People like US

Wanna get your child on the development fast track?  Got $400 and time in the day to spare for a course of classes? Live in an affluent area in the US? Then do not fear, commercially run parenting centres like this Boston based chain may be opening in an area near you soon.  

Little Teadrinker and I sampled our first session last week - we chose the Movers and Groovers developmental class for 9-11 month olds. Having navigated our way through the centre’s enticing posh baby shop to the ‘studio’, we were greeted by a circle of 10 cheery moms and their babies.  Our Akela was an uber parenting expert and Masters qualified early years pedagogue - Brits: think Floella Benjamin meets Tanya Byron.  After an initial exchange of baby related woes and advice, events kicked off with songs and stories, the moms and the brightest babies fluently baby-signing along. Next up was a range of motor development activities involving high-tech props including a parachute. The moms enthused from the sidelines as the babies crawled clambered and toddled around happily in the centre of the circle. The vibe was relaxed, although the competitive under-tone irrepressible “Has Aiden crawled through the tunnel yet?”, “Did I hear Josie say quack already?”.  Akela rounded up with some Thanks Giving advice on safety and dealing with sensory overload, finally sharing some Christmas shopping tips on where to buy the best wooden toys.

The pushy posh parent phenomenon is by no means exclusive to the US, yet in the UK we have not seen the likes of private parenting centres.  Could the reason be that the state has captured the market?  After all, Sure Start Children’s Centres now exist across England offering families with young children universal free access to everything from baby massage to dad’s stay and play and breastfeeding consultations - where they are run well, middle class parents come flocking.  The US equivalent, which started in 1965 and was an antecedent to Sure Start, is not open to better off families.  Typically for the US, Head Start is targeted exclusively at those on low incomes.  Obama is a firm believer and used the Economic Stimulus Package to boost its funding to the tune of $2billion.

Yet in the UK the principle of a universallity is proving hard to defend in the face of massive pressure on public finances - why shouldn’t “middle class freebies” be first in line for cuts?  Ministers are hinting that Children’s Centres could go the same way as Head Start, and as the UK's Child Benefit system, with only the most disadvantaged drawing the full benefit in the future. 

The argument for targeting Sure Start seems, initially at least, pretty compelling. The original architects of the Sure Start programme argued that universal, free access was necessary to avoid stigmatisation of services - something which had been a problem with Headstart. Yet England’s Sure Start experience has shown that even an open-to-all service does not necessarily entice those in the most dire situations, many of whom run a mile from anything that looks like authority or institution.  An early evaluation showed that Children’s Centres were failing in this respect, and a lot more money had to be pumped in to reach out to those families.

But before throwing the baby out with the bath water, politicians in the UK should take time to look once more at the US experience.  It reveals at least three troubling trade-offs...

1/  Targeting early years services could be culturally divisive. As our little venture last week illustrates, while it may be pleasant to be surrounded by “people like us”, the US’s targeted approach has led to a socially segregated, two-tier system.  A sorting effect happens of course to an extent anyway when children reach school age (watch Waiting for Superman for a powerful tale on the divided US school system), but by drawing the line so clearly about who accesses what so early in a child’s life differences between social classes are being reinforced at every level: social networks, peer effects, parents’ aspirations expectations, notions of tastefulness - remember the wooden toys...

2/ There’s a risk of disenfranchising the wrong groups.  A large proportion of families are likely to be left out of the equation all together - not poor enough to qualify for publicly subsidised services and not wealthy enough to fork out for the private alternative.  Many of the would-be excluded families make up the “squeezed middle” whose needs politicians both sides of the Atlantic are now claiming to acknowledge.  

3/ A minority services is often a weak service.  Headstart has survived an incredibly long time, but only just.  Most would acknowledge that it has remained a marginalised service with significant shortcomings: notably, the most comprehensive evaluation to date came out in January showing that children's attendance in Headstart had no impact on their academic, social-emotional or health status at the end of first grade. The lack of sustained benefits has been troubling its proponents for years, but attempts to fix it have been relatively limited.  Such drift would likely not have been tolerated had pointy elbowed middle class parents seen it as in their interests to agitate for a solution.  Crucially, the lack of broad public support is now putting the programme at risk, in spite of Obama’s wish to improve and build on the programme.  


Last week, a vote to renew the fiscal stimulus money for early years was kicked into the long-grass by Congress, meaning that it might be ditched entirely and hundreds of thousands of children could be kicked off the Headstart rolls. The issue hasn’t even made the national press.

Toy store story

Every Thursday morning a sea of strollers covers the entrance to Campusville Toys.  At the back of the shop, the East Coast’s answer to Rolf Harris strums his guitar and sings, egged on by around thirty under-4s. 

Rolf is not a bad performer but, in truth, his uncanny resemblance to a chimpanzee must be a boost to his kiddie X-factor. He takes up his guitar and monkey mayhem ensues.  Pre-crawlers flap arms and down lego pieces and other floor debris, while the more mobile little chimps swing from the rafters.  They snatch toys, pull things off shelves, and bounce around, jostling for position at the front when a favourite tune comes on. Enthusiastic nannies, moms and the odd dad sing along mouthing the words with tremendous gusto.  Probably, like me, they’ve come just as much for themselves as their kids - a little adult contact goes a long way in breaking up long hours spent caring for a young child.  For an hour or so after the event beleaguered shop assistants tiptoe around us stragglers hoovering, sorting and running an inventory of the damage. I wonder sometimes if all this can be worth it for the store, we didn’t even pay to get in after all. But of course it is - the tills have taken more in a couple of hours than the rest of the week combined.

In small town America, it seems that just about every high street big enough to have a post office also has an enticing independent or small-chain toy store. Hosting weekly parent and baby sing-alongs, story-times and coffee hours is pretty standard - a lot see it as their bread and butter. Events typically attract dozens of local families, thus etching out the place of toy-stores as meeting places for young families and community hubs.

We’ve looked to publicly funded Sure Start Children’s Centres and libraries for this kind of thing in the UK in recent years. In the face of radical plans by the new Coalition Government to pay back the deficit and reduce spending, both are now facing significant cuts and potential closures. So, might our toy shops go the American way?  

On one level, its a no brainer.  State provided services shrink enabling small businesses to grow into the spaces they once occupied.  Profits get boosted and children and parents are able to access equivalent services to the ones they used before. The shopkeeper’s community knowledge and desire to get people through the door might even lead to events which are better attuned to the needs and desires of local families.  Its the perfect allegory for David Cameron’s “Big Society” master-plan.

Yet in cultural terms, UK retailers have a distance to travel to take up their spot in the Big Society.  In contrast to the US service culture, some still seem to see their customers as the enemy.  At our local London toy shop, patrons are greeted by a sign on the door that shouts “KNOCK BEFORE ENTRY.  NO TOUCHING.  CHILDREN ONE AT A TIME”.  Once you’re through the door, if you don’t accept immediate assistance, you’ll feel the shop assistant’s eyes burning holes in the back of your head. Its a stoney stare that says in no uncertain terms: your-brat-breaks-anything-and-you-both-get-booted... Thanks very much.

A more serious question, however, is whether families can really draw value from playing along with what is essentially a private business’s marketing strategy.  I don’t think the answer is straight forward.  There are obviously a lot of good things going on at Campusville Toys’s sing-a-long, just the same as they would in a Children’s Centre or library (exposure to language, child social interactions, adult networks being established, etc).  But a toy store is not a Children’s Centre.  It is not designed with child development in mind, and that’s not the priority of the people who run it.  Some of the toys are educational, but a lot are simply designed to be eye-catching.  The sheer amount of toys around is enough to bring on a bout of ADHD in the most focused child - which would explain the rafter swinging.  And the frenzied grabbing at stuff off shelves is not just an unfortunate side-effect from the retailers point of view.  It is the very purpose of the event.  The more children grab, the more their parents buy. 

As services are cut back in the UK, its worth looking at the way things are done in the States where commercial and civic society play a larger role (this is something I intend to do more of in this blog). But as always, its important to drill beneath the surface to see what’s really going on. A dose of toy-lust? A little frivolous spending? A momentary shortening of a child’s attention span?  On the face of it, these trade-offs don’t sound too major.  But writ large they could lead to an undesirable creeping commercialisation of public life.  

I like to be in America

It looks as if this week’s storm in a teacup may be blowing over. Obama’s call for tolerance following the mad Pastor’s Koran burning threat has not even featured on Fox News’ politics site and CNN have done a brilliant job reassuring us that the American melting pot is a happy love-in with a story about two guys on a road trip “Ali and Tariq were embraced nearly everywhere they went, from a Confederate souvenir shop in Georgia to the streets of Las Vegas, Nevada, to the hills of North Dakota” ...

Here in Campusville the locals certainly do their bit to reach out across cultural boundaries, making us feel very welcome despite our eccentric Anglo-ways. Advice and invitations abound from fellow parents, whether its Pamela in the playground, Janey in the bookshop and Christie in the coffee shop. The grocery store’s exotic international aisle even has a UK shelf baring marmite, Tetley teabags, baked beans and Ready Brek (don’t it make you proud).

In return, we’ve done our best to get on and fit in. I’ve got face ache and exhaustion from my efforts to be smilier, earlier and cleaner than comes naturally. And when our new friends tell us proudly that there’s a sing-along at the toy-store, a new-mom meet-up in Starbucks or baby yoga at the expensive gym in the next town I resist the temptation to boast about England's Children's Centres. Would the moms and dads here be envious if they knew? You don’t miss what you never had I guess. And thanks to their confident networking abilities and strong spending power, America’s ‘big society’ seems to be thriving all by itself in this middle class town.