Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Best Beginnings is the podcast for everyone working in or caring about the early years. Hosted by George Looker, CEO of Babyzone, each episode brings together leading researchers, clinicians, practitioners, policymakers and parents to explore the evidence, ideas and innovations shaping how we support children and families in the UK.
From infant mental health and attachment to workforce challenges and systems change, Best Beginnings goes beyond the headlines to have the conversations that matter most in early childhood.
New episodes drop every Tuesday.
Best Beginnings is brought to you by Babyzone, a national charity operating free, evidence-based family hubs across England for families with children aged 0–5.
00:00:00:00 - 00:00:08:00
Unknown
you can be as mean as you like to your brother or sister, and they're still your brother and sister. Whereas if you're super mean to a friend, that friend will walk away.
00:00:08:02 - 00:00:11:24
Unknown
going to say siblings because they've been so overlooked by research.
00:00:12:01 - 00:00:31:03
Unknown
And I think if you talk to parents, they totally get how important those relationships are. And yet we don't know very much about them.
00:00:31:05 - 00:00:53:08
Unknown
The same.
00:00:53:10 - 00:01:15:13
Unknown
The same.
00:01:15:15 - 00:01:36:23
Unknown
The same.
00:01:37:00 - 00:01:49:22
Unknown
The same.
00:01:49:24 - 00:02:12:21
Unknown
Thank you very much for having me.
00:02:12:23 - 00:02:33:23
Unknown
I think when I first became interested in autism, it was a very cognitive perspective. So we know that one of the hallmark features of autistic children is that although they may be very smart in some ways, actually getting the cues that most children pick up really, sort of instinctively really is effortful for them.
00:02:33:23 - 00:02:57:12
Unknown
And that's that's what we're terming kind of theory of mind home. So understanding that other people have knowledge and views on the world that might be different from their from their own. And therefore when somebody says something they don't necessarily mean to be hurtful, they might just be it might just be a misunderstanding. So that was where it all started.
00:02:57:14 - 00:03:17:17
Unknown
When I moved from Paris to London. Professor Sir Michael Rutter told me that he wanted me to work for him, but he had enough autism researchers, so could I kind of carve out another niche? And that's where I got interested in the idea of children who have a different kind of social difficulty, children who might be disruptive in the class.
00:03:17:17 - 00:03:39:18
Unknown
So at the time, yes, we called them Hod to manage, I think we might say children with behaviors that challenge. Now, you know, the language has changed a little bit, but realizing that these also what looks like a social problem, there's often a cognitive element behind that. So that's less about theory of mind and more about the higher order thinking skills that we call executive function.
00:03:39:18 - 00:04:01:07
Unknown
So that might be impulse control. It might be being able to hold information in mind. It might be about being able to shift from one activity to another. And those are skills that really help children learn to regulate their behavior. And until you have them, then children might behave in ways that actually are quite difficult in the classroom, and they may make life harder for other children.
00:04:01:07 - 00:04:04:22
Unknown
And that can lead to social problems down the way.
00:04:05:03 - 00:04:26:05
Unknown
Moving to Cambridge from London, I realized that the these hard to manage preschoolers already had so many problems at home and at school that I wanted to try and find out what the early origins were. So that's why I started with with age two. And then yes, you start with two year olds and you realize that you could have begun even earlier.
00:04:26:05 - 00:05:04:21
Unknown
So the latest longitudinal study, the new Fathers and Mothers study, we began before birth. And actually we've been able to show links between how parents think about their child even before that child is born and how they interact with their babies at six months and beyond. So yes, it's always possible to go backwards in time.
00:05:04:23 - 00:05:08:23
Unknown
I think we are much less likely to put children in boxes.
00:05:08:23 - 00:05:33:13
Unknown
And to think this label accurately describes this child. So recognizing. So back in the day when I first started working with these children that were termed hard to manage, they were often thought was having a problem of kind of acting out of not knowing how to regulate their behavior. And that was seen as almost the opposite of children who were inhibited and maybe a bit shy and anxious, maybe a bit sad.
00:05:33:13 - 00:06:22:09
Unknown
And actually, we now know that children who act out often have the same mood problems as well. You know, they're unhappy kids, they just have a different way of showing it or that these things can co-occur. Likewise, autism we now recognize co-occurring with ADHD, all of these things often. So thinking about more a whole child profile and actually looking at what the difficulties are, rather than thinking this child is like this and this child is like that,
00:06:22:11 - 00:06:40:09
Unknown
Absolutely. So I have a similar kind of anecdote. So I have three children. And I remember when my third was a baby that it was hard to get to school on time sometimes because getting out the house, when you've got three children, one of them's a baby is hard, and the first one often seemed to be quite stressed.
00:06:40:09 - 00:06:57:17
Unknown
And in my head that was that was who he was as a child. And the middle one was very chilled. And then a few years later, when she was the same age as her big brother, she she started getting stressed about being late for school as well. And I realized it was actually the teachers in year five six who were putting pressure on the kids to be punctual and all of that.
00:06:57:17 - 00:07:19:12
Unknown
So it wasn't really about even about the child's age. It was about the world that they were living in that, that, that that had changed. So learning that, yes, things change with age. And yes, there can be individual differences, but also actually even within the same child, you'll know this as a dad. A child who may have totally got this one day doesn't seem to have it in their wheelhouse another day.
00:07:19:12 - 00:07:49:24
Unknown
It really depends on how tired stressed everything else there is going on. So expecting that things can go up and down and backwards and forwards and it isn't a linear thing I think is an important insight, which sounds like you've already you've already got that one in the bag.
00:07:50:01 - 00:08:07:08
Unknown
And again, okay, so going back to the beginnings and theory of mind research and autistic children back in the day, that term theory of mind came from a study chimpanzees and then later on in the 80s. So he wasn't a sir then.
00:08:07:08 - 00:08:45:08
Unknown
But anyway, Simon Baron-Cohen did a very highly cited study which showed that autistic children had difficulties too, and we knew that autism was highly heritable. So at the time, the idea was very kind of nativist. It was very much it's all about genes. And then when I was working in London with Judy Dunn, looking at sibling relationships, actually observing family relationships, over time we started to realize that, no, actually the social environment matters to and I did a twin study with more than 1000 pairs of five year old twins, and actually we were able to show that it really the differences weren't about genes, they were about children's environment and the environment that mattered.
00:08:45:08 - 00:09:27:09
Unknown
For children's language skills were the same factors that mattered for children's social understanding. So that gave us the important insight into the importance of talk and family talk, which has been one of the themes in my research, kind of subsequently.
00:09:27:11 - 00:09:42:07
Unknown
of conferences? Okay, so this brings me on to some of the work that I've done over the years on sibling relationships, because people often think about sibs as an exercise ground for aggression, that that's kind of how you learn the rough and tumble plague.
00:09:42:08 - 00:09:47:08
Unknown
It can it can tip over the edge. And that makes sense, because
00:09:47:10 - 00:09:55:05
Unknown
you can be as mean as you like to your brother or sister, and they're still your brother and sister. Whereas if you're super mean to a friend, that friend will walk away.
00:09:55:07 - 00:10:01:21
Unknown
So children can be very kind of warts and all with, with their their siblings home.
00:10:01:21 - 00:10:17:23
Unknown
But we know that although sibling relationships vary a lot in terms of their quality, some children just are so sweet and supportive with their siblings, and some feel like it's just continual rivalry or, you know, ways of of annoying each other.
00:10:17:23 - 00:10:27:13
Unknown
Actually, in the broader picture, sibling relationships tend to cluster by family and tend to be shaped by how the parents behave towards the children.
00:10:27:14 - 00:10:51:09
Unknown
So in a family where the parents manage to be very kind of warm and supportive, even if the children are, are, you know, bashing the living daylights out of each other, probably it will all be fine. It's when you get that combination of sibling aggression and harsh or rejecting neglectful parenting that that can double the risk of conduct problems.
00:10:51:11 - 00:11:17:10
Unknown
So it's having the double whammy,
00:11:17:12 - 00:11:37:12
Unknown
Yeah. So there's a lot more left to be done. So sibling research is only about less than 5% of family research. So there's a lot of things we don't know about about sibling relationships. And one of the reasons I think for their neglect is that they're quite hard to study because they vary so much.
00:11:37:16 - 00:11:57:05
Unknown
So depending on the age gap, depending on whether you're talking about brothers or sisters or or mixed gender, depending on the temperament fit, all of that sort of thing. I mean, really, sibs can be like chalk and cheese, or they can be like peas in a pod. So trying to make any generalizations about what you get from a sibling is hard, because it really depends on, on on that sibling relationship.
00:11:57:05 - 00:12:20:22
Unknown
But what it, I think actively shows you is the variety of ways in which children learn, so they can learn directly from getting into lovely flights of fancy pretend play with a sibling. Most parents don't have the stamina for the endless games of a template that children will have. And so that's that's lovely that they can fill the gap that you don't get from a parent child interaction.
00:12:21:00 - 00:13:04:18
Unknown
But equally, siblings learn from watching. So if a sibling is getting into trouble, the other children will be watching very carefully and making sure that they don't make the same misstep going going forward. So there is observational learning as well as kind of directly getting involved and playing and learning, learning from play. And I think you see that very much in in families where they have more than one child.
00:13:04:20 - 00:13:11:22
Unknown
Yeah, so actually, to some extent, the findings replicated findings from a big national study that was done before the pandemic.
00:13:11:22 - 00:13:52:22
Unknown
So I don't think it's restricted to the pandemic. But we were doing this in at the beginning of the pandemic, when we really didn't know how long it would last and what the effects would be. So we just had a range of questions, and we recruited families from six different countries. And one of the consistent findings we had was that on average, children who had an older sibling were showing fewer problems, whether those were emotional problems, whether those problems of behavioral regulation or, you know, just generally being being a little bit naughty or whatever you want to call conduct problems less than you'd expect, which I think shows that.
00:13:53:01 - 00:14:18:02
Unknown
And probably families who remember that time will know that older children often did step up to the plate. They enjoyed becoming a kind of secondary caregiver or being the primary source of entertainment for for their younger sibling. It was an opportunity for them to really show that they they, they could contribute. Whereas obviously when you're talking about children under the age of three, there's less they can do in that context to be helpful to their older siblings.
00:14:18:02 - 00:14:33:24
Unknown
And so maybe there was more of an effect of resource dilution, which is something you also hear about when you're talking about families. People often think that. And parents worry about this when they have their second or their third child. How am I going to love my second one as much as I love my first? You know, how am I going to slip my my time into my attention?
00:14:33:24 - 00:15:15:16
Unknown
And actually, you know, you learn that that you can that this this can be done. But of course, when the younger one is very small, then they are a drain on time. And so that might lead to the older ones feeling slightly overlooked or whatever, and therefore more prone to to show some of these problematic behaviors.
00:15:15:18 - 00:15:33:07
Unknown
Well, it's not something I've looked at directly, but it's definitely clear that starting school is different when you're the first child and when you're a later partly to do a parental anxiety. It's a big unknown for the parents, and they don't necessarily always get it right.
00:15:33:07 - 00:15:50:18
Unknown
And working out how to help juggle the routines and the homework. And do we need to change bedtimes and all of that sort of thing. And by the time the second one goes to school, everybody's kind of got this a little bit more under control. So some of it has to do with how the parents are experiencing it, but also thinking about it.
00:15:50:18 - 00:16:45:22
Unknown
For most children, if you're a younger child, you've probably done the school drop off and pick up for years before you actually start school. So that already feels like a familiar space to you. And you're just gagging to to, you know, to join your, your big sibling. And so it tends to be a much smoother ride for, for, for, for later borns.
00:16:45:24 - 00:17:00:12
Unknown
what you found? Yeah, sure. So in the new Fathers and Mothers study, we made it a inclusion criteria that families only took part if both mum and dad were willing to take part. So I say that because it's important to know that there may have been families where mum wanted to take part and dad didn't.
00:17:00:13 - 00:17:09:19
Unknown
So all our families in our study, the dads were quite involved because they'd already signed up for this study. So that's the kind of caveat around our findings. But
00:17:10:00 - 00:17:27:14
Unknown
to some extent we found a bit of a learning from mothers experience effect. So we were able to show that how sensitive the dads were at 14 months was better predicted by how sensitive mum had been a four months than by how sensitive dad had been at four months.
00:17:27:15 - 00:17:42:09
Unknown
So when mum has got it all under control by four months, she's kind of showing the way and dads are kind of following and learning in their footsteps. So even if you don't have that much time physically with your child, just watching your partner or getting that little bit of guidance from your partner gives you that bit of a head start.
00:17:42:09 - 00:17:49:19
Unknown
And you know what your child likes or doesn't like because you're being told because couples talk to each other and you know, that that that also makes sense.
00:17:49:19 - 00:18:56:05
Unknown
But also, I think the dads in our study very much wanted to spend a big part of the weekend with their children. And it's quality, not quantity, you know, so long as you're getting a regular dosage of high quality interaction with your child, that's probably enough to make sure that it'll all be okay.
00:18:56:07 - 00:19:05:21
Unknown
So, I mean, you're absolutely right that I suppose in the same way as I said, that dads can learn from mums, mums can learn from each other or parents can learn from each other.
00:19:05:21 - 00:19:27:17
Unknown
And so with that in mind, we're about to release an audio archive of clips of parents sharing their experiences so that you can look up somatic, you know, how do you cope with that, that sense of sometimes it might be that that being at school wasn't a great experience for you as a parent, and so you have to move beyond your own experience.
00:19:27:17 - 00:19:41:13
Unknown
Also, schools have changed so much over the years that just because school might have been a scary place when you were a child doesn't mean that they're a scary place now. So some of it is overcoming your own feelings, making sure that you're being as positive as you can for your child,
00:19:41:13 - 00:19:48:02
Unknown
but also recognizing when we've interviewed families about this, mostly they just wanted to talk about their child's experience.
00:19:48:02 - 00:20:08:22
Unknown
But when we got them to talk about their own experiences, the feelings often ran very deep that it was affecting their identity. The fact that the child was now citing what teacher says or, you know, so-and-so's mum does it this way or whatever, that they've gone from being the god or the goddess that that you know, their word is law.
00:20:08:22 - 00:20:26:18
Unknown
And children are starting to recognize there's more than one opinion and there's more than one way of doing things. And that's a whole new negotiation that they have to have in their relationships. For mums, sometimes it means they might even have to change their working hours or even their job, because nurseries tend to have wraparound care in a way that schools don't.
00:20:26:19 - 00:21:38:09
Unknown
And so that can be a real challenge. How do you juggle that? What's much more stressful than many people imagine? So I think going in, just knowing that this will be a big transition for the whole family and not just for your child, I think is an important kind of mindset.
00:21:38:11 - 00:21:52:05
Unknown
That's so something I've heard a lot in Hong Kong that I really hope I don't hear in this country, is the idea of winning at the start of the race. That is something they say a lot, and it just doesn't make any sense.
00:21:52:05 - 00:21:59:18
Unknown
Knowing that your child is happy at school has to be the best sort of foundation for them to do well in the long term.
00:21:59:18 - 00:22:17:15
Unknown
So we know from the Millennium Cohort Study that children who report liking school in reception in year one do one GCSE grade better on all their GCSEs ten years later. So that's the kind of part of the evidence that happy kids make make for better learners.
00:22:17:17 - 00:22:22:19
Unknown
in Hong Kong. They also talk about happy schools, which means schools that don't give homework.
00:22:22:21 - 00:22:43:16
Unknown
So they really buy into this idea of you can either have a clever kid or a happy kid. And I think our teachers do a great job at trying to encourage children to be both kind of rounded, fun, emotionally intelligent individuals, and to thrive and have a curiosity and a thirst for learning.
00:22:43:16 - 00:22:49:09
Unknown
So teaching children that it's fine to make mistakes, actually, mistakes is how we learn you.
00:22:49:09 - 00:23:13:09
Unknown
No children can get quite anxious about whether they score 100% on a test, or whether they score or whatever it is, and so moving away from the product or the performance to thinking about the process. So when you praise the child, not praising them for having got a certain mark, but praising them for the amount of effort that they put in or the creativity or the way they persisted at it.
00:23:13:10 - 00:23:50:06
Unknown
You know, just focusing on on those things that in the long term, I think, is what will make excellent scholars who are also happy people.
00:23:50:08 - 00:23:50:12
Unknown
got.
00:23:50:13 - 00:24:12:09
Unknown
Yeah. So certainly in Cambridge we have a lot of parents around who set very high standards for themselves and for their children. So I can remember one mum telling me that her son, she was having a battle in the park, but it was one of those yes no type battles. And then she noticed another parent who was also talking to his child called Tom, and they would talk about Nietzsche.
00:24:12:11 - 00:24:39:10
Unknown
And of course she went home feeling totally inadequate because she's got this sort of yes no tug of war going on with her child. And they're talking philosophy and and all of that. So it's very easy to, to feel paranoid a little bit about everybody notices the high fliers. People don't notice that their child is maybe doing well enough, maybe not brilliantly, but they're doing well enough and everybody will have their thing and they might not excel on everything, but that's fine.
00:24:39:11 - 00:25:47:16
Unknown
That's just kind of normal. So I think definitely be involved. I'm not saying don't worry about it, but do it in a way that is fun. So my son wasn't particularly keen on reading in the early days. So we made tents and we did those sort of reading in fun places and, you know, using a torch and and finding things and just making sure that this felt like something he wanted to do rather than he was being made to do.
00:25:47:18 - 00:25:58:18
Unknown
So I think some of it so that I think I don't know if it's helpful as a metaphor, but if you imagine that you're driving down a road, you don't really notice the gradient because the car does that for you.
00:25:58:18 - 00:26:17:02
Unknown
But if you're on a bicycle or if you're walking or running, you really notice if it's uphill. And so think of that as the difference between an adult perspective and a child perspective. The ups and downs of a day are just that much bigger and more intense for a child than they are for an adult. For an adult, you know, this was always going to happen.
00:26:17:02 - 00:26:31:06
Unknown
This has happened 100 times before. We'll get through it. It'll be fine. Whereas for the child, they don't necessarily have that broad perspective. So all they can think of is this is the end of the world. And I'm so upset that my toys broken or whatever it is that, that that is upsetting them.
00:26:31:06 - 00:26:53:08
Unknown
One of the best pieces of advice I got as a parent a long time ago now my my, my son is now 26, was the acronym Halt, which stands for if your child is hungry, anxious, lonely or tired, then all bets are off in terms of what you can expect, whether they're going to do the thing they were supposed to do
00:26:53:08 - 00:27:17:22
Unknown
or how they're going to do it. So that's the problem that needs to be fixed and not the behavior. So if they're behaving in a kind of unexpected or embarrassing way, that's not the problem. The problem is are they hungry, anxious, lonely or tired? And I think just tuning in to what's behind the behavior can be really useful for, for parents.
00:27:17:24 - 00:27:50:13
Unknown
parents too, if they're I often
00:27:50:15 - 00:28:12:13
Unknown
So I'm part of a new study that will be following a thousand babies from NICU through to the school gates. And I think we're going to find some really fascinating developmental pathways trajectories there. We increasingly know that kids can get genetic testing now in Nick if they have problems.
00:28:12:13 - 00:28:37:06
Unknown
That's the NHS is starting to roll that out fairly automatically. So that will allow us to identify which children might benefit from support really only on. So we know that about 10% of babies are born premature. And oftentimes teachers don't necessarily get told they might have it in their notes, arrived early, but they don't know whether that means six weeks or 12 weeks or whatever.
00:28:37:06 - 00:29:06:05
Unknown
And we do know that these children will have their own specific problems. So that might be coming back to the idea of executive functions so that they're related to the frontal lobes, which are the last bit of the brain to develop in gestation. So that's the thing that's most likely to be affected in prem babies. So reducing expectations, giving them being more aware of the gestational age for longer, I think we started to kind of recognize that
00:29:06:09 - 00:29:21:02
Unknown
what keeps me up at night, I suppose the way in which families face so many more challenges now than they might have done a decade or so ago to do with devices being both, can be a fun,
00:29:21:02 - 00:30:10:04
Unknown
positive way of connecting, way of finding out information that can also be a way of creating isolation, even within a family. If everybody is on their own little screens, then people aren't talking to each other and the quality of the interactions can, can really be kind of eroded. And I'd like to think that we can do some joined up thinking about how best to make sure that we can have everything that, that these devices have to offer without losing the kind of soul of what it is to be a family.
00:30:10:06 - 00:30:22:00
Unknown
Worry less about the future. I think more about where you are now with your child
00:30:22:02 - 00:30:29:08
Unknown
Alison Gopnik has written a book that I haven't read, but I know her works. I'm pretty sure that everything in it will be excellent.
00:30:29:09 - 00:30:58:00
Unknown
It's called The Carpenter and the gardener. So the idea is that as parents, we don't try and chisel our children into a particular shape, but we think of them as plants that have this. One might be some loving this one might be shade loving and thinking about your role as a gardener rather than as a carpenter. I think quite helpful.
00:30:58:02 - 00:30:59:22
Unknown
I'm I'm
00:31:00:02 - 00:31:03:24
Unknown
going to say siblings because they've been so overlooked by research.
00:31:04:01 - 00:31:19:11
Unknown
And I think if you talk to parents, they totally get how important those relationships are. And yet we don't know very much about them.
00:31:19:13 - 00:31:20:22
Unknown
You're welcome. Thank you.
00:31:21:03 - 00:31:42:04
Unknown
What I learned from this conversation is something that sounds simple but probably isn't. The early years are not preparation for life. They are life itself. The connections being made right now, the conversations that are happening are not happening. The security of having a sibling. Those aren't foundations for something that comes later. It's something that's already there.
00:31:42:08 - 00:32:02:20
Unknown
The research that Claire has spent 20 years doing tells us something both reassuring and urgent. What children need is not complicated, but it's not optional either. And the environments we build around families, the hubs, the health visitors, the communities and the siblings aren't nice to have. They're part of the developmental infrastructure.
00:32:02:21 - 00:32:06:23
Unknown
Thank you for listening. To Best Beginnings, A Baby's Own podcast.
00:32:07:00 - 00:32:14:01
Unknown
Please subscribe to this channel or share the episode with someone who might need it. We'll see you next time. Thanks.
00:32:14:03 - 00:32:14:10
Unknown
We.