Childcare guru: small children should not stay overnight with absent parent

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/jun/18/childcare-claim-children-emotional-absent-parent

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Very small children whose parents separate should not stay overnight with the absent father or mother, according to childcare guru Penelope Leach in a book that is already causing controversy ahead of publication later this week.

Leach says divorce, which is now the fate of nearly half of all marriages, is too often about the interests of the parents, with the children regarded as property to be shared between them. Her book, Family Breakdown: helping children hang on to both their parents, looks at divorce from the child's point of view, she says.

But her assertion that children under the age of four, usually living with their mother, may suffer emotional and developmental damage if they sleepover at the home of the absent parent, usually the father, has attracted strong criticism from some psychologists who say there is insufficient evidence to substantiate it.

In an interview with Tory MP and former children's minister Tim Loughton on the website of her publisher, Unbound, Leach says: "You get situations where children are spending a week in mum's house and a week in dad's house and all kinds of horrible arrangements. I call them horrible because we do know that they are desperately wrong for children, who need the security of a place called home and who, when very little, shouldn't be taken away overnight from what is usually the mother – the person they are attached to."

It is understood she relies on a study published in Australia in 2010 by McIntosh, Smyth and Kelaher, which was the basis for a report by the Australian Association for Infant Mental Health. It stated that "the shared overnight care of children less than four years of age had a significantly negative impact on the emotional and behavioural well-being of the child. Babies under two years who lived one or more overnights a week with both parents were significantly stressed." Older children under four exhibited greater levels of problem behaviour, the report said.

But Adrienne Burgess, joint chief executive and head of research at the Fatherhood Institute in the UK, said the study's findings are out of line with other research on the issue and the authors themselves claim their work has been misrepresented. A consensus statement from over 100 experts, published in the US this year, had taken issue with the Australian findings. "Policymakers and decision makers should recognize that depriving young children of overnights with their fathers could compromise the quality of developing father-child relationships," said the statement signed mostly by members of the American Psychological Association.

"Penelope Leach seems to be unaware of the [Australian authors'] latest position, let alone the furore that has been going on in the academic world," she said.

Leach's view that infants and small children form just one strong attachment is out of date anyway, says Burgess. "Children develop multiple attachments," she said. "There will be some attachments where they spend more time with one carer than another, but all these attachments have an impact – positive or negative."

Dr Tara Weeramanthri, consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the South London and Maudsley NHS foundation trust, said that children have a hierarchy of attachment figures, who include grandparents and other carers as well as parents, rather than being attached to just one person. "When sick or distressed, they want the person at the top of the tree as it were, so if mother was the main carer, that would be mother," she said. However, "I would not share the view that young children should not spend the night at the father's house , where the couple have separated.

"It is obviously important that visits are managed and supported by both parents rather than the child being caught up in a situation where there is acrimony. "Each parent has to work to support the child's relationship with the other parent, by planning and talking to them about it and it is best if the visit are part of a routine rather than erratic and small children may want to take a favourite toy, such as a teddy."

Dr Nigel Sherriff, senior research fellow in the centre for health research at Brighton University and a member of the British Psychological Society, said the suggestion that overnight stays should not be permitted "goes against the research evidence which strongly suggests that positive father engagement in the early years leads to higher social and educational outcomes". He added that the concept of a unique attachment to one person – usually the mother – was "hugely outdated now". The theory grew up in the 1950s, post-war, when men came back without jobs and there were attempts to persuade women that they should stay at home with the children. "All the evidence [today] suggests it is about the quality of the relationship to the care giver and not whether it is in a different location or with a different care giver," he said.