Facilitating carers' mind-mindedness through education and early intervention

What determines the people we become? How does children's early environment affect their development? In order to answer these questions, my group's research involves working with the same families over years or even decades to chart children's development. These longitudinal studies involve families from wide-ranging social backgrounds and start when the baby is around 6 months of age. Our findings show that parents' ability to 'tune in' to what their baby might be thinking or feeling (so-called 'mind-mindedness') is an important predictor of a range of positive child outcomes (secure attachment, language and play, children's understanding of other people's thoughts and feelings). Parents who are skilled at 'reading' their babies' minds also report lower levels of parenting stress. Specifically for families in poverty, parents' ability to tune in to their babies' thoughts and feelings protects the child against problem behaviours at school-starting age. Our research thus shows the widespread benefits of parents' willingness to see things from the child's perspective.

Mind-mindedness focuses on very specific parenting behaviours and is relatively straightforward and quick to assess. The main research objective of this application is to develop and evaluate an intervention package that will inform parents in an accessible way about mind-mindedness. The intervention will consist of an animated film, short book and smartphone app that will help facilitate parents' mind-mindedness. The efficacy of this intervention package will be evaluated by exploring its impact on mother-baby interaction and child outcome in an at-risk sample (teenage mothers). The associated PhD studentships will explore (a) the relation between adoptive parents' mind-mindedness, success of the adoption placement and child outcome, and (b) mind-mindedness in childcare professionals and its relations with quality of caregiver-child interaction and child behaviour.

The intervention package is crucial for ensuring that our academic research has real-world implications and applications. There is increasing Government recognition that early intervention is key to improving the outcome of vulnerable children. For example, Field's (2010) report summarised how to prevent poor children from becoming poor adults as follows: "The things that matter most are a healthy pregnancy; good maternal mental health; secure bonding with the child; love and responsiveness of parents along with clear boundaries, as well as opportunities for a child's cognitive, language and social and emotional development" (p. 5). However, concluding that these factors are crucial is easier than establishing what to do to increase the number of vulnerable children having positive parenting experiences. My research can help inform Government thinking on early intervention in a number of important ways because mind-mindedness predicts outcomes in the key factors identified in Field's report. The main impact-related objective of this Fellowship is to extend my existing work with MPs, local government and charities to ensure that the academic research on mind-mindedness is used to inform policies and programmes relating to children and families. Delivering professional training courses to midwives, health visitors and nursery nurses will be a key component in meeting this objective.

The Fellowship research will be disseminated to academic audiences via a number of major research papers. A website and popular science book will disseminate the Fellowship activities to non-academic audiences.

The main beneficiaries of this research will be parents and children, particularly those living in poverty. Academic papers published over the last decade have reported on the positive child and family outcomes associated with higher levels of maternal mind-mindedness, with a protective effect of mind-mindedness against children's behavioural difficulties specifically in the context of low socioeconomic status. The first main aim of this Fellowship is to develop an intervention to facilitate mind-mindedness that is quick and easy to administer on a large scale, is comprehensible to vulnerable and hard-to-reach groups and can be easily incorporated into everyday life to minimise drop out. If this intervention is found to be effective, it will have the potential to have a major impact on the wellbeing of young children. Even if the positive effect of the intervention is small, with only a minority of parents benefitting, it will still have the potential for considerable benefit given that the costs of the intervention are minimal and it can thus be administered on a large scale.

The second main aim of the Fellowship is to ensure that the intervention and the results of its evaluation are brought to the attention of policy-makers via the applicant's network of contacts with MPs and local government representatives. Local and national government will be extremely interested in an intervention that is effective in improving the wellbeing of vulnerable mothers and their babies at minimal cost. This research will also be of interest to charities whose work focuses on children, families or poverty. Existing contacts in these organisations will enable the applicant to ensure that these findings can be applied as widely as possible to benefit these vulnerable groups. Facilitating parents' mind-mindedness will mean that children's outcome is likely to be improved in crucial areas such as language, play, and behaviour, all of which are key components of children's school readiness, and thus their academic engagement and achievement. Previous national initiatives aimed at tackling problems associated with child poverty, such as Sure Start, have largely failed. I believe this failure is due to the inability of Sure Start to target its activities specifically at families most in need, and a lack of standardisation and evidence-base in its schemes. Given that the Coalition Government is currently piloting a new parenting scheme to replace Sure Start, the Fellowship would be ideally timed to help policy-makers ensure that any new national programme is based on sound evidence and will be effective in reaching the most needy families. The Fellowship activities thus have considerable potential for increasing the effectiveness of public services and policy.

The professional training that will be delivered as part of the Fellowship will benefit professionals working with families and children (e.g., social workers, midwives, health visitors, nursery nurses). This professional training will be complemented by the research on mind-mindedness in (a) the adoption process, and (b) childcare settings, that will be conducted in the two Fellowship-linked Studentships. The first studentship will explore whether adoptive parents' mind-mindedness at the start of the placement predicts the success of the adoption and children's outcome. This research has the potential to benefit both professionals and families involved in adoption by helping to identify adoptive parents who are most in need of support. The second studentship will evaluate whether childcare professionals benefit from mind-mindedness training, providing data that can inform childcare practice.

My research has identified aspects of early infant-mother interaction that may ultimately enable today's disadvantaged children to become tomorrow's university graduates. The Fellowship's impact-related activities aim to make significant progress toward achieving this goal.