six - Saving children

Summary

Introduction

In this chapter we move deeper into the implications of early intervention. We look at the way that brain science and social investment ideas infuse the beliefs of practitioners who work in the early years field. We consider how it shapes their understandings and practices, with consequences for their approaches to and interactions with parents. Practitioners are no mean constituency; the UK has ‘the most elaborate architecture anywhere for parenting support’ (Daly, 2013: 164). There is an extensive workforce involved in early years provision in children's services, health and education. They include early years educators, health visitors, home visitors, nurses, play workers, social workers and therapists (Churchill and Clarke, 2009; Gillies, 2011; Lewis, 2011; Daly and Bray, 2015). Such practitioners work in public provision such as Children's Centres and primary schools, and most significantly in the home setting. They provide instruction and knowledge to parents as to how best to relate to and bring up their children, and they monitor babies’ and children's development and parent–child relations. Mary Daly and Rachel Bray (2015) argue that this expansion has been stimulated by the coming together of concerns about ‘risks’ to children and society, the identification of deficits in childrearing practices as causal, and a set of interventionist policy ‘solutions’ that focus on individual behavioural change rather than structural interventions (see also Dodds, 2009, on the Family Nurse Partnership [FNP] specifically).

A key motif of early years intervention is the idea that children need to be ‘saved’ from poor parenting. It is sub-optimal parenting that is claimed to hold back babies’ brain development and thus their future wellbeing and achievement. As we have seen in previous chapters in this book, through saving individual babies from the neuro-damage that deficient parenting can create, the world will be changed. The idea is neatly summed up in the FNP intervention programme's slogan: ‘Changing the world – one baby at a time’. There will be savings in the moral sense. Enthusiasts claim that intervention before a child is 3 years old will save society from future crime, low attainment, teenage parenthood, and drug and alcohol abuse. Consequently, there will also be savings in the financial sense.