Sue Palmer - childhood education specialist, author and 'childhood campaigner'

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Marcus Railton:     Hello, I’m Marcus Railton and welcome back to the second series of the ScotsCare podcast. ScotsCare is the only charity dedicated to helping disadvantaged Scots in London through a range of support, including financial grants, advocacy, counselling and sheltered housing for older Scots, job coaching, social events, befriending and support for children and families. The charity’s been running for 400 years to help break the cycle of poverty experienced by some Scots. In the new series, I’ll be chatting with guests from all walks of life, from celebrities and authors, athletes and actors, business entrepreneurs to academics, all with one thing in common, Scots heritage and they enjoy a good blather. Sue Palmer is the ScotsCare podcast guest this week. She is a former head teacher in the Scottish Borders, an educationalist, having written over 200 books. These books include Toxic Childhood and 21st Century Boys. Sue and I sat down a while back and as a father of three, I was really looking forward to this chat, especially as two of my kids are lads. We chatted a lot about the book Toxic Childhood and how much it scared me. The thorny subject of social media came up and how much screen time all our kids are subject to these days. What was really interesting was talking about generational change, especially in respect to how I played outside in the streets as a kid compared to how my children play outside these days. She is a truly remarkable writer and speaker. It was a joy to chat with her. So here she is, Sue Palmer on the ScotsCare podcast. Hi, Sue.

Sue: Hello.

Marcus Railton: Thank you for doing this for us.

Sue: Thank you for inviting me.

Marcus Railton: how are you feeling? Because you said you were getting over a virus. Are you getting over Covid?

Sue: I think it was Covid, actually. I didn’t have any of the testing things in the house, but all the symptoms fitted, and it was nasty. And I’m now really, really tired, so I think I might have that sort of fatigue thing that you get the end of it as well.

Marcus Railton: Yeah, I’ve had it twice now and the first time I had it, I kind of ruined the kids’ Christmas. I had it, right. I tested post on Christmas Eve two years ago and then on Christmas Day, I was. I was useless.

Sue: It knocks you, doesn’t it? Absolutely knocks you out.

Marcus Railton: And then I had. I had a full, once I was clear of it, I still had a full six weeks and I was getting to the, you know, where I was like, you were talking about being exhausted and I got to like, week five and started to feel a bit kind of, oh, this is. This worries me about. Because I’m I was felt okay, but if I sat down, I could just go to sleep. I felt so exact. But then there seemed to be like. Like somebody flicked a switch on. On week six and it just seemed to go away.

Sue: Please, God. Please God. Because it’s just. I’m sleeping for Britain at the moment.

Marcus Railton: Funny, is it? The next time I had it, which again was just this Christmas, but just before, it was like Covid light. It was. It was like an inconvenience rather than the first time that really blindsided me.

Sue: Well, if you were you inoculated the first time, had you had the vaccination?

Marcus Railton: Not the first time.

Sue: And then there you go. I mean, I’ve had all the vaccinations all the way through, so I don’t think it was anywhere near. I mean, I was only feeling really poorly for about a week, but it’s just this tiredness, so. Ah, thank goodness for the vaccinations. I see.

Marcus Railton: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I hope, you know, speedy recovery and all that, but thank you. You’re very much an honorary Scott, because you were born in Manchester, but you’ve been here forever.

Sue: I worked it out this morning. I have been here for half my adult life. I was born in… Well, I lived in Salford, but it was happened to be born in Manchester because my mum was in a maternity hospital there, but came to Scotland in 1970 at the age of 19. And actually, I think. I think actually did fall in love as I came out of Waverly Station because it was a beautiful sunny day, and Edinburgh just was so beautiful. and I was knocked out by. I love living in Scotland. So, I was here till 83 when a terrible domestic drama sent me home. And then, I didn’t get back until 2007. So, I’ve been here again 16 years now. But all the time I was away, I was back in living in England and, all I could think of was getting back to Scotland, actually.

Marcus Railton: So, are you in Edinburgh now?

Sue: I’m in Edinburgh now, yeah.

Marcus Railton: Somebody else that I was chatting to is an author, actually. A children’s author called Debbie Leiorie.

Sue: Oh no yes I’ve come across Debbie.

Marcus Railton: And she was talking about Waverley and she was talking about how much she loved Edinburgh. Because as you come out of Waverley, as you go up the steps, Edinburgh just seems to rise above you.

Sue: And you’ve got the castle at one end and you’ve got that bank of beautiful, beautiful buildings on your left. There’s Scott monuments going up on the right. And in Front of you, the gardens and the two art galleries and I mean I was raised in Salford for goodness sake. And this was just like I was a European city. A beautiful, beautiful European city. just stunning. I actually dropped my luggage and actually said out loud why did nobody tell me?

Marcus Railton: It is beaut… And it’s changed. Edinburgh’s changed so much in the last 20 years ago since I used to work in Leith before the Parliament and it was just a bomb site, you know, and, and then then over the last 20 years in the Parliament there and the gentrification and it’s just, it’s really. But hugely expensive.

Sue: The trams. And the trams of course. But I taught in briefly in Leith, in Bonnington, which was a. It was pretty, pretty dreadful area. My goodness, that some of the. The lives those kids were living. And then my granddaughter ended up going back to Bonnington School because it’s now the Gaelic school and they’ve made it beautiful. So yeah, it’s changed a huge amount that during the period that I was away it changed and I don’t know absolutely for the better in terms of the posh bit of the city, but certainly the living conditions down in other parts of Infinitely better.

Marcus Railton: Yeah. Well, what I wanted to talk to you today was mainly about kids and parenting and Because I found you through one of your books and you’ve written so many books, but I found you through the book Toxic Childhood, how the Modern World is Damaging Our Children and what We Can Do About It. And I was thinking about, you know, I struggle with being a parent. I love it. It’s the best thing I’ve ever done in my life. I’ve got two boys and a girl. 14 and 10 are my boys and my little girl India is four. And I think the thing I struggle with a lot of the time is that my only point of reference as a parent is me and how I grew up and what my parents did and. And I sometimes I wonder if it’s. Parents of every subsequent generations think the same thing, that the world is changing so much and the world is changing so fast. But because I think this all the time now that I look at what Noah and Raife and Indie go through and the amount of information they have coming at them and the amount of things they have to deal with. And for me growing up in the 70s and 80s, that was phenomenally different because we didn’t have the Internet, we didn’t have television. After Blue Peter finished at 5,25. You know, we didn’t have. I remember watching telly at the weekend and it finished it at like 11:30 or 12 and then world of Sport would come on. So we didn’t have this constant bombardment of information. Do you think it is different, genuinely different for our under 16s now?

Sue: I think that you, your generation, and my daughter was one of them as well, was one of the last generations that got what was typically in the overwhelming majority of cases throughout the millennia, what people thought of as a childhood. And that meant that a lot of the time you were outdoors playing with your mates, with a great deal of freedom, that you lived in a community where you actually knew quite a lot. People possibly had grannies and aunties and people around as well as parents. One of the things I hear very often from kids from Scotland is, you know, my mum’d give, well old people now but my mum would give us a jelly peace and we’d be out and it’d say come back. When the lights go on, the street lights go. so it was. But that is normal for human beings. one of the things, I mean I was in education for most of my professional career so I was a specialist in literacy and it was all about schooling and everything. And it wasn’t until I had a, I did an interview with a speech and language therapist in 1998 for the Times Educational Supplement. and she’d found really quite, quite distressing statistics on children’s language development changing from the late 80s going downhill. very young children’s language development going downhill from the late 80s to the late 90s. And we just started talking about why this could have happened. And she just said the world has changed so much. We’ve just not really thought about the knock-on effects of the fact that childhood is different and that talk with her and then subsequently talking to experts in other areas was why I wrote Toxic Childhood because I think it is a very different experience. And I particularly was bothered for parents because I think like you say, parents are more isolated and more pressurised now than I think in any time in history. And your parents hardly saw you, you were out playing all the time.

Marcus Railton: But do you know what? Yes, we were out playing. And that’s. It’s strange you should say that because I think I said that to a few podcast guests about mom mu. I would say to my mum, when do you want me back? And they’d say when the lights come on. And I have this clear memory of, you know, I better run, the lights are going to come on. And I didn’t see my dad much. You know, my mum and dad were together, but my dad worked hard, and he worked six days a week and he was a driving instructor and I often used to have an experience of seeing my dad driving past in his car, you know, teaching people to drive. And I would wave to him, and he would wave out the window. But he finished at 8 or sometimes 9 o’clock at night and then he’d be away early in the morning, so I’d be lucky if I saw him on a Sunday. So, it was a very different type of parenting.

Sue: Well, I didn’t see m much of my. I mean actually I don’t think dads were especially if they had jobs that weren’t around the home, you know, if they weren’t farming or something like that. Didn’t see them. My dad was either away working or he was playing cricket. So, you know, you didn’t see much of dads really, did you?

Marcus Railton: No, no, was, it was different.

Sue: But again, that’s why we now talk about parenting. I mean there wasn’t any. I think the word didn’t come into the dictionary really till about the 90s when it became necessary in order to help dads recognise that they actually had a part in this procedure.

Marcus Railton: Yes.

Sue: because that’s the other. A big thing that’s changed is women going into the workforce means that there’s a lot more actually paid for childcare and that sort of thing. So it is a very, very different world that these k the kids are living in and the, the parents are living in. And I don’t think that policymakers have really taken it into account. Their job has been to get parents into the workforce. Hard working parents was the phrase that you used to hear right through the early 20th, 2000s. and you know, there’s keeping the kids off the street. It was the reason really that they were starting, some degree of funded nursery provision. But it’s not really been thinking about, you know, what actually is it doing to everybody, that we are living such very, very different lives. And I think that they’ve turned, I mean the parenting industry with all its books and it. And I was so worried about toxic childhood. I really didn’t want it to be part of that because all these books about how to do it and everything, it starts making you feel so inadequate. My point I was trying to make is it’s not your fault. You, the world’s changed. And it’s about time we all started thinking how we change. Well, my current job is running a campaign for change in universal services. I think we should do what seems to be the most productive thing for early childhood and that is introduce a kindergarten stage similar to what they have in the Nordic countries to reinstate the play.

Marcus Railton: Well, yeah, and that really interested me when I read your thoughts on that because, you know, my three kids, we live just outside London. My three kids went to school at age four, which is phenomenally young, ridiculous, insane. And let’s go back to, let’s talk about this book, Toxic Childhood because it scared the life out of me because so much resonated because I’m living through it. And a lot of the time, as I said, as a parent, as a person, I feel overwhelmed by the world. But can you tell us and the listeners what you mean by toxic?

Sue: well, basically I called it Toxic childhood Syndrome. It’s simply that all these things have come together. I ended up when I used to go around talking to parents and one of the reasons I’m now a campaigner is I couldn’t bear the fact that these parents were all so anxious and I thought, you know, flipping government’s got to step in on this. So that’s why I started sort of campaigning for changes to the education system. But basically I reckon it was like a perfect storm that happened in the 80s. You’ve got three cultural fronts hitting at once. The first one was the incredible speed of progress driven by digital technology. I mean it really hot it up in the 1980s. the second one was the sort of acceptance of consumerism, competitive consumerism as a sort of global economic force on the planet, that Reaganism and Thatcherism and everything hit them. And the third was the, the fact that women were beginning to want to have a bit more of a life than just being stuck on the domestic front all the time. And you were seeing more and more women wanting to move into workforce so that there was a change in the, in the personal family circumstances there and then these masses, massive changes going on all hitting at once and you never knew where the next one was coming from.

Marcus Railton: And my family has been affected by all of these things. and that my kids have no concept of linear television anymore because anything they want to see, they want to see it now. And my dad who passed away during COVID we used to go and visit him and he lived in Salco in the west coast of Scotland and he had a telly with an Aerial in roof. And the kids would say oh well can we watch whatever fireman Sam? And my dad would say to them, you can watch what’s on the telly. And they couldn’t grasp that concept. And then the other point of the triangle, that kind of globalisation you were talking about and the. My kids can get anything they want from anywhere on the planet from, you know, not that they should do because we try and enforce our sustainability policy in our house of should we really be ordering this thing from China? You know, it’s, it’s not the way to go. And that kind that just terrifies me. And then my wife and I were out working at the same time, so we had the kids in childcare and that was another mortgage. You know, that was at one point. At that point we were working when my oldest was very young and we were. What I or my wife was bringing home was just about covering the childcare. So, we were working just. I think there was 40 quid a month left at the end of the month is bonkers figures.

Sue: And the thing is everybody’s so busy just keeping the head above water and it’s going to get even worse with the cost-of-living crisis going on. Nobody ever, you know, sort of makes a fuss about we’ve got to do something about this. But I mean we have the good news. I decided when I got, as I say, I got a bit depressed in the book, but I’ve always had huge sort of faith in the human spirit and you know that we are pretty clever species, we should be able to sort this stuff out. and the good news I think is that evolutionary biology, it’s fascinating. it’s what I’ve been doing the last 20 years now and it’s. We are so successful because we are so social. Essentially, it’s our social nature and our adaptability that’s made us such a successful species. And that is still in there, that resilience and that adaptability and our capacity to collaborate is still there. So, there is absolutely no reason why we can’t adjust the way we live in order to make it more comfortable for everyone. I don’t mean comfortable in fact in the idea of being able to buy things you want on the Internet from China. I mean humanly, socially and emotionally comfortable. And if you look around at the countries that are making the best fist of it, the Nordic countries always come top, the Netherlands usually doing pretty well. But a lot of it is, I think to do with the way we raise children so that the children are adaptable, creative, resilient, social and able in though those are the really important things that’ll see you through. but what we’re obsessed with is getting them into school at the earliest possible opportunity and starting them on literacy and numeracy. And of course, as I said, my subject was literacy, so for a lot of my life that was what I was about and it was a horrific understanding that, you know, I’d been contributing to this, that it was totally unnecessary what I’d been doing, a lot of it. You don’t really need to start teaching children to read till there’s seven. Certainly works in Finland and Switzerland and places.

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Marcus Railton: What we don’t have in England here is this primary one or key stage one, year one testing, which they do have in Scotland, which is. I cannot imagine my daughter who is just becoming a person, you know, having to sit down and say, we’re going.

Sue: To do a test. She does have to

00:20:00

Sue: now PR in as, ah, she goes into reception.

Marcus Railton: Oh, really?

Sue: They’ve got a sort of a baseline that they do in the first weeks of reception now. so she will be doing something and that’s, that’s the baseline and then she’ll also have the phonics testing in. I think that’s year one and year two. So, I mean, it’s, they’ve, they’ve dropped some of the, the testing, but they’re still doing the stuff on the little ones. There is this absolute obsession with cramming phonics into little kids, which is even worse in England and Scotland. But I do agree with you. I mean, I couldn’t be leaving when Scotland for the first time ever introduced literacy number testing at P1 absolute nonsense and really, really just damaging for a lot of kids.

Marcus Railton: Have you seen the Ken Robinson animation Changing Education Paradigms?

Sue: Absolutely. He was a wonderful man.

Marcus Railton: That kind of blew me away. It was kind of stuff that I had, I couldn’t have articulated myself, but I always suspected my wife and I always felt that way and I must have watched that a hundred times and thought, you know, the way we are educating our child, our children now is the way we were educating our children a hundred years ago. Yet the world has turned massively and my wraith, my 10-year-old goes to school and he, we a blue shirt and a red tie and it chokes him all day long and you know he comes home and he looks like he’s just been dragged through a bush. It’s just not the way that child needs to exist.

Sue: Oh well, I mean I’ll continue to bang my head against, you know, the policymakers as long as I live and there are a lot of other people doing it. I mean eventually, maybe we hope one day we’ll make some difference. Actually, have to admit at the last SNP conference in October, the membership of the Scott National Party, passed a motion for a kindergarten stage for children up to age 7. So, we’re waiting to see whether anything will come of that with the current Scottish government. But in England you’ve got a number of good people. There’s an organisation called More Than a Score which are brilliant crowd who are sort of fighting to get testing stopped in primary schools and you know, focus on other aspects of children’s development. and can I just say as a literacy specialist it is not that I don’t think literacy and numeracy are important. I just think we don’t need to start hammering on about them until children are about six and a half to seven. Actually, I’d prefer seven and it. There’s research being done in New Zealand that shows that it doesn’t matter whether you start teaching at 5 or you start teaching it at 7. By the time we’re about 11 it’s evened out. There’s still a. They’re all managed. It’s just that the ones who’ve started later tend to like it more and tend to be rather better at comprehension.

Marcus Railton: When I was a kid, my mum was a voracious reader. Our house was filled with books. She actually, she worked for Harper Collllin and so our house was full of books all the time and so we read and my brother read and maybe it’s just because you know, I didn’t live in this 24 hour society with tablets and YouTube and stuff like that. And my older boy Noah, it’s a battle to get him off TikTok. I could probably, you know, count the number of books in the last year that he’s read. On one hand we’re always out to read and I just wonder is there a problem in modern society and short form video that kills off kids attention spans so they don’t want to.

Sue: It’s definitely affecting all of our attention spans. I mean, well, it would because there’s just so much to distract you. And you know, we are, you know, we’re. We’ve got. The reason we got two sides to the brain is that one side is essentially a sort of more focused side and the other side’s more sort of keeping attention to the rest of the world. So, I don’t know whether you come across a guy called Ian McGilchrist.

Marcus Railton: No.

Sue: Another person who’s got one of those RSA animates. And there’s a very good one about talking about his work. And he’s saying if you think about a bird, it too has a bipartite brain. And if it’s looking for food, it’s got to be really focusing hard on looking at the ground and pecking. But it’s also the same time got to be keeping aware for predators or, the fact that maybe there’s some better food around somewhere else. So you’re doing this. This two things and that’s why you’ve got a corpus callosum in the middle. You’re going backwards and forwards between the two. But if you’ve got hugely distracting and distracting material, which actually is very attractive, appeals to things that matter, then it’s. We are going to have a, more trouble focusing. so it’s that at the bottom of a lot of the problems that I think we see for kids learning nowadays, it is this capacity to focus attention. And one of the things about reading is that you, it hones your capacity to focus into that page.

Marcus Railton: Yeah. And I find it very settling is I think we’re all guilty of it. And, you know, and I try to read, and I tend to read at night and you know, I get six or seven pages and then the book slips down and I fall asleep and you know, and we went on holiday, must be three months ago now. And I think I chun through three books and it was restful, and I felt good about it. And this is, you know, I’m always.

Sue: Going to part of that’s. You’re relaxing. Yeah. you’re on holiday, so you’re relaxing. There’s not other things that are that going on. But again, on this one, the good news is it’s not just reading that makes you able to focus attention. I mean that you need to be able to focus attention in, in order to learn to read in the first place. Particularly to read with enjoyment rather than just have something crammed into your head by people making you learn by rote. that we are, you know, our capacity for learning is phenomenal and the best way is through play. So, if you watch a small child playing, they can concentrate for hours on something which looks perfectly meaningless to you. My daughter used to take all the books out of the bookcase. She’d spend hours on it piling them up and quite often she’d be doing interesting sorts of piling. Then I’d have to put all the damn things back. But you know, children will play and the point about play is it’s self-directed, it’s coming from inside. So that’s the sort of focusing you want children to be able to do. And if look at kids working together to sort of build a dam in a stream or to build a tree, you know, a den or something. All the sort of obvious playthings that have happened through the millennia. and it seems to be particularly at that age of three to seven that that benefits them enormously to be active outdoor and social and playing in a self-directed way.

Marcus Railton: That’s interesting. There’s a quote from you actually. I read. I’ve got it. I have it here. Hold on. Yeah, here it is. Until I was about 40, all children played out. We didn’t know then how important it was. Ironically, the scientific evidence about the power of play accumulated over the exact same period that children’s active social outdoor play declined. Why? What are the main factors for the declining that?

Sue: Traffic. Yeah. I think when I talked to parents the main thing that they said was that you just dare’nt let them up because it’s so dangerous with not just the cars driving along the road, all the parked cars that mean that, you know, kids could just be so easily damaged by running out between one. but I don’t think it was just that. I think I put, I think I put it in the book. I think a lot of it is that because of the visual media we’re all much more frightened than we used to be because all these awful dreadful things that you hear about are being brought into your home on a regular basis and with rolling news that you see over and over again and in certain things you actually want to know about. So, I still, as a parent, I still have a very vivid mental image of two little girls in red football shirts standing underneath a clock. I don’t know whether you’re old enough to remember that picture, but it was the two little girls in Soham.

Marcus Railton: No I don’t. And I’m old enough to remember that. I remember that. But I don’t remember the picture.

Sue: Well all, all that was dreadful. Very, very rare occurrences of children being abducted and killed and damaged in horrible ways. It’s so much more if you’re get these visual memories of them, apparently, what the neuroscientists say is it sort of bypasses the rational parts of your brain, go straight to your amygdala and you just get this emotional terror that that’s going to happen to me.

Marcus Railton: Yes, I am. Yeah, I totally understand that and I’m guilty of that cotton wool parenting. I mean when I, When I was 10 I was a latchkey kid, literally had a bit of string around my neck and my mum and dad were working. I come home at lunchtime from my school and my school must have been about a mile and a half away and I remember telling my 10 year old this and he, I said I come home at lunchtime and make my own lunch. He said did you live very near the school? No. You know I’ve crossed three or four major roads but I wouldn’t, I still don’t let my 10 year old Raife, we live near a supermarket. I wouldn’t let him go to the supermarket on his own and there’s only one road to cross.

Sue: I mean it becomes cyclical because if the kids do get the chance to play they get much more competent and they feel themselves competent. You feel competent in them because they managed it but when they can’t and quite frankly I think in most cities now you wouldn’t be able to let kids out. I wouldn’t my good. My daughter certainly doesn’t or didn’t. She’s lucky enough to be in a smaller town now so a bigger kid can walk to school. But it is and of course we became you know the planet became more urbanised. I think there’s more people living in cities than there are living in, in rural environments. I think that, that that change was about 2012. So all these changes are affecting what we’re looking but what we’ve got to do as a species is realise that it’s not just the planet that we’ve been damaging by the way we’ve been behaving. It’s our own species. We’ve got to start making sure that we look after our little ones in the best possible way. And it isn’t difficult because it was, because you know it was people had to be able to do it in the most difficult and challenging of circumstances but managed it. So at the moment I think because there’s a lot we can’t control. we need to be looking to our policy, to may makers to be thinking about how are we looking after children in what is early child is defined as birth to two, eight.

Marcus Railton: Okay.

Sue: and I think that is particularly significant because that’s the period when your brain’s really forming an enormously rapid speed.

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Marcus Railton: Can I talk to you about the difference in children’s brains? Because two books that I really liked was yours, 21st century boys and then Steve Biddulph’s Bringing Up Boys.

Sue: So, yes, Steve Biddulph and his, his book on boys and the fairly obvious common sense that he always speaks.

Marcus Railton: Yeah, I did want to talk to you about that because I’ve got two boys and a girl. And, you know, everyone thinks their own kids are good. And I do believe my boys are good, but they’re very different from my little girl. My boys are like wild dogs. And, you know, while their play isn’t violent, it’s certainly a lot more boisterous than the way my daughter plays. And I’ve said this to other people, it’s like if my daughter goes quiet, I know that she’s just doing something or building something or reading a book. If my boys go quiet, I think there’s a problem and it’s because you think, oh, no, something’s broken or something’s damaged. But boys are different, aren’t they, Sue? And I think it’s. And’s something. This is probably not a politically correct thing to say, but boys are boys. Boys will be boys. They are a different species.

Sue: Well, according to the research I read and, you know, people will contest things, but overall the stuff that I looked at, there are very small differences at birth in terms of developmental capacity, sort of socialisation, distractibility and so on, in that boys are less social and indeed then learn to speak, usually a little later and a slower to, do all sorts of social things and then don’t strive at school as well, particularly if they start early. Girls: much more social, much better at pleasing people. So those very small differences are incredibly exaggerated, and exacerbated by our, cultural expectations. And those cultural expectations are now sort of embedded because we’re picking them up from the moment we’re born. And we make assumptions about what females are like and what males are like. So you’ve got the huge problem that’s a lot of it is cultural but it’s incredibly embedded cultural expectations. And I think you have to accept that the combination of nature and nurture does mean that boys and girls will have different problems as they get older. but I’m a bit bothered because there’s changes in the way boys and girls are reacting to things and particularly girls that girls. What one wonderful child psychologist I spoke to said what you find is that if there are problems, if children, you know, boys will be boisterous and that that’s normal and healthy but. And healthy if it’s a girl as well. But with boys generally if anything goes wrong, they’ll tend to kick out and maybe cause problems. So you notice them. Girls will turn it in on themselves.

Marcus Railton: Yeah.

Sue: And blame themselves.

Marcus Railton: So do you think we are too quick these days to say that? You know there seems to be. In my kids school there’s a lot of ADHD and ADD diagnoses. Are we too quick to get there these days?

Sue: I think I was talking about this yesterday actually. it’s a combination of all sorts of things. Basically there was no such thing as ADHD till 1980. Right. Didn’t exist. Nobody had defined it. But there were obviously some children who found it more difficult to settle down and focus. We just didn’t give it a name. And I had little boys in my. And it was always, I have to admit, always little boys in my class who found it difficult to focus in the 1970s. And I mean there was one, I used to say, oh Brian, just go and run one’s around the school. Feel will you get out of you and come back and see if he can settle. there were. I mean it was the same with the other developmental issues. So it is, it is normal for some people to find it more difficult to settle. But if you live in a culture where, well, first of all you’re being constantly you know, sort of… Gosh, honestly, sorry, I’m having a bad day for words. It’s probably the COVID. There’s, there’s people charming you on screens into something which will keep your attention there but will mean that you’re finding it more difficult to pay attention elsewhere. So, if you, if you’re living an environment that is actually manipulating your attention skills in ways that aren’t probably in your, your best interests. if you’re in a culture where they send little children into classrooms at the age of four or five and make them sit down and do worksheets and you know, sort of learn stuff that really seems meaningless to them. if children are not getting the opportunities that would naturally have occurred in the past for them to get out and active and use up or their energy in this way, it’s hardly surprising that the ADHD statistics will go zooming up.

Marcus Railton: Yeah, that does, that does make sense. You mentioned earlier about the kindergarten system and so if they didn’t go to school at 4 would, would they remain or go into a more play based nursery environment?

Sue: What we’re asking for in Scotland is a kindergarten stage between the ages of three and seven and there’s a good evolutionary reason for that. if you, you think about you know, for millennia, you know in every sort of part of the world for the first year or so, the first couple of years a baby would be with its mum all the time because she’d probably be, well she’d be feeding it around about the age of two and a half to three, mum would probably have another baby. So the older baby would be need to be looked after and it would be looked after by the other kids. So from about two and a half that the older children would look after the little ones. By the time they reached 7 or 8 they’d build enough to do things to help the family in terms of things like going, getting in the water or looking after the beasts or something. So they’d start getting initiated into the adult world. It was that group of three to seven- to eight-year-olds. They looked after each other. And there’s so much research now coming through. There’s a great guy called Peter Gray that that’s pulling it all together at the moment showing that if you have mixed age between three and seven or indeed at any stage but that particularly as a critical one you’d have the kids naturally the little ones look up to the big ones. The big ones like looking after the little ones because it makes them feel important and it helps them develop empathy.

Marcus Railton: It seems a very natural process. I do watch my 10 year old play with my 4 year old and they go on like a house on fire.

Sue: It really works, yeah.

Marcus Railton: Yeah.

Sue: So the basic principle would be that for three to seven it’s a play based relationship centred, an awful lot about the adults relationships with the children being Particularly positive, not sot, you know, judging them on whether they can pass some sort of test or something but actually being encouraging children’s development, supporting them at what they are good at doing and helping them along with obviously, you know, a literacy rich environment, the science rich environment, the stuff we provide will help them decide what they want to play at. But it’s play based with a lot of self-directed play and active and social and mixed age and that’s what we’ve campaigning for in Scotland at the moment.

Marcus Railton: So, I’ve just got a couple of final questions for you. One question I want to ask is moving on from that one. Looking at our older kids. You know I read more and more about teenage alcohol and drug abuse and suicide and teenagers, and it terrifies me, and I just wonder what we can do to improve our communication with our slightly older children.

Sue: Well, all the language, all the research shows it’s not so easy for parents because of course, you know, I know this is a par myself, you know, you’ve got your own tension going on there. But u. The, the mentor thing is the, the thing that makes the difference. Round about the age of 13, 14, if you’re lucky enough to have an adult who’s an aunt or an uncle or a granny or a granddad or a friend or something, you know, that’s family friend that can be a mentor to the kids. That seems to make a big difference. Although I have to say I think a lot of it, it’s very boring of me but I keep going back to this business of early childhood. If you get it right then, and you’re building resilience and self-regulation and social skills and you know, just general common sense, hopefully that’s going to be a huge help right through life because that, that resilience is what you need to see through all the ups and downs. But yeah, at all stages you benefit from having people that are close to you that you can talk to and an older mentor around about the beginning of the teenage years seems to be a very, very helpful thing.

Marcus Railton: I think the final thing would ask you is, is you come across having as chatted for the last half hour or so as wonderfully pragmatic and it could be argued that we’ve bequeathed a rather hellish future globally to our kids and are you emotionally positive that they have it within themselves to rise above it and prevail?

Sue: I have huge confidence in children. I just think we’ve got to make sure that we do the best for them, and I don’t think that we’ve put our minds to what is the best for them. I think we’ve all got, ah, this nonsense of. Of a competitive attitude to education. people thrive because they’re healthy, not because they’ve been crowned. So, I think we’ve got to, as soon as possible, change the way we look after our kids.

Marcus Railton: So, it’s been brilliant talking to you. Thanks for joining me on the ScotsCare podcast today.

Sue: Thank you. It’s been nice to talk.

Marcus Railton: Speak to you soon. Bye bye.

Sue: Bye bye.

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