Parenting is too important to be left to parents alone

Back in the 1950s, my parents raised my sister and I as they thought right. They gave us a caring, nurturing and stimulating environment, both physically and mentally. I don't recall being physically chastised, although it may have happened. We were brought up in a loving home, with what seems, years later, an appropriate mixture of discipline and boundary setting. We spent car journeys playing memory, mental arithmetic and word games.

When he arrived home from his work, my father told us made-up stories before bedtime, still wearing his work suit. We were taken to the village library every Saturday when my parents borrowed books, and so did we. Some of the nurturing was delivered by the state, and I clearly recall being taken to the village hall to endure my weekly cod liver oil supplement. And at that time, processed sugary foods were much less prevalent than now, so healthy eating was the norm.

I describe all this not in any attempt to describe my childhood through rose-tinted spectacles, but to indicate the influences on me as I grew up. When we became parents in the 1980s, my wife Sheila and I did much the same for our own children. I'm sure that when we have grandchildren our children will, almost without thinking about it, provide the same sort of experiences for their own children.

These inter-generational experiences will resonate with many readers. Since I was growing up, we have learned a lot about what makes for good parenting and we understand much more than we did about child development. As a nation, though, we have a somewhat haphazard mix of state intervention – putting folic acid in bread to reduce the risk of spina bifida in babies on the one hand, yet allowing masses of sugar in drinks and food on the other - that leave new parents largely to fend for themselves.

Antenatal and early childhood health care is good, but we are curiously shy about educating new parents in the breadth of what makes good parenting. I was delighted when the Children's Commissioner for England Maggie Atkinson came out this month explicitly against any sort of physical chastisement. When parenting goes horribly wrong, we describe it as "neglect" or "abuse", and in the worst cases we take children into care. There is, though, a wide spectrum of nurture, with some parents providing the sort of childhood environment that I enjoyed, and others, through ignorance as much as deliberate fault, providing a much less positive environment. There is a link with poverty, but it isn't a directly causal link. Financial poverty makes it more difficult but not impossible to provide a positive environment for children. Sure Start children's centres have made a real difference, and I have seen some brilliant parental engagement work. But it is not enough. There are charities such as Booktrust, which ensure every child has starter books, and that's a superb initiative, but again it's not enough.

Impoverishment of mental stimulation in young children is the most concerning thing - it can be both almost invisible and have life-long effects. Talking face-to-face with your child, reading, playing games, using toys, and not ignoring or parking her in front of the television – these are all important.

At the CYP Now Early Intervention Conference in November, I learned about the solid research that shows that young children can generate up to two million synapses - mental connections - every single second, with about 1,000 trillion synapses by the age of three. After that, the brain starts to consolidate synapses to those that are needed. That means that if developmental stimulus is minimal in early childhood, it has permanent effects - the development has happened, or not, by the age of three. Going back to my childhood and the experiences of our children, we didn't know about synapses, but there was a lot of active stimulation.

What I am leading to is the notion that parenting is too important to be left to parents to work it out on their own. We need a societal shift towards a general understanding of parenting and child development. This can only come through universal school-based education. The curriculum is already over-crowded, and I'm not sure what should be displaced. But I am certain that all new parents would be better able to raise their own children if they already had a practical understanding of how children develop and grow.

John Freeman CBE is a former director of children's services and is now a freelance consultant Read his blog at cypnow.co.uk/freemansthinking