Brigid Daniel - Child Development for Child Care and Protection Workers

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For the first edition, Jim Ennis was responsible for bringing the writing team together and facilitating the books development. Elaine Ennis also contributed many helpful comments. Sadly, since then Jim Ennis has died and we wish to pay tribute to his vision that made this book happen. Julie Barclay designed Figure 1.1 and Jane and Stan Gough helped with the typing. Thanks also to David and Gavin Willshaw and Chris Henderson for continued and ongoing encouragement and support.

Whatever cards heredity deals, at birth each child has the genetic potential to become a unique, life-affirming individual. But how a particular genetic hand gets played, how the genes express themselves, depends so much on the quality and character of the environment as it presents itself, day by day, week by week, year by year. Nature and nurture interact in ways both wonderful and complex to make us who we are. Environments, particularly social environments, that are rich and responsive are most likely to help children realise their full potential. However, when the world is harsh and dangerous, cold and rejecting, bleak and empty, development suffers. Progress is impaired. Lives are disfigured. This, of course, is the world of the child care and protection worker.

To gauge deprivation and danger, child care workers need the yardsticks of normal development. How else do you know that what is happening to this child is beyond the pale, not to be tolerated? How else can you measure improvement? In their early years, young children develop rapidly. When all goes well, their competence grows at an extraordinary and thrilling rate. They have an appetite for life. In quick succession they learn to recognise, relate, control, smile, grasp, sit, crawl, laugh, walk, play, run, talk, share, count. One way to study children, therefore, is to chart these shared milestones. It is equally interesting, though, to consider childrens individual differences. And although genes account for a good deal of our individuality, the social environment of parents, family and friends is an equally powerful force with which to reckon. Child care and protection workers can do nothing about genes, but they can assess the character of the environment, and they can attempt to change the quality of care-giving, the way a child views and reacts to friends, the poverty that places everyone under stress, and how a teacher might engage a child who has known nothing but neglect.

Modern ideas about childrens development, including the way experience shapes the young brain, recognise that all of these elements interact in a continuous and dynamic way. Development takes place in a bewildering series of transactions between the individual and his or her environment. So, for example, a secure attachment and a cheerful temperament are likely to equip a young child well to take advantage of the next developmental opportunity that comes their way play with peers, perhaps. Each transaction transforms current developments which in turn sets up new patterns of organisation that affect, and are affected by, subsequent experiences and opportunities in what is sometimes known as a transactional systems perspective. The childs evolving personality therefore interacts dynamically with the environment of parents, siblings, peers and teachers, projecting the individual along his or her unique developmental course. Developmentally speaking, each dynamic transaction can be for good or ill. Pathways can be optimal or sub-optimal. It is the job of child protection workers to study and understand each child with whom they work, all with a view to nudging him or her back on to one of lifes more promising pathways.