Jenkins – supporting families

We need to do a much better job of supporting those families than we do now. I think that would make children’s direct experience and learning within that family better.  

We are able to recognize the children than are going to be hard for their parents to parent, they’re the kinds of vulnerabilities that we now know about. They’re behavioural vulnerabilities where they’re tough kids, they’re easy to anger, they’re difficult to deal with. So we know that. We know about these kids who have language problems. So, it’s harder for them to learn language, to learn those skills of communication, and so they’re harder to parent. We know from the genetic literature, and we’ve been finding this as well, that kids with particular polymorphisms are more vulnerable to adverse environmental influences like this disadvantage that I’m talking about, or like the parents being angry and irritable within the family context or the parents not being sensitive to the kids. Certain kids will respond to that more negatively than other kids will and those vulnerabilities are both behavioural and underneath that behavioural element are probably a whole series of things. There are genetic vulnerabilities; there are also how the children have developed in utero. 

We know that kids who are very low birth weight are more neuro-developmentally vulnerable to those psychosocial adversities that I study. And so, through all of that we can really say this child’s going to need help, and we can do that pretty early on. I think we should be doing that much earlier than we are doing it, and really supporting parents, because as soon as they’ve got difficult kids, kids who are learning more slowly or who don’t have the language or who are much more difficult and irritable to handle then the parenting becomes more of a problem because the parents are, it’s so hard to handle that kid, so we should right in those early early ages, we should be putting those supports in for families and I think those supports are two kinds. I think they’re one kind of support is child care and is early schooling for kids, and I think as a society that’s something we should be thinking about. I think the other kind of support is really intervention for parents, to help those parents understand what those kids are going through. To help them get inside the minds of the children and be able to, through that understanding, to support the kids more effectively so that you don’t set up these patterns of real troubled relationships between parents and kids because we know that those troubled relationships are what predict over the whole life course how children manage in their life, do you see…too early?