Last week I saw a quote on Twitter 'children who feel loved at home, come to school to learn. Those who don't, don't.'
This captures the key message from our new report Understanding early trauma and the importance of early relationships’.
The report describes research in which early education and childcare professionals, and reception teachers told us about how children in their settings are affected by their experiences of early trauma and relationship challenges. These children struggle to learn and to thrive:
'... delayed emotional development, behavioural issues resulting from poor attachment, lack of confidence, inability to socialise, unable to concentrate, running, shouting out and interrupting, perceived as naughty…'
'Unable to regulate feelings and emotions.'
'Difficulty in building and maintaining positive relationships with peers. Taking a long time to trust the adults in the setting…'
'Not settled and struggle to focus fully on work and activities.'
These reports reflect what the science tells us about the impact of trauma and relationship problems early in life.
What happens during the first 1001 days, from pregnancy until a child is two, lays the foundations for later health and happiness. The brain is particularly 'plastic' and susceptible to influences this time, and so babies’ early environments and experiences shapes their early development – with potentially pervasive and long-term consequences.
Human brains adapt to our circumstances. This means that children’s brains change in response to the adversity that they experience in the womb and in the early years of life .
This has, historically, benefited us as a species – if your mother lived in a stressful environment, it was adaptive for you to be born with heightened stress response. But today, these brain changes may not be as useful.
Children who have experienced early trauma might have a heightened response to stress, for example, living in “fight or flight or freeze” mode, which helps them to escape violence and abuse at home. But these changes also mean that they are more likely to overreact to situations and find it hard to regulate their emotions. This is unhelpful in other settings – like childcare and school - as the examples above show.
Science also shows us the importance of early relationships. Psychological trauma depends not only on objective external adversity, but how that adversity is experienced. Nurturing relationships can buffer the impact of adversity and prevent psychological trauma.
Without a nurturing relationship to support them, children experience negative events as more traumatic. We can understand this if we imagine two babies who are exposed to adult conflict: a baby who is held securely and soothed by a trusted caregiver during this conflict will experience less stress than a child who does not have this comfort.
Being left alone in a cot may not seem traumatic to an adult. But for a baby, who relies completely upon adults for food and care, repeatedly lying alone for long periods no one responding to your cries can feel life-threatening. An objectively terrible event for adults however – such as exposure to war or violence – may be less damaging to a baby if they have a nurturing caregiver who can help the child feel safe and reduce the stress they experience. As Dr Allan Schore wrote, 'For the developing infant the mother essentially is the environment.'
Research shows that relational poverty – the lack of a sensitive, nurturing relationship – is perhaps the worst and most damaging adversity that a young child can experience.
Attachment is a widely used and respected, although imperfect, measure of the quality of parent-infant relationships. Research suggests that, in 'normal' populations, the prevalence of disorganised attachment is 15 per cent. This means that 15 per cent of children – more than four in every reception classroom – will have developed a problematic relationship with their main caregiver as a result of unpredictable or hostile care. The prevalence of disorganised attachment is higher in communities experiencing more adversity and disadvantage.
Public services can help to strengthen and repair early relationships to give children the best start in life.
Specialised parent-infant relationship teams are multi-disciplinary teams which can, locally, be known by a range of different names. These parent-infant teams are led by mental health professionals such as psychotherapists or psychologists with expertise in working with babies and their families.
They work at multiple levels driving change across the system: They offer families experiencing severe, complex and/or enduring difficulties a tailored package of therapeutic support to strengthen and repair early relationships. They are also expert advisors and champions for all parent-infant relationships, offering training, consultation and supervision to other professionals in health and children’s services.
This week’s report contains two examples of how teams work directly and indirectly with families.
You can check out our website to see if there is a specialised parent-infant relationship team in your area. If not, it might be time to work with others in your local system to call for this important provision (especially if you’re in one of the 75 local authorities in England who will soon be getting 'Start for Life' funding).
Protecting and promoting early relationships will enable more children to get the most out of their early education experiences, and increases the likelihood that they will have happy and healthy futures.