Thriving in the 21st century: the new science of early childhood

A provocation paper

Kathy Sylva, Emeritus Professor of Educational Psychology; Emeritus Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford

Introduction

In the 21st century a new vision of children and childhood has been forged, based largely on the neuro-sciences. This new vision, however, cannot be the sole guide for government policies because it describes the ‘biological’ child much better than the ‘social’ one. What we need is a broader theory to describe the forces that shape the child’s development and specify physical and social supports that enable the child to thrive.

At the turn of this century a powerful bio-developmental framework burst upon the scientific world, followed quickly by an explosion of media interest that filtered down to parents and local communities. The new framework brought together advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, genomics and the behavioural and social sciences in order to chart the causal pathways to healthy or deviant development in children. At Harvard Jack Shonkoff boldly claimed ‘We now know that genes provide the initial blueprint for building brain architecture, environmental influences affect how the neural circuitry actually gets wired, and reciprocal interactions among genetic predispositions and early experiences affect the extent to which the foundations of learning, behaviour, and both physical and mental health will be strong or weak’.[i]

The framework laid out the causes of development while at the same time outlining policies and practices that governments could follow to assure healthy development. The developmental scientists were optimistic that their new and integrative science would create a blueprint for policies and that smooth implementation of these policies would lay the foundation for ‘responsible citizenship, economic prosperity, healthy communities, and successful parenting of the next generation’.[ii]

Why do some children thrive and others falter?

Michael Rutter asked the right question in 1981: ‘Why do some children rise above environmental challenges to thrive while others falter in the face of adversity?’[iii] Rutter went on to study children who developed resilience in the face of adversity and contrasted them with those who succumbed to vulnerability. He found that there is a strong genetic component to resilience but that the environment mattered too: whether or not the genetic pattern associated with vulnerability actually leads to poor outcomes depends on the way inherited genetic patterns interact with specific environmental risks or protectors encountered by the child and at specific time-points.[iv] Thus, life outcomes are influenced by a dynamic interplay between specific genes and specific physical or social risks/advantages. Rutter also identified the buffering effects of ‘protectors’. These can be found within the individual child, such as a positive temperament, or within the environment such as a sensitive, caring parent. Rutter’s model of risk and resilience emphasised the importance of reciprocal child-adult interactions during development, pointing towards the vital role of enduring relationships.

But this framework is an oversimplification. Too often this new model of early childhood neglects the importance of the political or cultural environment in which the child lives. This theory, and the policies which flow from it such as the government’s plethora of parenting programmes, fails to acknowledge powerful economic forces that influence family behaviour. Take parenting as an example. The developmental sciences put great store on consistent parenting. Research suggests that parents who set a regular bedtime or insist on teenagers informing parents of their whereabouts will have responsible and high achieving children. But consider how easy is this for a parent of three children between two and twelve who share one room. Setting limits under these circumstances is not only difficult, it is but one ‘parenting skill’ that needs to be mastered within the context of unsuitable housing in an un-safe neighbourhood.

The environment matters for individuals

Rutter discovered individual differences in the ways children respond to environmental risks; what was not known was what underpinned these differences. Biological science suggested that the foundations of both healthy and deviant development could be found among ‘biological memories’ that are created in the earliest years of life and lead the brain to ‘expect’ certain regularities. These patterns were manifested within the circuitry of the developing brain as well as the physiological systems that control the way the young child adapts to the environment, the child’s immunological responsiveness, metabolic and neuroendocrine regulation, and cardiovascular health. This means that the child ‘reads’ the characteristics of its environment and then develops ‘expectations’ of what is likely to happen in the future. If early experiences are characterised by threat, neglect, uncertainty or abuse, stress management systems go into over-drive and heightened awareness of threat leads to greater vulnerability in the child. Scientists coined the term ‘toxic stress’ to refer to strong, frequent and prolonged activity of the body’s stress-response system in the absence of buffering support from adults. This disrupts brain architecture and adversely affects other organs. Though toxic stress is rare, lower levels of stress can lead to milder, but nonetheless dysfunctional, responses to future stresses.

Policy implications: the role of parents and parenting

Central to the new developmental science was the role of the family in shaping the developing intellect, motivation and social dispositions. Research on the effects of stress on child development led to theories of change, specifying pathways whereby supportive environments, especially in the family, could ‘buffer’ the child from the stresses of adversity or ‘steel’ the child so that development was protected from poverty, neglect or social upheaval. In other words, it was believed that good parenting would lead to the development of resilient children through the protective shield of nutritious diet, warm and responsive interactions, and effective behaviour management techniques.

Parents shape the development of their children. If they engage often in language rich interactions with their children, especially around book reading, their children are more likely to become competent readers. Recent research has shown that ‘reminiscing’ amongst parents and children about family members and events makes a special contribution to children’s development. This ‘shared history’ makes possible the building of bridges between the here-and-now of the family home and the world outside including the past and even the imagined future. Conversing about family history exposes children to new vocabulary but also to exciting worlds that cannot be seen. Compared to their more advantaged peers, children from families with incomes in the bottom quartile hear about one third the number of words and talk much less about unseen or abstract things. Children thrive on conversations where they take their own turns in conversational partnerships. A recent and innovative study found that children who participated in more conversational turn-taking during their early years developed superior neural processing capacities for language when they were of school age.[v]

Supporting families

What does this theory, with its deep roots in the health and biological sciences, tell us about ways to configure services to support families? It tells us what a good parent does, but it is far less clear about effective ways to support families — especially those struggling in poverty — to become a ‘positive’ parent. Loosely based on developmental science, Sure Start Children’s Centres were created in the early 2000s to provide a ‘one stop shop’ for parents living in poor neighbourhoods. They offered advice, support for breast feeding or child behaviour, groups for parents to share their problems, and outreach into the homes of young mothers feeling isolated. The Government’s evaluation showed that Children’s Centres were effective at reducing parental stress and improving parental support for home learning.[vi] Austerity has led to many closures, but Centres remain in the poorest neighbourhoods, an effective means to support parents in their parenting role. Their effects, however, are small when compared to the powerful and adverse effects of poverty and the culture of low expectations.

Parenting alone is not enough

A recent book by Eisenstadt and Oppenheim[vii] praises the work of Children’s Centres but argues that parenting programmes on their own will not enable parents of highly disadvantaged children to develop the cognitive skills, self-regulatory ability or emotional dispositions to succeed in life. They note ‘Some politicians and commentators have come to believe that any parent can produce happy productive offspring if only they try hard enough’. They cite research demonstrating that sheer lack of money — over and above low qualification levels and job status — can lead to mental health problems and poor relationships among the parents, problems that a twelve-week parenting course cannot solve. Their book makes a strong argument that parenting courses are misplaced if they do not face up to the wider challenges that poor parents must overcome.

Although there is no doubt that families have the strongest influence on children, they are difficult to change and are only one part of the environmental context of development. Another supportive environment for the developing child is the nursery or playgroup. Countless studies from around the world show that children who attend early childhood education (ECE) make a stronger start to school, go on to higher educational attainment and eventually to better jobs compared to children with no nursery experience. This is now widely known and accepted. What is not accepted, at least in policy circles, is that only high-quality early education, with well trained teachers and a challenging pedagogy, can give poor children the skills they need. There is a battle raging over ECE with the government focusing its effort and funds for childcare so parents can work, while ECE scholars argue forcefully that ECE ‘only works to promote development when quality is sufficiently high’. Supporting parental employment while also enhancing children’s development through high quality provision were compatible and achievable aims in the first decade of the century, although they came at a high cost. The cost may be worth it, however, because research has shown that the children who benefit most from high quality nurseries are those whose parents have the lowest levels of education or where English is not spoken at home.[viii]

Thriving in the 21st century — the self-regulated learner

Which skills and dispositions will children need to thrive in a world of internet connectedness, global markets and intense competition for resources? One aspect of child development shaped profoundly in family life is ‘executive function’, the capacity to remember information, focus attention, regulate emotion and think flexibly.

It is easy to see how enhanced vocabulary can be ‘taught’ by well-educated parents but how can parents support executive functions such as concentrating on tasks or thinking flexibly? Early executive function is shaped by parents in the home, especially by parental responsiveness in the context of warmth aligned with setting challenges. Executive function is part of a broader ability called self-regulation that includes the child’s capacity to choose tasks, plan ahead, and work in partnership with others to achieve goals.[ix] Ground-breaking research over the last decade has demonstrated predictive links between early self-regulation and later academic skills at secondary school and general well-being in adulthood.[x] Shuey and Kankaras[xi] point out that children who increase in self-regulation during the preschool years have better health outcomes in their thirties, perhaps through the link between self-regulation and healthy eating styles. Self-regulation may be the most important of 21st century skills; it is moulded by the family and the preschool early in life and is the engine of successful planning, coping and problem-solving[xii]. It has long been known that children’s earliest experiences shape the development of ‘hard’ skills like counting but we now know they shape ‘soft’ ones too such as self-regulation[xiii].

The bio-developmental theory of childhood charts the course of successful development and describes the environmental contexts that protect the child from adverse risks and promote self-regulated learning. The family, supplemented by early childhood education, has a key role to play. The policy challenge is to use this knowledge-base as the springboard for new ways of thinking about educational reform, workforce development, health promotion, protection of children from maltreatment, reduction in crime and violence, but above all, the alleviation of poverty. Supporting the ‘biological’ child with effective policies will require innovations in ways to conceptualise the ‘social’ and the ‘economic’ family. The neurosciences must join up with more social ones to set an effective policy course.

The British Academy has undertaken a programme of work that seeks to re-frame debates around childhood in both the public and policy spaces and break down academic, policy and professional silos in order to explore new conceptualisations of children in policymaking. Find out more about the Childhood Policy Programme.

Subscribe to our newsletter for monthly updates on our Childhood Policy Programme.

[i],[ii] J.P. Shonkoff, ‘Building a new biodevelopmental framework to guide the future of early childhood policy’, Child Development, vol. 81, no. 1, 2010, p.357.

[iii] Rutter, M. (1981). Stress, coping and development in children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 22(4), pp.323–356.

[iv] N.E. Garmezy and M.E. Rutter, ‘Stress, coping, and development in children’, In Seminar on Stress and Coping in Children, 1979, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA, US. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983.

[v] R. R. Romeo et al., ‘Beyond the 30-million-word gap: Children’s conversational exposure is associated with language-related brain function’. Psychological science, vol.29, no.5, pp.700–710, 2018.

[vi] P. Sammons, ‘The impact of children’s centres: studying the effects of children’s centres in promoting better outcomes for young children and their families: evaluation of Children’s Centres in England’, ECCE, Strand 4, 2015.

[vii] N. Eisenstadt, and C. Oppenheim, Parents, Poverty and the State: 20 Years of Evolving Family Policy, Policy Press, 2019.

[viii] E. Shuey, and M. Kankaraš, ‘The Power and Promise of Early Learning’, OECD Education Working Papers, Paris, OECD Publishing, no. 186, 2018.

[ix] K. Sylva, ‘The role of families and pre-school in educational disadvantage’. Oxford Review of Education, 40, pp.680–695, 2014.

[x] T. E. Moffitt et al., ‘A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol.108, no.7, pp.2693–2698, 2011.

[xi] Shuey and Kankaraš, ‘The Power and Promise’, OECD 2018.

[xii] Sylva, K., ‘The role of families and pre-school in educational disadvantage’. Oxford Review of Education, 40, pp.680–695, 2014.

[xiii] Raver, C. C., Blair, C., & Willoughby, M., ‘Poverty as a predictor of 4-year-olds’ executive function: New perspectives on models of differential susceptibility’, Developmental psychology, vol.49, no.2, pp.292–304, 2013.