UK parents, listen up: you’re letting your babies down. So warn husband-and-wife team Brian Jackson, director of the Child Minding Research and Development Unit, and child psychologist Sonia Jackson, writing in the Observer Magazine on 22 September 1974. They kick off a three-part series on child development with a stern rebuke: we are failing our little nippers in the ‘vital’ preschool years, a time ‘when so much of a child’s intellectual development is won or lost’.
Every bairn is a genius in nappies and we must recognise ‘the mind-dizzying potentiality of our children’. That potential, the Jacksons argue, is being thwarted, owing to ‘the immediate world into which the baby is born’. Babies may be programmed to learn, ‘but in our society, and this is not a problem confined to poor or poorly educated families,’ we are letting them down.
There are, they decry, ‘three cardinal ways in which early growth is delayed or restricted’. Top of the list, here in the UK, is ‘Boring the baby.’ Not so in ‘many African or Asian villages’, which may be ‘much more dangerous’ than in the UK, but at least they do not hold their infants back with ‘the trappings of affluence’ such as ‘cots and prams’.
Far worse is the way we make our babies sleep. This is a ‘deadly restriction’ and one that UK parents ignore. Why? Because a sleeping baby ‘means a free adult’. The result? ‘Every day, millions of babies spend endless, empty hours lying on their backs, unable to move their heads to vary their view – so they sleep for lack of alternatives.’
The third cardinal offence is ‘clocking them on’, which is to say, treating a baby as an object, not a person, albeit a ‘delicate, precious and loved’ object. Squealers are wheeled about in ‘trendy prams’ or sport ‘a prima donna’s wardrobe’.
The result? ‘Babies in Britain are often worse off than in many of those poorer parts of the globe about which we think with pity.’
