report, The Foundation Years: Preventing poor children becoming poor adults has been published • Establishing a new programme of early years education ‘The Foundation Years’ covering the period conception to five • Use money that would previously have been spend on benefits for children on the Foundation Years programme ‘Parents are the key drivers in determining their children’s life chances. It is not so much who parents are – what their jobs are – by what parents do – how they nurture their children – which the evidence shows, determines a child’s life’s race….schools should teach parenting and life skills throughout the whole of their school life. Pupils will begin to learn how they can advance the lives of their children when they start a family’.

9. Key proposals Graham Allen’s report out in February but a press work done already • Regular assessment of all pre-school children focussing on their social and emotional development • A national parenting programme • Numbering school year groups from birth All parents need to know how to, ‘recognise and respond to a baby’s cues, attune with infants and stimulate them from the very start, and how to foster empathy…If we can invest a little early in the life cycle to help mums and babies, and young people, then I think you’ll find that money is recouped over and over again’.

10. Major themes • Both Field and Allen have found, and recommended, entirely what was to be expected ie their thinking has not been modified • Set out in Early Intervention: Good Parents, Great Kids, Better Citizens (Duncan Smith/Allen) • Publication from the Centre for Social Justice (2008) • Starting point for the Early Intervention Commission

11. A clear focus on ‘the [expanding] bottom’…..the ‘growing dysfunctional base’ ‘As the fabric of society crumbles at the bottom what is left behind is an underclass where life is characterised by dependency, addiction, debt and family breakdown….What exercises me, perhaps more than anything else, is the very scale of these problems, the creeping expansion of this underclass…the norm is dysfunctional….the dysfunctional norm is spreading….this is why Rhys Jones was gunned down whilst walking across Croxteth on the way home from football practice, this is why we are seeing a spate of fatal knifings and murderous beatings’ (IDS, p9)

12. A clear focus on ‘the [expanding] bottom’…..the ‘growing dysfunctional base’ ‘There is evidence that people in the dysfunctional base have their children earlier and faster than average, building up a massive social and financial problems unless it is addressed soon’ (p22) ‘There remain the problems of what social scientists call the existing ‘stock’: the children and young people who are already presenting with severe difficulties, as well as the ‘flow’: those at risk who are yet to be born’ (p24).

13. A focus with implications for all of us ‘The transmission of parenting skills from generation to generation has changed considerably and while the middle classes can read the guide books, those with lower educational and social skills are finding parenting skills squeezed out as extended families reduce and more one-parent households have smaller knowledge bases on which to draw’ (p23).

14. ‘The evidence says’…. ‘The research we draw on for this pamphlet indicates that what happens inside the family, when a child is very young indeed, strongly determines how they will react to people outside the home, how ready they will be to learn and ultimately what kind of citizen they will become’ (IDS, p12). ‘We believe that there are grounds for optimism: without claiming to have found a ‘magic bullet’ we have seen evidence that a new approach, tackling the precursors of social problems in the earliest years of children’s lives, could make a significant difference’ (p22).

15. The evidence says parenting causes dysfunction and therefore poverty because of how it affects the brain ‘George Hosking…..brought home to me the sheer predictability of children’s early years for their future outcomes. He has produces compelling evidence that if a child is born into a home where they are nurtured, where conversation takes place, where someone reads to them (even at an age where they cannot understand) then, quite simply, their brain develops properly. Their social skills develop and they go off to nursery school able to learn from the next phase of their education. However, if they do not have that kind of environment, if they are not stimulated, if they sit in front of the television interminably, if there is constant anger and shouting,……..then the evidence we present shows that such a child will arrive at nursery school unable to communicate or relate properly to others than in a violent or otherwise dysfunctional way’. (IDS, p12)

16. The evidence says parenting causes dysfunction and therefore poverty because of how it affects the brain ‘Dysfunctional families become incubators for the generational transfer of mental and physical ill-health and chaotic lifestyles that inhibit children’s ability to lead a fulfilled life. These damaging effects can be explained neurologically, biologically and behaviourally.’ (p29) ‘Neuroscience can now explain why early conditions are so crucial: effectively, our brains are largely formed by what we experience in early life….scientific discoveries suggest it is nurture rather than nature that plays the lead role in creating the human personality…It has been said that ‘the greatest gift for a baby is maternal responsiveness’. The more positive stimuli a baby is given, the more brain cells and synapses it will be able to develop.’ (p57)

17. Evidence based policy to reduce poverty means teaching parenting to ‘the stock’ to save ‘the flow’ (and their brains) ‘The Early-Intervention policy pragmatism started to meet scientific and evidence-based analysis as around this time more and more work was becoming evident to me and many others on what happens to children’s brains between the years on 0-3. An evidence base was beginning to accumulate on the fantastic ability of the brain to expand in the very early years….[and] it seemed ever more obvious that if we could equip the parents or parent to optimise (usually) maternal responsiveness and their impact on their 0-3 year-old children, we would be laying secure and strong foundations…..’(GA p17)

18. Evidence based policy to reduce poverty means teaching parenting to ‘the stock’ to save ‘the flow’ (and their brains) ‘The large human brain and therefore human head size requires the baby be born earlier than other mammals in order that it can be physically delivered. The brain then grows outside the womb, over the 0-3 year period….It is in that delicate and vulnerable period that out lives can be made or not. It is there that private competences and public policy must ensure that parents administer the best three years of emotional and cognitive ‘intensive care’ to every child. ’ (GA p17)

19. Evidence based policy to reduce poverty means teaching parenting to ‘the stock’ to save ‘the flow’ (and their brains) ‘Too often the public sector machines are prescribed an agenda which is exclusively about fire-fighting and picking up the pieces…..This is of course a colossal waste of both financial resources and well as equally precious human potential - the 16-year old failure, banged up in a secure unit, at a cost of £230,000 a year often for want of a few hundred pounds worth of help to his mother on parenting skills 16 years earlier.’ (GA p15) ‘….primary head teachers who could spot the ‘difficult kids’ on day one at school…..[which made me realise] we had to go back even further….Clearly we had to delve back further, to think of ways of getting a child’s parents or parent to give the child the emotional and social wherewithal to get the best from school well before entry into primary school….Therefore ideas around intensive health visiting and intensive pre-natal care started to take shape, even going back beyond the time of pregnancy to the pre-conception, teenage years of potential mothers and fathers……I began to form the idea of a virtuous circle of interventions covering a generation aged from 0-18 and over again to the next generation.’ (GA p16)

20. Questions / areas • A new phrenology …. assertion, speculation, pseudo-science • A new relationship between public policy and (pre)-family life: emotion as a political problem • A further erosion of the integrity of the concept ‘education’ • Contradictions: teaching Latin and parenting? Under parenting and over parenting?