Love is not enough

This is a deeply significant fact relevant to our new understandings of brain research, and the way neural pathways are created within the developing brain. The significance of the under-five years is now known to be crucial in setting patterns for rest-of-life attainments. Second generation Italian and Greek migrant families have a solid track record in taking pleasure in encouraging every developmental phase of their young children’s lives. This has a near automatic effect in boosting subsequent academic achievement levels. And the demand from all these ethnic sub-groups in Australia has already boosted the provision of academically oriented classes for three to five-year-olds, as well as supplementary tutoring for primary school children.

Second, modern economies have very little room for the kind of unskilled labour that previously used to be a ticket not merely to survival but to a reasonably good life. Nowadays those who fail to keep ahead of the game are likely to slip into an underclass, a new version of the hewers of wood and drawers of water. The cost to taxpayers of supporting an uneducated, unskilled underclass has become deeply resented, while the figures have been crunched to prove conclusively that $1 invested in effective early learning saves up to $10 of social cost in remediation, welfare and law enforcement costs.

Governments have become deeply interested in the early childhood years, and there is currently a vigorous debate in the US, with strong echoes being picked up in Australia about whether they should provide a universal pre-kindergarten year at public expense. The cheaper option at the government level is to target early intervention programs to “at risk” children. For different reasons both options are problematic. But in the context of modern pressures bearing heavily on parents, the former is probably a better choice.

Any means-tested targeted program is likely to be funded with a minimalist logic, and an attempt to keep the budget as low as possible. The long term outcome, however, whether the choice is for universal or targeted provisioning, is very likely to mirror the progress of the whole public education system, whereby excellent schools slowly became starved of both funding and well-qualified staff.

For all children energetic, well-informed, time-rich and loving parents are probably the best choice for wiring up a child’s mental capacities. But given the contemporary pressures of paid employment, most children cannot expect, any longer, to be able to slip into adult life by spending their unscheduled days observing and learning from being around the adults in their family. It remains true that they learn best from adults with whom they have an embedded holistic relationship grounded in everyday life.

Parents need to find contexts in which they themselves do most of the teaching, as well as the loving, of their under-fives. The future of parent attended classes is an approach that needs investigating much more widely.