Thinktank DEMOS got quite a lot of publicity yesterday for it’s new report entitled ‘Building Character written by Jen Lexmond and Richard Reeves.
Building Character was funded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) and included such names as Penelope Leach and Penny Mansfield on the advisory board. The EHRC commissioned DEMOS to undertake research into the development of character capabilities contributing to ‘life chances’ and factors influencing the development.
The methodology looks pretty robust. They reviewed up-to-date literature, carried out a new statistical analysis of the Millenium Cohort Study and analysed policy initiatives. The statistical analysis looked at information given by over 15,000 families.
The report first of all defines ‘important character capabilities’ which include empath, agency (locus of control), responsibility and self-regulation. The authors state that these should be considered ‘hard skills’ if the definition of hard and soft skills is actually useful, which they doubt.
They go on to divide parents up into 4 groups:
- Tough love. Parents are attached, warm and loving and ‘high control’ more rules, consistently enforced..
- Laissez-Faire. Parents are attached, warm and loving and ‘low control’ have fewer rules/more variably enforced.
- Authoritarian. Parents are not attached, have ‘low warmth’ and ‘high control’.
- Disengaged. Parents are ‘low warmth’ and ‘low control’.
They then also look at parents capabilities, self esteem and so on. They look at how children’s character develops in relation to the above style of parenting. They also compare all the usual ‘risk’ factors such as low income, family make-up, employment, ethnicity and so on.
I think the findings are remarkable. In virtually all cases, allowing for the capabilities of the parents the ‘risk factors’ become negligible. The style of parenting is the most important factor in how children develop these ‘hard’ life skills. Children of ‘tough love’ and ‘Laissez Faire’ parents develop character far better when all factors are taken into account than authoritarian and disengaged. Children of Tough Love parents do significantly better and children of Disengaged parents do worse of all.
This is probably hardly surprising but it does bring about some interesting thoughts. All the money being poored into providing childcare, welfare-to -work, reducing teenage pregnancies and so on is seemingly wasted. In actual fact having working or young parents makes no difference to outcomes for children. It is the style of parenting that is all important.
Demos make a very convincing case for refocussing public spending and energy on providing parenting skills and support to impact on the style of parenting.
There is really far too much information in this report to summarise in a blog post, but I’ve hopefully whetted your appetite enough to go and read for yourself. If not, here are some quotes from the report which might convince you! Check out the Breastfeeding one – one of my favourites 🙂
An analysis undertaken by Kiernan of the MCS found that family status was only very weakly associated with children’s development, once other factors – like poverty, maternal depression and so on – were controlled for.
When we control for other characteristics – namely parental style and parental confidence – the relationship between family structure and child outcomes disappears almost entirely.
Crucially, the outcomes for children of lone parents and step-parents are explained by the differences in other family characteristics such as parental confidence and self esteem; being a lone parent or a step-parent does not adversely affect child outcomes in itself.
There is a strong association between children’s development of character capabilities and breast-feeding to six months. This effect remains even after controlling for all other variables in the model, including primary carer attachment
There is no connection between paid employment on the part of either the main carer, or the second parent, and the development of character capabilities in children.
Parental disability and parental ethnic background are associated with significantly different outcomes for children at age five, but all differences are outweighed when parental ability was taken into account.
Now, I’m off to peruse the rest of the DEMOS website as this report is pretty good in my opinion. Just wonder… is anyone going to listen?
AP fantastic 