Examination of Witnesses (Questions 40-59)
PROFESSOR BRYAN
RODGERS, PROFESSOR
JUDY DUNN,
DR LEON
FEINSTEIN AND
DR AMANDA
WADE
12 JULY 2006
Q40 Paul Holmes: The first question
I was going to ask you have already covered really. As far as
I can see, the research evidence shows that the key factor in
how a child performs is not so much whether a separation happens,
it is what the conditions were—income, behaviour, parental
relationships—before or after the separation. It is not
the actual fact of separation that really makes the difference.
That is a lot of what you have just been saying is about. That
was the first question really. What about the situation after
separation, where you have then got a step-parent, another partner?
The traditional image from myth and story and film is that the
step-parent can often be a bad factor. Is there any evidence to
back that up? Is that just a myth?
Professor Dunn: The relationship
between the child and step-parents is an important factor feeding
into how they come out. There is enormous variation, but where
there is a negative relationship that is an important factor certainly.
In general, children's relationships with their step-parents are
not as close, not as intimate as they are with their biological
parents, but, of course, that is a very crude average and there
will be plenty of very good relationships in there too.
Q41 Paul Holmes: So there is not
generally research that would say that step-parents are always
a negative factor?
Professor Dunn: No. There is a
lot of research on step-parents, and certainly it is not overwhelmingly
a limiting factor. In fact, I wanted to bring it up in relation
to your point about poverty. One of the arguments has been that
if poverty is what is the most damaging factor for children whose
parents separate, then the arrival of a step-parent and an increase
in family income that follows, it was suggested, should mean that
the impact on the children is better, and that has not been found.
On the whole the worst off are the children who are with a single
parent, but in terms of their adjustment, they do pretty badly
even with a step-parent, so it is not just poverty.
Q42 Paul Holmes: Is there enough
research to identify whether they are doing badly because of the
step-parent or they are doing badly because of a sequence of change
in adult relationships?
Professor Dunn: It could be both,
and people have looked at that. The worst seems to be a whole
sequence of changes that the child has to cope with in regard
to multiple relationships.
Q43 Chairman: We keep coming back
to this, maybe you smile, happy families are uneventful!
Professor Dunn: These relationships
change over time, so if you just take them three years after the
arrival of a step-parent, things may look pretty grim, and then
if you follow them up things can get better. I do think the point
Amanda made is important, about getting the children's perspective
on all this, which is relatively recent, to be paying attention
to what the children think. The national data say that over 70%
of the children whose parents separate do so before the child
is ten, so we have to think how we are going to get the perspective
of young children on this. We have thought about several ways
of doing that and so has Amanda, and we do learn from getting
the children's perspective. One thing we learn is that grandparents
are very important and children who have close relationships with
a grandparent are better off in terms of how they weather the
storms. That has not been looked at.
Chairman: Do you want to come in on this,
Douglas?
Mr Carswell: I just have a general question
about methodology, but it can come in later.
Chairman: Hang on two seconds; Paul,
you carry on.
Q44 Paul Holmes: Back on the step-parent
issue, you get the whole evolutionary, Darwinist argument that
step-parents might be a bad factor towards children who are not
their biological children; it is the cuckoo syndrome in reverse.
Again, is there any qualitative evidence that actually shows that,
or is it part of the myth?
Professor Dunn: I do not know
what my colleagues think about this, but the number of step-fathers
who end up being violent towards their step-children is very small.
It is easy to write a headline about it, but it is not going to
be explaining the life situation for most children in step-families.
Dr Wade: We have done research
with children on who they think of as being members of their family
when parents have re-partnered, and it is interesting how difficult
children find it to use the sort of formal terms of kinship because
their families are quite complex, and so they will talk about
"my dad" and "my real dad", for example, because
there are not words for the relationships. Again, I support what
Judy was saying, what matters to the children is the quality of
the relationships that they are able to make with new adults or
new step-siblings in their life and that those people make with
them, so if those relationships are good and warm and caring then
those people will be counted usually as family members and children
may well see some benefit in re-partnering because their family
has expanded and there are many more people who they can count
as family. Alongside that, however, there is the fact that not
all those relationships are good and sometimes these changes come
much too quickly for the children to deal with, so it is partly
about the pace of change and partly about the quality of relationships.
Some step-parents can be good people, and some not.
Q45 Paul Holmes: Judy was saying
about listening to what the children say, and one thing that struck
me a lot towards the end of my teaching career—I finished
teaching in 2001—was how easily children now talked, without
any sort of embarrassment, without any awkwardness, about "my
father's girlfriend". You know, if you are asking who is
writing the note for the dentist, who is coming to parents' evening,
they will so easily say "It is my father's girlfriend"
or "It is my mother's partner" and all these sorts of
phrases.
Professor Dunn: It is almost normative
now to have complicated family relationships.
Q46 Paul Holmes: Is there any detailed
qualitative research again to enable us to make any comparison
between, after separation, after divorce, the parents who then
carry on as a one-parent family or the parents who then enter
into a new relationship which brings step-parents, new partners
into it?
Professor Dunn: Yes, there is
quite a lot of research that compares children growing up in single
parent families and children who are now in step-families. I hate
to stress again how complicated it is, but it is not a very simple
issue, and one of the lessons from all this is how elaborate and
complicated family life is now for children and for their parents.
It is more than 25% of children who have complicated family lives,
it is nearly to be expected, so rather than assuming this is a
pathological change, we should be looking and saying what does
it mean to the children and so on. We have learned quite a lot
about the practicalities of what makes it more bearable for them,
and in the ALSPAC study we asked the children what their feelings
were about their divided lives, because they were going off every
weekend or every month or whatever to another household and another
family, and the great majority of them had something positive
to say about it, it was not a bleak overall picture, and they
had lots of practical suggestions about how their lives could
be better—this business of two households could be improved,
like their dad could stop watching telly all afternoon and so
on. I do not quite know why I got onto that.
Q47 Paul Holmes: You said there is
a lot of research whereby you can look at the difference between
continuing in a single parent family and continuing in a new partner
relationship. Does it generally show that one is better or worse
than the other, and do you have to disallow for poverty and all
the rest of it as a factor there?
Professor Dunn: Single parents
come through as a very vulnerable group, I have to say.
Q48 Paul Holmes: Is that primarily
because of the financial side?
Professor Dunn: It is partly the
financial side; I do not know that we could say X% of the variance
is because of finance because the factors go together so often,
but life is pretty grim for parents who are on their own in financial
terms, their children are upset.
Q49 Paul Holmes: On the financial
side again we have this common accepted idea among some circles
anyway that because of our welfare system you have so many people
who become single parents quite happily, either never getting
married in the first place because they sign up for the flat and
everything as soon as they are a teenage mother, or because they
can leave the relationship easily because the welfare state will
subsidise them. James Bartholomew wrote a book last year, The
Welfare State, in which he just repeats all this stuff without
any research evidence; is there any evidence though, perhaps looking
at other countries with different welfare systems, that you could
draw comparisons with to show whether this is true or not?
Professor Rodgers: Judy's point
about lone parent families being vulnerable—we have done
research on parents as well, though you are obviously focused
on children but parents are players in all this, and that is where,
in our work, we are seeing very big differences, it is a pretty
tough life for lone parents and it is not just financially. You
see that in terms of psychological distress, sometimes you see
it in other issues. Australia is in a period of change, I do not
know how similar it is to here, but the pressure of the welfare
reform and the push to get people into the work force is certainly
now biting as from July 1 in terms of lone parent families with
the youngest child over the age of six. We are really in a state
of flux on that and it is going to be a period of time to evaluate
those sorts of change to see what they produce. I just come back
to the one point that Judy made; there is a lot of research on
children's outcomes that compares lone parent families with growing
up in a step-parent family and it is remarkable how small the
differences are on average, but I think part of the reason for
that is that it is not a static status, it is something that changes
over time, so who is in a lone parent family at one age may well
be in a step-family later and maybe back in a lone parent family
again. My suspicion there is that a lack of findings or the apparent
lack of findings is because it is not two separate populations,
it is a fluid situation. Something that I have often wondered
might be significant is there have been some studies that have
looked particularly at the quality of relationships between children
and step-parents and it has been raised as a factor by kids themselves
when they are older as to when they leave the parental home. Now
I do not know if I make too much of a big thing of that, it is
research that caught my eye at one point in time, but the possible
implications for education are significant when fulltime education
is the norm. In Australia most kids stay on at school until they
are 18 and half the kids are going on to some form of tertiary
education after that. If you are in any way pressured to leaving
the parental home and you do not get the sort of support that
other kids get, that could have quite an impact on your educational
qualifications and career at that point, that teenage stage. That
has been a bit of a neglected area in the research that has been
done; a lot of the research that has been done on educational
outcomes for kids in these different family situations has gone
up to about the age of 16 and has not actually gone beyond that,
and I think there is a bit of an unknown area.
Professor Dunn: It is certainly
clear that leaving home early is related to living in a step situation,
children are more likely to leave.
Paul Holmes: Judy said that the evidence
is fairly clear that, for whatever reasons, if a child is with
a single parent it is more difficult, for all sorts of reasons,
than if they are with two parents, partners and so forth. Society
in the west generally seems to have a fairly schizophrenic attitude—and
policymakers—that on the one hand the parent, usually the
mother, should stay at home so we do not have latchkey kids, but
on the other hand they should be going out to work and not living
on benefits, hence the Australian changes and the pressure in
this country. Again, is there any hard evidence that would suggest
it is good for a single parent to be going out to work while the
kids are still of school age? Who benefits from that?
Q50 Chairman: Leon, do you want to
take that? You have not been asked any questions recently.
Dr Feinstein: A lot depends on
the provision of childcare, the quality of the childcare. The
income gain may have very substantial benefits and that will be
offset by whatever the impact is for the child of the mother not
being present. We have looked at mother's employment as a factor
and also the other factors in explaining children's achievement
and the mother's employment in a sense is a bit like family structure
in that it is a bit of a red herring. There is a very good study
in ALSPAC that Paul Gregg and others have done where you have
very rich data, so you can take account of lots of other features
of the family in explaining is there an effect of the mother working
on the child? One thing that should be said straight off is that
it is very different where the mother is working in the first
six months or the first year of the child's life than after that,
and there may be some particular issues in the first year that
make mothers being out of the house have some negative effect
on the child's development, but beyond that they do not find any
particular effects of the mother being out of the house. What
they do find is that parents sacrifice sleep effectively—they
have a certain amount of time to sleep, to spend in quality time
with the children and to work to bring in the income that the
household needs. What parents tend to do is sacrifice sleep, so
the children are okay but it is the parents you have to worry
about and ultimately that may have a negative effect. A lot depends
on the quality of the childcare and some mothers who are under
a lot of stress, with low income, difficult housing, difficult
social support, not particularly good parenting skills, then the
mother being out at work and good quality childcare provision
may have some very good effects. There is an income gain and there
may also be some benefits for the mother in the enhancement of
her parenting skills, and family learning programmes can support
that too. It is not a generic thing again.
Chairman: Paul, can I hold you for a
second, it is just that a couple of other people are bursting
to come in on that particular point. Douglas.
Q51 Mr Carswell: I had a general
question of methodologies. This is fascinating and I have learned
a huge amount about some of the evidence that you have spoken
about. I just had a question really about the extent to which
we can take it at face value; presumably a lot of what you have
done in your research is to do with correlation analysis and to
look at factor X or Y and assess that in terms of educational
attainment. Can we be certain of cause and effect though because
it was you, Professor Dunn, who spoke about grandparents and said
it is good if there are grandparents. Often, actually, correlation
is not cause and effect and there can actually be some quite unsettling
alternative explanations for things. I read a book, The Blank
Slate by Steven Pinker, and that had all sorts of explanations;
unsettling though the implications might be, is the automatic
assumption that because factor X is present, this has an impact
on educational attainment? Could it sometimes be the other way
round, could it sometimes be that there are alterative explanations
that are very unsettling and in polite society we do not mention?
Professor Dunn: Absolutely. Any
academic worth their salt goes through great gyrations about not
making causal assumptions, because it is so complicated. For instance,
the Pinker argument was presumably about genetics, which may well
be part of the story, in fact we have some evidence that it is,
but we have to be terribly careful about causal inferences. On
the grandparents stuff it may well be that a child who has a close
relationship with the grandparents, is a nice child, and they
have a nice grandmother—whatever that means—and drawing
a conclusion about the grandparents having an effect on the child
would be quite inappropriate, but what we can say is it is of
the opposite to the risk factors, the protective factors that
seems to be linked to children coming through what are very stressful
experiences okay. If you ask children was there anyone they could
talk to when their parents first separated, was there anyone they
could just ask questions of, have discussions and so on, top of
the list was grandparents. This may be coloured by the fact that
we were working in the Bristol area where the community is relatively
stable over time, and it certainly does not fit with some of the
American data where people are thousands of miles from their grandparents.
For most of our Bristol children the grandparents were a couple
of streets away, but it turned out to be an independent contributor
to the variance in the children's outcome. Again, you have to
be terribly careful about causal effect.
Q52 Mr Carswell: You are very careful
before using a correlation as just explained for cause and effect.
Professor Dunn: Absolutely.
Mr Carswell: Thank you, that is fine.
Q53 Jeff Ennis: This not a whole
different theme from Douglas, in some respects, because one of
the emerging family patterns in my constituency over the last
10-15 years has been the prevalence of what I call second-generation
mothers, where the grandparent lives with the single parent and
the single parent's children then are looked after by the grandparent
and the single parent does her own thing or goes out to work or
whatever. Have we got any sort of research on that type of family
pattern and the impact that has on achievement?
Professor Dunn: The millennium
cohort will have data on that and they have actually over-sampled
for various minority groups where grandparents are often resident
in the same household. In the ALSPAC there are probably not enough
children who were living with their grandparents, but I do not
know.
Dr Feinstein: This comes back
to causality and methodology, all of this does. It is very dangerous
to say methodology to a panel of academics, but I will try not
to throw too much into that territory. There is an issue in relation
to the ALSPAC study where they were looking at the effect of different
forms of childcare provision and different forms of quality of
provision and I think, without saying too much about it, because
I do not know the study very well, they found some dangers or
some risks in relation to grandparental care where that was not
high quality and often, perhaps, involved putting the child in
front of the television and not getting very involved with the
child. In all of these types of provision it comes back to exactly
what we have all been saying about parenting: it is about the
quality of the relationship that the child is experiencing, and
that could be in any childcare setting. Grandparents may provide
excellent quality childcare, but you cannot assume it.
Professor Dunn: In that case—this
is the exact example of the danger of making causal inferences—the
children who were looked after with their grandparents were more
likely to be from very disrupted families, who had been through
lots of adverse experiences. That is not always true, but care
in the first year would explain a lot.
Dr Wade: Coming back to the question
about single parents and employment, Simon Duncan and Ros Edwards
have done research on parents' decisions about employment and
obviously there can be advantages when single parents work, both
from the parent's point of view of self-esteem and also financially,
but sometimes it can place parents in a difficult bind because
although there is substitute care available for children, if parents
work fulltime that can sometimes mean that very young children
are having extremely long days out of the home, which from my
observations rather than research from interviewing children,
can be very tiring for children and quite stressful. Some parents
do feel, therefore, that they have to make difficult decisions
which are about what is best for my child, what is best for me,
what is best in the long term, and I do think it is important
to think about what are the effects of some of these extremely
long days on young children and whether there are alternatives
that can be supported in ways that mean that part-time work, for
example, is going to be economically viable and helpful.
Chairman: Stephen, you wanted to come
in on this rather than the next section.
Q54 Stephen Williams: It is a question
on research, yes, and it is about a family group that no one has
mentioned yet. I come from a single parent family but it is not
the single parent family that usually people mean by it but from
death, which is a genuinely single parent situation where the
parent has gone forever. What research have either you done or
do you know on the educational outcomes or the social outcomes
of a child who experiences the early death of a parent?
Professor Dunn: That has been
looked at in the ALSPAC, and as adults the individuals who had
lost a parent through death were doing fine; the adults who had
lost a parent through divorce earlier on—so this is going
back to earlier decades—were not doing fine and there were
higher rates of depression and so on.
Professor Rodgers: I mentioned
before you came in, Stephen, that when I worked on the British
1946 cohort, in that study all the kids were born in March 1946
and there were more children in that study who had lost a parent
through death than through family separation—mortality rates
were higher, divorce rates were lower then and the pattern that
Judy mentions is very evident in that study, that parental death
did not have the same associations with poor outcomes as parental
divorce in the project. There are some examples where parental
death in some studies of children has shown some problems, particularly
where the death is preceded by long periods of disruption and
if there is a chronic illness that leads up to that and creates
hardship and other disruptions in the family. That can have an
adverse effect on kids.
Q55 Mr Wilson: I am very interested
in the seeming drive in this country and apparently in Australia
to force mothers back into work at a very early age, and the age
of the child seems to me to be very important in this. Older children
can cope much better, obviously, than younger children, as Dr
Wade has indicated, but are you aware of the Biddulph research
on childcare and young children?
Chairman: Give more details of the name.
Q56 Mr Wilson: It is Stephen Biddulph.
He changed his views completely over the last five years in terms
that he was very much a supporter of childcare at a very young
age, really from birth so that the mother could go out to work,
but he has completely reversed that opinion based on evidence
and seems to be of the opinion now that under the age of three
it is best if one parent is able to stay at home, and the outcomes
for the children in terms of educational attainment later on will
be much better if that happens and in terms of behaviour, social
interaction and all those other things. Wold you concur with that
view or not?
Professor Dunn: Research in the
United States has been extraordinarily comprehensive and careful
and looked at children in a whole range of urban and rural contexts,
and looked at the quality of childcare. I really think they have
done an excellent job answering the question about does childcare
matter and it comes back to the issue of the quality of the childcare,
which is profoundly important.
Q57 Mr Wilson: There is research
suggesting, for example, that for the first two years bonding
is an incredibly important issue between parent and child and
that has implications for social interaction and educational attainment.
Professor Dunn: That is exactly
why the US Government put an enormous amount of money into this
childcare study, with ten different research groups looking at
all sorts of issues. Primarily the starting point was the issue
of bonding and attachment and would this be damaged, and the answer
depends exactly how you look at it. There are some minor differences:
little boys who spent a lot of time in group care are more assertive
in some studies than others, but the quality of the attachment
between the mother and the child did not have to be damaged and
plenty of children were insecure but it was not the childcare,
it was the separation from mother that was important.
Dr Feinstein: The attachment relationship
between the mother and the baby does not only depend on the amount
of time that the mother is spending with the child in the first
two years, the context in which the mother spends her time will
also be important. Having patterns where there may be the possibility
of maintaining employment, particularly for low income families
where employment may make a very substantial difference to the
well-being of the child in terms of income gain and the self esteem
of the mother and other sorts of factors, the research I have
seen suggests that there are particular issues in the first six
months so that if the mother is absent a great deal in the first
six months, that is 20 hours and above of part-time or full-time
employment, then that will damage and there will be an impact
on behaviour of that very early, but again there are selection
biases. Which mothers are in situations where they are having
to go out to work in the first six months of the child's life
without good quality childcare? Very few mothers would be choosing
to do that, so there are clearly issues here in relation to maternity
leave and provision of good quality childcare. I agree with Judy
that the overwhelming evidence from the US where they have done
very good evaluation studies, particularly in low income groups,
in urban environments where there may be ethnic minorities and
poor housing and so on, in those contexts where you provide employment
opportunities together with good quality childcare and support
for the home learning environment, then that overall package of
measures can be extremely beneficial. That package of measures
without the employment opportunities does not bring the same benefits
because the mothers are not encouraged to develop their own independence,
their own autonomy and their own engagement with the outside world,
and that will have long term consequences as well. There are risks
and important issues around attachment and bonding, but that does
not mean that these are the only positive effects and leave the
mother alone.
Q58 Mr Wilson: You seem to be suggesting
that that is only important or the main importance in the first
six months, whereas the evidence I read and looked at is that
it is the first two years.
Dr Feinstein: The evidence I have
seen has emphasised particularly the first six months. I defer
to others on the panel, but in the first three years of life the
bonding or the attachment relationship is extremely delicate and
needs very careful support, but in terms of the relative trade-off—it
depends what level of income you are looking at—between
an income benefit as compared to an attachment risk depends very
heavily on the quality of the childcare and the outside force
that can be provided. A mother at 18 months, where there is good
quality childcare, may very well be able to be outside the house
for three or four hours, and that may benefit the attachment relationship
with the child because the mother may have less stress, higher
income and a better sense of social engagement.
Q59 Mr Wilson: There is evidence
that that may be true if a family member like a grandparent is
taking care of the child rather than a complete stranger in a
nursery. There is strong evidence to suggest that that is the
case.
Dr Feinstein: There is good evaluation
evidence from the US that high quality childcare that could be
provided by strangers can be beneficial to the attachment.
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