Social Development

"This is a textbook. I’ve never read it from cover to cover and I don’t imagine most people would. It’s particularly compelling for somebody who doesn’t have the training and background in the complexity of child development. Schaffer was from a Jewish family and one of the children on the Kindertransport. His parents got him onto the train to England and, sadly, he never saw them again. This book reflects, firstly, a deep humanity — which I feel is a very important value to have in studying children. Secondly, the importance of relationships, of the social environment for children as they grow up — as you would expect of somebody whose relationships had been severed. He was a brilliant man, a powerful teacher, and a wonderful human being. “Children who are not able to form attachments, for whatever reason, will flounder in their relationships” The book focuses on the social aspect of development. So much modern thinking focuses on cognition. All modern education systems, for example, are focused on cognition. The route to success is understood to be a route through education that supports cognitive development. This book is much more focused on the importance of social relationships: of connections and attachments to others and how children build themselves through these social and emotional attachments. It is a very, very comprehensive read across different aspects of children’s development: the biological imperatives in social interactions, how they are mentored, how they learn from others. It’s an important reference book that I go back to again and again and again in many of the areas that I’m working on. There is a sense that children who are not able to form attachments, for whatever reason, will flounder in their relationships, and therefore also in their growing sense of identity and belonging in life. There are different theories of attachment. The one some feminists have disputed is a theory of attachment which says that the sole primary attachment is to the mother. If that, for any reason, doesn’t develop, then the child is very likely to go off course, to display pathology in their behavior or in their development. That’s been quite heavily challenged, including by anthropologists who’ve worked in cultural contexts where the care-giving is not necessarily given by the mother. There might be multiple caregivers. Babies may be breastfed by more than one woman. Where you have multiple caregivers, you may have multiple attachments. But the point is that human beings have a fundamental need for attachment of some kind. This is a book to come back to when you are looking at things like resilience, or the role of school education or work in children’s lives. For children growing up without mentors and caregivers, what would be the sort of faculties and attributes that they would bring to bear? What resources could they use in the absence of some of those relationships? From a policy point of view, it has a lot of different implications. For example, there is a whole raft of research which has been done with children in war zones. It has been argued—quite authoritatively—that evacuating children from war zones, which historically has been quite a common practice, actually does more damage to the children than remaining with their families. That’s a really hard one to argue because Schaffer himself wouldn’t have survived: his parents died in German concentration camps. But there is quite a lot of evidence that the separation from the family is so disorientating, so damaging to children, that a policy of evacuation is now entered into much more carefully and cautiously. There will be far more efforts made, in conflict zones, to ensure families are not separated, sometimes even if it means staying in quite difficult situations. But it’s worth adding that even that is culturally defined. For example, one Canadian psychologist compared refugee children who’d entered Canada from the Horn of Africa with those from Central America. They were all children who came on their own to Canada. What she found was that the Central American children were in real trouble emotionally, and the East African children adjusted much better. What she established, through her research, was that for boys in East Africa, going out and herding animals on your own is a rite of passage into adulthood. If you can live on your own in the bush for weeks on end, without the support of an adult, that’s a sign that you are now moving into manhood. In Central America, connections with family are fundamental to everything. There’s nothing positive about being separated from your family. Separation has different implications, depending on whether it is celebrated or not. Even attachments are shaped, to some degree, by the different contexts children live in. It’s extraordinary. We are so sure of ourselves, but the more you look into childhoods across many contexts, the more you realize how little we actually do know. That then enables you to think differently about raising your own children. It’s brought me to think very differently. I’m not sure I got it right, but it makes you ask questions of your own approach. People are very intrigued. We’ve all been children. It is the one subject we all think we have some expertise in — until we have children of our own. Then we realize how little expertise we have, which is when parents so often reach out for these books, about different ways of doing things, or they get the advice of others. Unfortunately, we are very influenced by our peers, to the point where we uncritically accept things. The best example I can give of that is my own experience of raising children in Oxford. Knowing all the research that tells you clearly that, in the UK, your children are far more likely to be abused, or experience violence, at the hands of people they know well; that stranger-danger is statistically insignificant, I still found myself, when they got to their teens, terrified when they came home late at night. Emotionally I was thinking one way, while rationally I knew that the evidence pointed in completely the opposite direction. Of course, there are risks. Some children are abducted and murdered, but compared to the number who are abused within the family circle… That’s a very powerful example of a mother who’s done the research and who doesn’t actually abide by the research because she lives in a particular culture and environment, where we assume things are done in a particular way. Absolutely. You worry about the shame and the embarrassment, the kids coming back and saying to you, “So and so’s Mummy does this…” You are being compared. It feeds into all your insecurities. Parents go to crazy lengths, sometimes. That’s why I resort to science — and, yet, the science is very complex in this field too, and full of contradictions. Some of the best scientists are themselves bearers of enormous assumptions and norms. It is complicated and that’s what makes it a very interesting area to research. That’s a good example. Somewhere in their minds, they’ve been told that paying fees for school means they are buying a better education for their children. In some cases, they may be. There are factors which probably make private education better. If you believe that small class sizes guarantee a better education, private schooling probably does have smaller class size, which means that children get more individual attention. But, at the end of the day, what you are really buying is the social connections. You are giving your children a lift up in the world. Most jobs are assigned to people on the basis of somebody who’s in the know or has some kind of a connection. At Oxford, we really struggle to get state school children into the university. All the children who apply excel academically — whether they’re from a private school or a state school. But the private schools coach children in all kinds of ways that the state schools just don’t have the resources to do. It’s incredibly hard for a child from a state school to compete on an even playing field with a child from a private school who has been coached, maybe for two years, before university entry. “A child who excels in a state school is going to excel more at university than a child who has been cosseted in a private school.” But state school kids in many universities actually do better than the private school kids — precisely because they have not been coached. Going to a private school gives you the entry advantage, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to do better at the end of the day. On average, you will not do as well. A child who excels in a state school is going to excel more at university than a child who has been cosseted in a private school. If you’re not part of the rough and tumble of life, if you’re not living in a socially, ethnically, religiously diverse community, life is going to be tougher in the real world. There are also other issues. For example, the hothouse effect of raising children in private schools. Also, the thing about these jobs that parents have, where they’re working all hours of the day, is that they’re not with their children much of the time. That’s the downside. The investment that you put into paying for the fees is a cost to children, because you’re not with them."