HomeDad.org.uk

This is the press release from the Early Years Commission released on September 8th 2008

Too many parents who wish to nurture their children at home
for the first few years are being forced back to work by
financial pressures when their children are babies, according to
a report published today by a think-tank chaired by the former
Conservative leader Iain Duncan Smith.

It calls for a raft of new measures designed to give families
“genuine choice” over whether mothers or fathers stay at
home when their children are very young and in need of
intensive nurturing and attention.

They include front-loading child benefit in the first three years
of life and changes to the tax and benefits system to boost
family income.

The report warns that much of today’s violent and anti-social
behaviour by young people can be traced back to parental
neglect when children are very young.

A mounting body of scientific and sociological research shows
that the foundations of happy and healthy lives are laid down in
the early years of life by the formation of a close bond between
parent and child.

But this critical finding is being overlooked by Government and
society at large which prioritises paid work over child-rearing.
Opinion polling conducted by YouGov for the Centre for
Social Justice also reveals widespread public support for a
fundamental rethink of family policy.

A staggering 88 per cent of parents and 82 per cent of adults
think that more should be done to help parents who wish to
stay at home and bring up their children when they are babies
and toddlers.

And 81 per cent of parents said that financial pressures were
the main reason why they or their partner returned to work
after their children were born.

The survey of nearly 3,000 expectant parents or parents and
over 2,000 adults found that around 70 per cent believed that
parents were encouraged to put their children into day care
and go back to work too soon.

Mr Duncan Smith commented: “We need to level the financial
playing field for parents. The current system pressurises
mothers – and it is mostly mothers – into going back to work
soon after their children are born.

“Yet the research shows clearly that the seeds of later
unhappiness and anti-social behaviour by young people are
often sown by the failure of parents to form a close and loving
relationship with their babies.

“Society is paying a high price for the quick fix of getting
mothers back to work so soon after birth.

“We need a fairer system in which the financial sacrifice of
giving up work to look after a baby is offset by extra help from
the tax and benefits system.”

The findings of “The Next Generation” – a report from a
commission on the early years set up by Mr Duncan Smith –
represent a direct challenge to Government policy and much
accepted thinking and practice about child-rearing.

The report is concerned that Labour’s Sure Start programme,
which was set up with the right intentions, has become patchy
and in too many parts of the country has moved from being
about support for parents in child-rearing into back-to-work
child care.

The commission, chaired by family researcher Dr Samantha
Callan, calls for an urgent reappraisal of the importance of the
first three years of life to the successful psychological and
physical development of a child.

Society is storing up trouble for the future by failing to
appreciate the importance of the relationship between parent
and infant for the child’s future well-being.

The report warns: “A compelling body of research indicates
that children’s experiences in the earliest years of their lives
strongly influence their futures across a wide range of
measures.

“Policy is currently focused on dealing with the consequences
of early adversity (neglect, abuse and dysfunction) which are
strongly implicated in the dramatic increases in young people’s
alcohol and drug use and mental health problems and in
youthful knife and gun crime.

“The most effective intervention strategy therefore requires
helping parents to get it right at the antenatal, postnatal and
infant stages, long before such help is typically available.

“We have been trying to address the issue of troubled children
and young people for decades, with little positive change. The
problem persists and appears to be growing, as illustrated by
rising levels and severity of youth crime.

“Current government initiatives appear to be focused far more
on intervention than prevention.

“A key conclusion of our report is that these issues have been
so difficult to resolve because, until now, we have never
properly understood or acknowledged their root causes.

“We have stuck rigidly to attempts to change behaviour but
this is an outcome or product of an individual’s state of
emotional and social health and well-being. So for genuine
change to take place, it has to occur in these areas.

“This perspective is based on the last decade’s consistent and
significant body of psychological and brain science research,
which identifies the key component in our capacity to function
as emotionally and physically able human beings as the quality of
our relationships and specifically those in our earliest years.

“Without sufficient calming, soothing and emotion regulating
interactions from parents and other significant adults, the
stress response systems in the infant brain, which are
extremely sensitive to adverse postnatal experience, can
become hypersensitive.

“ An infant can grow up unable to handle stress well and adopt
a generally long-term defensive reaction to people and events.
He or she can be persistently on the look out for threat, prone
to anxiety, depression and anger, both in childhood and later
life.

“In contrast when infants are consistently met with attuned and
responsive kindness, calm and compassion, the brain’s prosocial
systems, key for capacity for empathy and concern,
develop…”

Among the 11 policy recommendations of the report are the
following:

* Genuine choice for families in paid work and childcare, with a
change in the rules to allow the use of childcare tax credit to
pay un-registered close relatives (albeit at a lower rate) to
reflect parents’ preferences, and location, where possible, of
childcare outside Children’s Centres. This would free them up
to concentrate on delivering family support services and create
a more level playing field for private, voluntary and independent
sector nurseries.

* Front-loading child benefit, making it flexible so that a larger
proportion of the child’s total entitlement would be available
during the first three years when parents most want to spend
time caring for their children and when attachment and
intensive nurture are most important.

This would be linked where necessary to ameliorative services
such as intensive parenting support, to greatly improve the life
chances of children most likely to experience deficits in
parental care.

* Transferable tax allowances, which reflect the fact that if one
spouse is not working outside the home that family requires
more, not less, support from the tax system.
Similarly the benefits system should not penalise low income
couples who want to live together which requires tackling the
‘couple penalty.’