Naomi Eisenstadt Talks about Our a Better Start Programme

I’ve spent forty years in the work of children and poverty, basically, so my field of expertise is largely under-fives, but the main focus of my work has been children living in poverty and the impact of poverty on children. I was the first director of Sure Start, but before running Sure Start, before becoming a civil servant, I was the chief executive of a medium-sized children’s charity, and I started my career in Britain working in a Social Services day nursery, so I’ve had very, very frontline experience with under-fives, and in those days mainly mothers, but these days we want to work with mothers as well as fathers. There are lots of things that affect very young families. For me a major issue is poverty itself. Many, many poor parents are also very good parents, but it’s much harder to be a good parent if you’re poor. It’s much harder to do those things that we know are really good children if you’re worrying about paying the bills, if you’re worrying about your housing, if your washing machine breaks down and you can’t afford to have it fixed. These are things that have a different impact on families with very limited resources. A Better Start can make a big difference for these families, by helping them to understand what’s really important for children, by providing practical support as well as good parenting programmes - I’ve always said that if you have the parenting class in a place where there’s a free launderette, I’m there! So if you can help people solve their practical problems along with doing those behaviours that we know are very good for children, particularly on diet and nutrition, poverty has a huge impact and we can help. We chose three areas of focus: social and emotional development, diet and nutrition; and language development, because we felt that the programme needed focus – particularly to be evaluated: these are things we can measure. But children’s attunement and attachment as infants has an enormous impact on their later social development, and in my view I’m demonstrating how important language is by doing this interview. Children who do not develop adequate language skills get very frustrated in their inability to make their feelings known, and this is where you get classroom behaviour problems, because if you can’t solve your problems through talking them out, then you’ll wind up thumping someone or girls will wind up sitting in the corner. And on diet and nutrition, this is the most difficult one, because we know that obesity is a huge issue for the National Health Service and for adults, but we don’t really know what interventions work on ensuring a healthy diet from a very, very early age that stays through, so the most difficult one is diet and nutrition, and has potentially the most impact in terms of future health outcomes.