Supporting low-income parents early on will improve children’s life chances
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Version 0 of 1. On the first two years of life, everything else is built. This will be one of the main messages from a seminar given on Tuesday afternoon by Sir Michael Marmot to MPs in parliament. The discussion will focus on the importance of the first years of a child’s life for their future life chances and health, bringing key scientific findings to the attention of policymakers. We will hear from the professor, who is known worldwide for his work on the social determinants of health, how much could be done to improve outcomes by creating the conditions for every child to have a good start in life. It is pleasing to see momentum gathering behind the cause of early intervention. An important part of this must surely be working out how better to support parents, who in most cases play the greatest role in creating the environment where children grow up. We need to dispel two damaging misconceptions about a focus on parenting support. First is the idea that concern with family support constitutes some form of moral panic. Recent social transformations have brought greater individual freedom but also greater isolation. As fewer of us grow up in an extended family environment, we have less experience of looking after children, and fewer parenting skills, once cultivated from long before the teenage years. Second, we must be clear that this is not about blaming poor people for their poverty. Understanding how the behaviour of parents affects their child’s outcomes is not to deny constraints such as class and income on life chances. It is, rather, a way to be more precise about how these constraints play out in real people’s lives. Recent findings on the early years allow us to fill gaps in our knowledge on social mobility. While we are familiar with the idea that educational and professional outcomes are linked to people’s backgrounds, exactly how this happens has remained mysterious. Paul Willis’ 1977 book Learning to Labour evokes the way that working-class children can end up getting the least out of the classroom, even with the best intentions of teachers. But how, exactly, does low income result in failure to succeed at school? The effect of low income is mediated by different factors, among them family support in the early years. In the classroom Willis describes there is a significant minority of pupils from the same socio-economic background, who sit at the front of the classroom and wish to climb the social ladder. What makes the difference between these children and their other equally working class peers? There have been moments in postwar Britain when social mobility was possible for a substantial segment of the working class This was notably form 1945 to the 1960s because of jobs created by the welfare state. This leads us to ask what, besides mere chance, might explain these patterns of different outcomes within class groups. And can we engender a similar period of upward social mobility, when the welfare state isn’t expanding, by investing in the education and family support available to our children early on to improve their skills base later in life to access jobs in sectors which are now growing, such as the creative and tech sectors? |