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Talk to me, Mummy

17 Jul 2004

A few months ago, Liz Attenborough went to visit a school in Richmond, south-west London. She met the headteacher, and the head of the nursery. "We sat on tiny chairs in the nursery," she recalls. The head told Attenborough she was worried about pupils. To illustrate her point, she described how parents, typically, arrived at the school gates. "She said they came wearing earplugs (for personal stereos). They pushed buggies that faced forwards, so they couldn't really speak to the children. Even when they spoke to each other, they were monosyllabic. She called it 'texting language'. One would ask the other, 'Shops?' The second would say, 'Yeah.' 'Ten?' 'Sure.' And so on."

Attenborough visited the school, as she has visited many other places where adults deal with young children, in the name of research towards promoting the public health campaign she runs. A campaign no less important than earlier campaigns to make seatbelts compulsory or to ban drink-driving. But it doesn't involve the prevention of death, it is more important than that. Attenborough's campaign is about the improvement of life.

A bright-eyed woman with a jolly laugh, Attenborough started her career in publishing, rising eventually to run children's books at Penguin and to a seat on the board. In 1995, she packed it in to take up a portfolio of jobs with charities and committees. One such job was to run the National Year of Reading, established in accordance with Labour's 1997 manifesto commitments, and the contract was granted to the National Literacy Trust whose Director Neil McClelland put Attenborough in charge.

She also enrolled as a student for a master’s degree in child studies. (Her dissertation was entitled: "The importance of self-esteem in children's educational attainment.") This combination of interests and qualifications makes Attenborough perfectly suited to run her latest special project - to which she was appointed, again, by McClelland.

Since the Year of Reading, the National Literacy Trust's Director had become increasingly aware that problems with literacy are founded on problems with even more elementary communications skills, and go right back to a child's earliest years. Determined to investigate more thoroughly, he persuaded Attenborough to rejoin him and together they got to work: commissioning academic research and going out to see experts such as that headteacher in Richmond.

Their findings were depressing. It turns out that young children in Britain, thousands and thousands of them, are growing up with severe problems with speaking and understanding. And, given the intimate connection between language and thought, they're growing up incapable of any more than the most rudimentary ideas.

This is not good, because speech problems can lead to reading problems; then, in the worst cases, to behavioural problems, exam failure, delinquency, perhaps prison. It would be easy to write off delayed language development as exceptional, as a difficulty affecting only a disadvantaged few, almost inevitably left behind by society's mainstream. But, as Attenborough discovered, these cases are frighteningly common. The Times Educational Supplement analysed 350 Ofsted reports and found that inspectors were concerned about the speaking and listening skills of half the four and five-year-olds starting school. "It is difficult to get hard statistical evidence on what is happening across the country," acknowledged the Chief Inspector of Schools in England, David Bell, last year. "But if you talk to a lot of primary headteachers, as I do, they will say that youngsters appear less well-prepared for school than they have ever been before." So how do we account for this creeping national emergency, and what can be done to prevent it?

From around their first birthday, babies start to produce words in isolation. At about 18 months, vocabulary growth jumps to the new-word-every-two-hours minimum that the child will maintain through adolescence, and syntax begins with strings of words of the minimum length possible: two words together. After that, children's language blooms into fluent grammatical conversation so rapidly that it overwhelms the researchers who study it.

The auxiliary system in English, including words such as can, should, must, be, have and do is notorious among grammarians for its complexity. There are about 24 billion logically possible combinations, such as "He might have eat" or "He did be eating" but only 100 are grammatical. Amazingly, one study showed that children made none of the possible errors. As Stephen Pinker observed in his book, The Language Instinct, this seems particularly astonishing when you consider that young children are notably incompetent at most other activities.

By the time they reach secondary school, children will have learned something like 20,000 nouns (let alone verbs, adjectives and so on). "If children had to learn all the combinations (of words) separately," Pinker noted, they would need to listen to about 140 million sentences, which at a rate of one every 10 seconds, for 10 hours a day, would take more than a century." Pinker argued, consequently, that children learn instinctively to identify parts of sentences: noun phrases, verb phrases, and the many positions in which they can find themselves.

But for some children, evidently, this instinct does not kick in as easily as it does for others. And, whereas problems with eating and sleeping manifest themselves at once, if a child is slow to talk it can take months before parents become aware of it. At that point, they might take the child to a speech and language therapist such as Gila Falkus, who oversees three Central London primary care trusts from a National Health Service clinic in north Kensington. But they would have to wait as long as three months for an initial assessment, Falkus says, owing to the sheer workload, and even longer for therapy.

Falkus is another refugee from publishing (she worked for Weidenfeld). "I had been there for some time. Whatever you do, you feel that you are repeating yourself after a while. And I suppose that having my own children got me interested in this. I wanted to do something more real, and to help people..." She abandons her sentence, embarrassed by what has started to sound grandiose. She shows me the room, adjacent to her office, in which children are assessed. It is full of toys, and books, and cupboards containing files and a TV, as well as a one-way mirror for observers to take part in sessions without unsettling children who already find it hard enough to communicate.

In a typical session, Falkus plays with children and gently asks questions. She explains: "If you ask: 'Where do you clean your teeth?' they might say, 'In the morning.' Which means they don't understand 'wh' questions – what?, when?, where?, who?, why?. 'Why?' is really difficult. 'Why does the sun rise?' You need a degree in all kinds of disciplines to answer children's 'why?' questions. 'Where?' is one of the easier words. Even a young child should understand 'Where are your shoes?'"

Falkus puts out several objects and asks: "Where is the teddy/ brush/ cup/ sock/ doll/ purse?" If she put out only one thing at a time the child would find it without necessarily understanding. This may seem obvious, but that happens a lot in everyday life. "Parents sometimes do not realise that children are good at picking up non-verbal clues; they might notice you looking at the thing you have asked for." And this is why many parents fail to immediately see the problem.

When a child starts to talk, Falkus says, parents tend to say, "Oh, it's OK, he's talking." But that's only the start. "The child may only be picking up single words. (Pinker compares children at this stage with a dog in a Gary Larson cartoon. The owner says: "Okay, Ginger! I've had it! You stay out of the garbage. Understand, Ginger? Stay out of the garbage, or else!" What the dog hears is this: "Blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah blah blah GINGER blah blah blah blah blah blah.")

It is easy to forget that the acquisition of language is a physical process, intimately connected with the growth of a child's brain and the terrifyingly early process of decline: synapses peak in number between nine months and two years, at which point the child has 50% more synapses than the adult. Metabolic activity in the brain reaches adult levels by 9 to 10 months, and soon exceeds it, peaking at about four years.

"There does come a point when it is too late," says Falkus over a mug of tea in her paper-strewn office. "The natural development window is pre-school years... If you want normal development, which is what all parents want, it has to happen then. After that, I would not say to a parent, 'Forget it, there's nothing we can do.' That would not be true. But if you have delayed language skills at 5 or 6 then the outlook is pretty poor."

The founders of Ancient Rome, Romulus and Remus, were brought up by wolves, as was Kipling's Mowgli. In real life, too, children have been deprived for too long of spoken language. One of the earliest known examples, from 18th-century France, was Victor, so-called wild boy of Aveyron, whose life was heartbreakingly re-enacted in Francois Truffaut's 1969 film, L'Enfant Sauvage. Since then there have been many others, often deaf but undiagnosed, whose deprivation renders them forever mute and uncomprehending.

However, the children enrolling at our primary schools have not been reared by wild animals, and relatively few are deaf. So why are their language skills so bad, and getting worse?

“Most of us think of thinking as something we do in our own heads," says Peter Hobson, a professor of developmental psychopathology at the Tavistock Centre in London. "This must be right in some sense... (but) the fact that we become able to reflect in such an abstract way, all by ourselves, does not mean that it was all by ourselves that we acquired the ability to think in the first place. The tools of thought are constructed on the basis of an infant's emotional engagement with other people."

In his book, The Cradle of Thought: Exploring the Origins of Thinking, Hobson describes an assortment of experiments showing babies engaging with carers from the moment they are born. In one study, a Greek psychologist encouraged children less than an hour old, with seeming success, to imitate his expressions: sticking out his tongue, opening his mouth wide, closing his eyes. In another, mothers were encouraged to engage happily with babies some weeks older, and then suddenly adopt a still face. This made the baby sober up and look uneasy. In a third test, mothers and babies in different rooms were connected through television monitors, only to have the mothers' responses delayed by 30 seconds. "It was not that they were unpleasant in any way," Hobson reports. "It was just that they were suited to a different moment and not in tune with what the infant was expressing now. The effect... was considerable infant distress."

From at least as early as two months, then, a baby understands that an adult is attuned to him or her (or not). Around the baby's first birthday, as Hobson describes, there occurs what psychologists consider to be another huge leap: the baby learns to concentrate not only on a person or an object but to see people and objects together; the object becomes a focus between the baby and the other person. "The 12-month-old will show toy after toy to those around her and she watches their reactions... We are witnessing a Copernican revolution. Copernicus discovered that the earth is not the centre of the world. Twelve-month-old infants discover that the world is not a world-for-me (but) a world that also has meaning for others, and the meaning for someone else can affect the meaning it has for me."

Games such as "peekaboo", "ring-a-ring o' roses" and "this little piggy went to market" provide a helpful framework for interaction, with regular and predictable stages that enable the infant to adopt a progressively more active role. Towards the end of their first year, infants begin to switch roles with the adult.

Still at this stage, though, infants are unable to think about events or possibilities distant from the present. The next major breakthrough occurs when, to use Hobson's example, an infant takes an object (say, a spoon) and pretends to the carer that it is something else (a car). From here it is a short step to other kinds of imaginative pretence, such as denying, in spite of the evidence of chocolate all round the mouth, that they have been eating forbidden food in a carer's absence.

To many people, talking to a baby might seem no more worthwhile than standing at a bus-stop and uttering out loud, repeatedly, your wish that a bus might soon turn up. The difference is that by speaking to a baby you actively bring about the conditions for the bus, that is, the child's own discourse, to turn up sooner rather than later (or not at all). In Hobson's view, "failure in interpersonal relatedness causes impoverishment in imaginative life". In the most extreme circumstances, he suggests, autism may arise because a child receives almost nothing by way of sensitive care. If Hobson is right, then for adults to speak to babies and toddlers, and also to listen to them, should be regarded as a civic duty of the greatest importance.

Regrettably, of course, some adults are better at that than others. Hobson describes another study in which mothers with personality disorders could not interact as smoothly with their babies as others; they tended to maintain monologues, cut across infants' attempts to vocalise and failed to pick up on the infants' interests and feelings. In short, they talked at their babies, not with them. "It was a relief for all concerned when the long two minutes came to an end", for the babies, for the mothers and for the psychologists watching them. "In such cases as these, is the development of thinking compromised?"

Social class has also been identified as a factor in delayed language development. While children from different backgrounds typically develop language skills at about the same age, children from professional families gain vocabulary at a quicker rate than their peers in working class and welfare families, according to a US study. By kindergarten, a child from a welfare family could have heard 32 million words fewer than a classmate from a professional family; and by the age of three, the children of professional families actually had a larger recorded vocabulary than the parents of welfare families. (In addition, children in professional families heard a higher ratio of encouragements to discouragements than their working class and welfare counterparts - as much as 90% of parental feedback in welfare families was shown to be negative.)

But, as all the experts will tell you, class is not the only factor. Many middle-class families, they hint, rely on nannies and au pairs, whose spoken English is terrible; and professional parents who feel guilty about spending long hours at work often compensate by buying the most expensive toys and equipment rather than devoting attention to the child. As Falkus puts it: "Middle-class parents spend a lot of time trying to get children into the 'right' school, whatever that is, but if the child can't speak when it gets there then what is the point?"

Play and interaction, because they produce no immediate, tangible result, Falkus says, often fall off the parental agenda, certainly compared with providing food or tidying a bedroom. "As adults we lose the skills of play, and it is particularly difficult if you are pressed for time."

Attenborough has drawn up a list of other aspects of modern life that adversely affect parent-child relationships. Up there with the pernicious personal stereo (the wildly popular iPod, as well as more old-fashioned models) and forward-facing pushchairs she notes the loss of extended family and the rarity of family gatherings. "Many families don't eat together any more," she says, "certainly not without the constant distraction of a TV."

Earlier this year, Attenborough organised a conference directly addressing the problem of television. Delegates heard that too many young children were watching inappropriate shows: the most-watched among British four-year-olds is EastEnders. This is almost inevitable if young children have a television in their own bedroom (according to one study, 20% of two-year-olds enjoy this uncertain privilege). But also, happily, if adults help children to choose programmes appropriate to their age, watch with them, and discuss the programmes with the child either during or afterwards, this may be no less beneficial than reading books together.

"Parents have enough to feel guilt about, and we do not want to add to that," says Attenborough. "People say we might get more coverage in the short term if we are negative, make it all about ‘feckless parents parking children in front of the TV' - but we do not want this campaign to be one of those things that are fashionable for a year or two. We want it to last."

In the meantime, Attenborough has corresponded with that headteacher in Richmond, who managed to secure funding from her local council. Attenborough recommended putting on something involving drama or music, to draw in the parents, and that's what she did. Parents came, enjoyed what they saw, and went home equipped with what is known in the childcare business as "modelled play opportunities".

Arising out of what Attenborough learned in Richmond, she has had an idea about pushchairs. She found out that only one manufacturer makes chairs that allow babies to face the pusher. But the Bugaboo is expensive ("Gwyneth Paltrow has one") so Attenborough is lobbying other manufacturers to make their own, cheaper versions.

She also shows me a draft of a document she is drawing up. This contains the following note: "Perhaps some of the messages should be: 'Talk to your baby now and it will make your baby more interesting for you'; 'Don't worry about helping your child with exams when they are older: now is when they need your help most'; 'Even if you have not seen other family members or friends talking to their babies, you should (talk to yours)'."

On the Tube the other day, says Attenborough, "a sweet boy got on with his mother and sat next to me. He pointed to my newspaper, and said: 'Who is that?' His mother looked embarrassed that he was talking, and other people looked awkward too. I tried to explain that the man in the picture related to a story - I can't remember what the story was - and then I said: 'Can I turn the page?' and he said yes, and on the next page there was another picture, and I explained that too. The mother's instinct, I think, would have been to tell him to be quiet. But it was really lovely. I like it when that happens. I like little people."

Through all these initiatives - talking to toddlers on the Tube being no less important than organising conferences - Attenborough earnestly hopes to achieve what she's recently been reading about in The Tipping Point, a book by the American journalist Malcolm Gladwell that she carries with her when we meet. Taking a wide assortment of "social epidemics", from fashion, crime and public health, Gladwell describes the mysterious process by which ideas become infectious. And that's exactly what Attenborough wants to achieve.

"We want to get people to understand that you must feed, clean and keep your baby warm, and also talk to them. But how do we get across a message that seems so simple?"

(Financial Times, 17 July 2004)

Tags: Talk To Your Baby