Margaret Sims
University of New England

We are currently experiencing an exciting time in early childhood as the Federal Government attempts to develop policies and systems to improve outcomes for our children. Recent advances in research have provided us with much evidence underpinning the new thinking. However, much of this evidence is still subject to interpretation, and it is my contention that common interpretations are significantly limited by our strong national culture of patriarchy. In this paper I identify some of the policy implications of this ontogenic knowledge, and suggest an alternative viewpoint.

Ontogenic knowledge is the form of knowledge we use to take in information, interpret it and develop action as a result of our understanding (Billett, 1996). In other words, our ontogenic knowledge shapes our interpretation and action in the world. In understanding interpretation and action we therefore have to work backwards to determine what people hold as ontogenic knowledge. Bruner and Haste (1990) and Gelman (1997) identify ontogenic knowledge as conceptual frameworks or models of the world and these are underpinned by values, beliefs, emotions and interests (Reynolds & Salters, 1995) – what Billet names dispositions. Dispositions determine our motivation to attend to incoming information, to either assimilate or accommodate the new information (Piaget, 1952), and to shape actions.

This is particularly noteworthy in the current political context with our intense scrutiny on early childhood. Much of the debate in recent months has focused around the needs of young children and how the state ought to be developing policy and programs to improve outcomes for these children and their families. The Council of Australian Governments (COAG) agreed in March 2008 to aim for the following outcomes:

• Children are born healthy.
• Children acquire the basic skills for life and learning
• Children will benefit from better social inclusion and reduced disadvantage, especially Indigenous children.
• All children have access to affordable, quality early childhood education in the year before formal schooling.
• Quality early childhood education and care supports the workforce participation choices of parents with children in the years before formal schooling.

In their 2008-2009 Budget, the Federal Government outlined its plan to work towards achieving these objectives. The plan includes:

• improving access to quality early childhood education and care through:
• -universal access to preschool for all children in the year before formal schooling, 15 hours per week, 40 weeks per year, delivered by a university qualified early childhood teacher;
• -the establishment of 260 early learning and care centres, including six specialist autism centres.
• improving quality of early childhood education and care through:
• -strong National Quality Standards;
• -A-E quality rating system;
• -support for education and training of the early childhood workforce;
• -the development of an Early Years Learning Framework.
• improving the affordability of child care by increasing the child care rebate;
• a new Healthy Kids Check for fouryear-olds;
• national rollout of the Australian Early Development Index;
• a Home Interaction program to help parents prepare their children for school;
• the introduction of Healthy Eating and Physical Activity Guidelines for use in early childhood settings;
• enhanced early years services for Indigenous children.

In working towards achieving these outcomes a range of reports has been developed and circulated for consultation (for example, the National Quality Framework discussion paper - Early Childhood Development Subgroup, 2008). Feedback (from the consultation forums around the country, various written responses provided to these reports, and in public debates) demonstrates that people's understanding of the key issues, and the evidence they present to argue their case, is strongly influenced by their ontogenic knowledge and, in particular, the beliefs and values underpinning their knowledge, shaping their interpretation of the available evidence. It is interesting that many who use the ‘scientific' evidence do so in the sincere belief that, being ‘science', the evidence is clear, unbiased and not open to interpretation; results from neurobiological research (discussed below) are a case in point. This ‘scientific' evidence, for so long lacking in early childhood, is held up as the main driver of policy change, but there has been no analysis of how our interpretation of this evidence is influenced by our underlying beliefs and values.

To illustrate this point it is first necessary to review recent neurological and physiological research which addresses the pathways by which the external environment impacts on biology, thus influencing health and wellbeing (Mustard, 2008; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000b). McCain, Mustard and Shanker (2007) call this experienced-based brain development. Evidence now points to the roles of cortisol and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis in shaping health outcomes (Gunnar, 2006; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000a). Atypical diurnal rhythm and reactivity of the HPA system are known to have negative long-term health outcomes. For example, higher levels of cortisol in children are associated with extreme behavioural inhibition, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder and withdrawal, memory problems, poorer school performances, cognitive impairments, anti-social behaviour, diabetes and delinquency (Dickerson & Kemeny, 2004). In a similar manner, chronically low activation of the HPA system (hypo-cortisolism) is linked with anxious and withdrawn behaviours, depression, excessive immune responsivity, premenstrual tension syndrome, behaviour problems, rheumatoid arthritis, chronic fatigue syndrome and post traumatic stress disorder (Yashmin, Karten & Cameron, 2005). The concept of allostatic load proposes that stressful events trigger a range of hormonal and physiological responses in the neuro-endocrine, sympathetic nervous, immune and cardiovascular systems which result in dysregulation of responses leading to poor outcomes identified above (Seplaki, Goldman, Weinstein & Yu-Hsuan, 2004). It is likely that, while the risk of establishing hypo- or hyper-cortisol patterns is partly genetic, personality and temperament also have a role to play, as does social inclusion/exclusion. These differential patterns of cortisol responsivity might be linked to the nature of the chronic stress, the external resources available to assist the child to cope and to characteristics within the child him/herself (van Bakel & Riksen-Walraven, 2004).

Infants gradually establish a typical diurnal rhythm in cortisol levels and learn to regulate their cortisol reactions so that transitory peaks are quickly reduced to basal levels. Adults are responsible for moderating infants' stress reactions, and the caregiving relationship is the vehicle through which this moderation operates; the quality of sensory stimulation affects the architecture and function of the brain (Gunnar, 2006; McCain et al., 2007, AI Mustard Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000b). Infants whose stress reactions are appropriately moderated develop more effective stress management and emotional regulation and demonstrate, as they grow, typical cortisol rhythms. A secure attachment is thought to operate as a protective factor, where the adult is able to mediate the impact of stressful events on the child (Gunnar, 2006). Children with disorganised or insecure attachments are less able to manage stress, and thus stressful events have a greater impact on their biology (Hertsgaard, Gunnar, Erickson & Nachmias, 1995). Animal studies (for example Kaffman & Meaney, 2007) indicate that this impact is likely to be lifelong: for example, rat pups experiencing better maternal attention were found to be less likely to demonstrate the problems with both HPA dysregulation and cognitive functioning normally associated with old age in rats.

Studies of the biological basis of attachment suggest that mothers' brains show different activation patterns in response to infants' cues than do the brains of non-mothers and men. These responses are linked to the pleasure centres of the brain and may thus be associated with the development of attachment, and the high levels of attention paid by mothers to their infants (Strathearn, Li, Fonagy & Montague, 2008). Swain, Lorberbaum, Kose and Strathearn (2007) summarise a range of recent research and conclude that there is a potential change in the functioning of the amygdala that comes with being a parent. Mothers are found to demonstrate an increased level of alertness and arousal in response to infants' cues in comparison to non-mothers (Purhonen, Paakkonen, Ypparila, Lehtonen & Karhu, 2001).

Repetti, Taylor and Seeman (2002) propose that genetic vulnerabilities in ‘risky' families interact with family characteristics, resulting in a disruption of children's biological regulation of the stress system (including the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical system). Children who are genetically vulnerable are more likely to behave in ways that elicit poor parenting responses, even when parented by adoptive rather than biological parents. Poor parenting exacerbates children's behavioural problems, eliciting more negative parenting responses. The attachment relationship is significantly at risk in this context, and this accumulation of risk builds up allostatic load which ultimately results in irreversible changes in children's biological regulation leading to significant differences in outcomes as they grow into adulthood.

Those who view this evidence through the lens of patriarchy and the neo-liberalist ideology of family understand this to imply that young children must spend quality time with their parents (and particularly their mothers) in order for secure attachments to be established, and thus facilitate optimal development of their brains. Brain responses of mothers towards their infants are interpreted to mean that infants in the care of their mothers are more advantaged. Care in the home by the family is positioned as ideal (O'Connor, Orloff & Shaver, 1999) and this care is expected to be largely self-reliant, autonomous and unpaid. The ideal Australian family comprises a heterosexual couple consisting of a male breadwinner and a female carer of children (Saggers & Sims, 2005). This gendered nature of care aligns with Caputo's concept of intensive motherhood (Caputo, 2007), with its proposition that those who don't offer intensive care are ‘bad' mothers. Families are perceived as functional, cohesive, supportive, able to meet the needs of all members, and capable of managing various predicaments. One consequence of this positioning is that mothers in financially-advantaged families, where only the father is engaged in paid work, are likely to be more able to fulfil the roles and responsibilities expected of them than mothers with fewer social and economic resources.

The argument is couched as follows: the neurobiological evidence indicates that children in secure relationships are less at risk for negative outcomes, as secure attachment enables more desirable brain development. Brain imaging research is interpreted to mean that, because mothers show different brain responses from their infants (when caregiving fathers have not yet been the subject of research), infants are better off in the care of their mothers, who are biologically programmed to offer that care. This supports the assumptions (underpinning patriarchy) that secure attachment is best when it operates between mother and child, therefore we need to ensure that mothers have opportunities to spend quality time with their young children in order to facilitate this. Arising from this is the implication that policy needs to focus on strategies such as extended maternity leave that enable this to happen. Non-parental care options, which do not support mothers as the primary caregiver, are not perceived as important, and may, in fact, be positioned as undesirable.

This is illustrated in the recent round of discussions over maternity leave, where many arguments have been put forward indicating that the neurobiological evidence ‘proves' that mothers need to maximise the time they spend with their children in the early years. In its recent submission into the Inquiry into Paid Maternity, Paternity and Parental Leave, the NSW Commission for Children and Young People and NIFTeY (2008, p. 8) argues:

This growing body of research provides a compelling biological underpinning to account for why maternal employment during the child's first year of life can have a detrimental effect on a child's long-term cognitive and social development. The challenge for us is how we enable mothers to be at home with their infant during this critical period. For this reason we consider a paid parental leave period of at least one year is essential to support the healthy development of this dyadic relationship between babies and their caregiver.

The assumption in this argument is based on patriarchy, which clearly defines the roles of women and men. A ‘good' mother spends time with her children, and undertakes all the caring tasks associated with child-rearing. Any participation in the world outside the home is acceptable only if it does not interfere with the woman's primary duties as mother and wife (Thurer, 1994). Women with children who return to work are considered to be ‘shirking' their primary responsibilities. They receive little support from those around them, are criticised as poor mothers and people by others, and struggle with internal role conflict (Johnston & Swanson, 2003).

While there is no doubt that children who do not experience secure attachments to their caregivers in their early years are at significant risk for negative long-term outcomes, none of the evidence specifically identifies that the caregiving must come from the mother. There is a suggestion in the research that neurological responses to infants may be dose dependent – i.e. the experience of caregiving may elicit these differential brain responses. Kringelbach, Lehtonen, Squire et al. (2008) suggest, for example, that brain patterns demonstrated by human mothers in response to infants are not found in maternal interactions with adult children. At what age does this change occur? We do not yet know, but it does indicate an age specific dosage effect. Boccia and Pedersen (2001) show that human mothers' oxytocin responses are impaired when they are separated from their infants for a significant length of time, indicating that being with the infant (a dosage effect) is essential for maintaining the biological mechanisms supporting bonding. Research with marmosets shows that levels of testosterone in males who had previous experience with infants were less at the birth of their babies than were those in first-time fathers (French et al., 2008), indicating a dosage effect on paternal biology. In addition, while paternal caring is not common in Western societies (and thus has not been seen as important in the research agenda), there are human societies where paternal caregiving is common and characterised by high levels of nurturing. In some hunter-gatherer groups paternal care is essential for children's survival; aka pygmy fathers, for example, hold their infants 22 per cent of the time and remain in earshot of them most of the time (Hrdy, 2008). With this indicative evidence in mind, it is not unrealistic to propose that fathers who are undertaking the primary caring role with their infants might also be found to demonstrate the biological responses typically found in extant research on mothers. The fact that these responses in fathers have not yet been identified is because no researcher has yet thought to test this hypothesis.

In our society, mothers are usually the ones providing infant care and mother-care is automatically positioned as ‘better' for children than non-maternal care. Women who allow others to share their child-caring role are judged as poor examples of womanhood (see discussion above). Consequently, non-maternal care options, such as child care, are the underdog of early childhood programs both in societal perception and in funding/resourcing. Childcare workers remain on lower wages than early childhood teachers (Press & Hayes, 2001). Training requirements to work in child care are less, and the industry is characterised by high caregiver stress levels, high staff turnover and poor working conditions (Commonwealth Child Care Advisory Council, 2001; Press & Hayes, 2001; Sims, 2003b, 2007). The child care industry is positioned as having a ‘…financial interest in separating infants and young children from their mothers…' (Cook, 2002)

Because of their low status (and poor funding) many child care programs around the country are not able to offer the levels of quality services that would maximise children's outcomes. We know that low-quality care impacts on children's outcomes. For example, a range of studies (see Sims, 2003a, for a review) demonstrates that children attending long hours of centre-based care, or who attend centre-based care at an early age, are more likely to demonstrate undesirable psychosocial outcomes. Attendance at centre-based care is associated with higher cortisol levels (Watamura, Donzella, Kertes & Gunnar, 2004). However, it appears that children's cortisol response to child care is partially dependent on the quality of the care provision (Sims, Guilfoyle & Parry, 2005, 2006a, 2006b), indicating that the quality of the care is at least as important as who is delivering the care. Children in high-quality child care are likely to have more secure attachments (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 1997; Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2000), improved pre-academic and language skills, irrespective of the time spent in care (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2002b; Vandell, 2001), improved social competence (NICHD Early Child Care Research Network, 2002a), and advantages in cognitive skills (maths and language) (Peisner-Feinberg et al., 2000). Children in high-quality family day care show improvements in cooperation, cognition and language skills (Clarke-Stewart, Vandell, Burchinal, O'Brien & McCartney, 2002). Sensitive, warm and responsive caregiver attention at the beginning of the day at child care is associated with lower child cortisol levels than than from sensitive, but essentially non-interactive care (Gunnar, Larson, Hertsgaard, Harris & Brodersen, 1992).

If we shared different ontogenic knowledge, parental and non-parental caring (such as child care) would be positioned in another way. In contrast to patriarchy, we could think of the responsibility of child-rearing as something we all, as members of an extended family and community, shared. We could choose to believe that parents had a right to additional support to ensure that their children experienced the best possible child-rearing environments, and that it is our responsibility, as a society, to ensure that all parents participate in a range of services to best ensure all members of their family had a high quality of life. In this context, we would interpret the neurobiological evidence somewhat differently. As before, we would understand the neurobiological evidence indicates that children in secure relationships are less at risk for negative outcomes, as secure attachment enables more desirable brain development. We could then add into our thinking further research on secure attachments, particularly the research around multiple attachments (Gerhardt, 2004; Hutchins & Sims, 1999; Jackson, 1993). Using this lens, we could argue that children who have multiple, secure attachments are less at risk than children who have one secure primary attachment. No mother can guarantee that she will not get sick, be hospitalised or die in an accident, leaving her child without a primary attachment figure. No mother can guarantee that she can be physically and emotionally available to her child all the time. Children who have multiple secure attachments will always have others in their lives to rely on, ensuring that each individual in that circle of attachment is not called upon to supply more than s/he is capable of doing at any one time. The bio-anthropological literature calls this ‘alloparenting' – see Hrdy (2008) for example. Sharing the caring means the demands of caring are less for all, without compromising the quality of the care offered. Multiple secure attachments are a protective factor against negative outcomes as demonstrated across a range of human and animal societies (Hrdy, 2008; Olazabal & Young, 2008). With this ontogenic knowledge underpinning our thinking, the implications for policy development are significantly different.

Using this different ontogenic lens, parental leave is one of a range of options we would see as desirable to support families. We would argue parental leave ought to offer the same options for fathers as for mothers, as we would believe it is extremely important for children to develop secure and equal attachments to both parents. Other options, we would argue, must also be universally available to families. Ideally we would have family support programs offering information and practical support to carers at home with young children. These might include home visits, playgroups, parent education, toy libraries, social networking opportunities, and practical support such as financial management and stress management programs for all families, not just for those targeted because of identified risk, as in the current context. Our aim would be to ensure that those providing home care are not stressed and are adequately supported so that children are sure of receiving high-quality care. We would also ensure that all non-parental care programs for children were appropriately funded and supported – we would want children in any form of care (parental or non-parental) to receive high-quality care.

The consequence of this different ontogenic lens would be that child care in all its forms (informal and formal, parental and non-parental) would become a higher status activity. Resources would be available to ensure that all services (parent support and non-parental care services) operated at high quality, and staff were appropriately remunerated, supported and trained. We already know that the economic benefits of high-quality early childhood programs are significant (Heckman, 2006; Heckman & Lochner, 2000), with the latest from the Perry High/Scope evaluations suggesting a return on investment as high as 17:1 (Schweinhart et al., 2005). We also already know that, were we to invest significant resources into early childhood programs, we could make major differences in outcomes, not just for individual children and families, but for society as a whole. Currently we choose not to make those investments because, as a society, we still believe that young children are the responsibility of their parents and that child-rearing is the responsibility of mothers. At the present time we are happy to invest in schooling from the age of six (with commitment to extend that down to five and maybe four), but any investment in the early years is couched in terms of those most at risk, and is not universal, despite the evidence that it is too late to make a major impact by holding off on universal programs till school age.

There is widespread public concern that, particularly in the current economic climate, we do not have enough money to invest in the early years and still offer the same levels of service in other areas such as schooling, health and employment. However, I contend the evidence is clear that we cannot afford to not invest in the early years. Money can be found if children are considered sufficiently important. Arias (2000, 2001) pointed out some time ago that 5 per cent of the money spent on military technology and training around the world in 1999 could have provided basic education, health care, nutrition, potable water and sanitation to all the people of the world. To encourage discussion and debate, to change our thinking, invest properly in our young children, and change our future as a nation, we need to take the first step: we need to challenge patriarchy and the neo-liberalist ideology of family.

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Australasian Journal of Early Childhood – Volume 34 No 1 March 2009, pp. 36–42.

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