It’s tough being a parent of a child with developmental problems. You coo over your baby, anticipating how they’ll grow into a cheerful and contented individual, only to find that the older they get, the more the problems become apparent. Your child may be late starting to talk, and then communicate with difficulty, may struggle with reading, be clumsy, hopeless at maths, or poor at making friends. In many cases, several of these problems occur together. Gradually, as life throws more challenges at him or her, your charming toddler turns into an anxious and unhappy child, reluctant to go to school, fearing failure at every turn, and attracting ridicule from other children.What you really don’t need at this point is to be told that it’s all your fault. Yet there is a band of self-appointed ‘experts’ who seem determined to keep this message alive, and to add guilt to the other emotions that parents experience. I know of mothers who think that their child’s problems are due to their having an occasional drink during pregnancy, going out to work when their child was young, or allowing them to eat food with e-numbers. And the media absolutely lap it up. Berating feckless and inadequate parents is a popular sport that attracts readers who can wallow in a sense of complacency that their child isn’t like that.
The latest in this line of commentators is Sally Goddard Blythe, who is described as Director of the Institute for Neuro-Physiological Psychology and child development expert. In her new book ‘The Genius of Natural Childhood’ she claims that many children are failing to develop vital physical and communication skills needed to start school, because of a lack of interaction between parents and children during the early years.
According to the Daily Telegraph “growing numbers of parents are turning to electronic toys and automatic baby walkers or rocking chairs to keep toddlers occupied. But this often impairs children’s natural development, meaning many are wrongly labelled as suffering behavioural problems when they start compulsory education”. The book notes that singing lullabies and using music gets a baby ready for language at a young age, while reading fairy tales can teach children moral behaviour and empathy. Finally, “many early developmental problems could be overcome with old fashioned one-on-one interaction between parents and children.” The account in the Daily Mail was even more stark: Poor parenting means half of five-year-olds are unfit to start school shouted the headline, with the text continuing, “Children are failing to develop vital physical and communication skills after being robbed of interaction with mothers and fathers during the early years.” Interestingly, in an interview yesterday on BBC Radio 5 Live, Blythe seemed to change tack and back off from blaming parental communication, focusing more on apparently alarming rates of motor skill deficits in primary school children. Nevertheless, links to the Mail and Telegraph articles feature prominently on her blog.
So what’s the basis of Blythe’s claims? Let’s look first of all at her credentials, as given on her website. Director of an Institute sounds impressive, but less so when it turns out to be a private self-funding institution. She has letters after her name, including MSc and FRSA. I couldn’t readily find what subject the MSc is in, but FRSA is Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. It’s not a particular mark of distinction: you can apply to become a fellow on their website, provided you are willing to pay £150 per year and can give evidence that you “share or demonstrate a commitment to positive social change in professional, civic or personal life”. She also describes herself as a “freelance consultant in neuro-developmental education”. That fancy-sounding language gives no validation - anyone can set themselves up as a consultant. It only carries force if it is a title awarded by an organisation with some credentials, such as a university or a hospital.
Never mind. Maybe she has good data to back up the statements about parenting. Well, I've not yet had a chance to look at the book, so perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised, but I doubt it. I read widely on this topic and I know of no credible scientific support for the claims. I searched Harzing’s Publish or Perish for articles by Sally Goddard Blythe. Since 1998 she has had three papers in peer-reviewed journals, with a total of 41 citations between them. None of the papers involves research on effects of parenting. Two books were also listed, but since these aren’t peer reviewed, they wouldn’t normally be regarded as evidence of scholarly contribution, unless supported by significant peer-reviewed work. There was also a piece in an journal with the bold title Medical Veritas (The Journal of Medical Truth). I’d not come across this one before, and it’s not featured on Web of Knowledge, but suffice it to say that a high proportion of articles are concerned with vaccination, and Dr Andrew Wakefield is an editor. This paper also had no data on parenting.
One reason why this story hit such a nerve with me is that I’ve researched causes of children's language and communication difficulties for many years, and, contrary to popular opinion, parental behaviour does not seem to play an important role. There are converging lines of evidence that can be considered. The weakest kind is correlational: if you find that aspects of parenting correlate with the child’s language development, you can’t be sure of a causal link; there could be a third variable that simultaneously influences both the parenting and the child’s language. Nevertheless, this approach does allow you to assess the plausibility of potential causal routes. A recent epidemiological study looked at factors associated with late language emergence (LLE) in toddlers in Australia, and concluded “Risk for LLE at 24 months was not associated with particular strata of parental educational levels, socioeconomic resources, parental mental health, parenting practices, or family functioning. Significant predictors included familial history of LLE, male gender, and early neurobiological growth.” This study concluded that neurobiological factors and genes were important in determining which children had language difficulties. A more powerful design is the twin study, because it allows some dissociation of genetic and environmental influences. If environmental factors are important, then you’d expect two twins growing up together to resemble one another. However, twins share genes as well as environments. More specifically, we can distinguish identical twins, who are genetically the same, and non-identical twins, who are as similar as regular brothers or sisters. One of the first things to strike me when studying twin pairs where at least one twin had language difficulties was how different two twins from the same family could be - provided they were genetically non-identical. This impression was borne out by statistical analyses of twin data, which repeatedly find that the similarity of language abilities between two twins growing up together is strongly influenced by their genetic relationship (see Bishop, 2006). A further piece of evidence is obtained by turning the question on its head: if children require a certain amount of talking and singing to develop normal language, what happens to children raised in unusual environments where they have little exposure to such stimulation? Some hearing children of deaf parents grow up in circumstances where they are exposed to little intelligible speech except from a TV. When such children were first studied, everyone predicted they’d have serious language difficulties. Instead, the studies demonstrated just how robust language development usually is: most hearing children of congenitally deaf parents learn to talk quite normally (Schiff-Myers, 1998). I would not want to claim that parental behaviour is unimportant. Interactions between genes and environments make their effects difficult to disentangle (see earlier blogpost). I'd cheerfully go along with encouraging parents to sing to their children and read books. But it's simply not realistic to attribute children's school difficulties to lack of interaction with parents.
Mrs Goddard Blythe is entitled to her views. My concern is with the blurring of the distinction between opinion and evidence. When a view about effects of parenting is widely promulgated on national media, and is expressed by someone who is described as a consultant in neuro-developmental education and Director of an Institute, the natural assumption is made that (a) they are speaking from a position of authority, and (b) they have some hard evidence. In this case, neither appears to be true.
Bishop, D. V. M. (2006). What causes specific language impairment in children? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15, 217-221.
Schiff-Myers, N. (1988). Hearing children of deaf parents. In D. Bishop & K. Mogford (Eds.), Language development in exceptional circumstances (pp. 47-61). Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone.
Zubrick, Stephen R., Taylor, Catherine L., Rice, Mabel L., & Slegers, David W. (2007). Late language emergence at 24 months: An epidemiological study of prevalence, predictors, and covariates Journal of Speech, Language and Hearing Research DOI: 10.1044/1092-4388(2007/106)
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