The pandemic has highlighted the development gap for many children.
During lockdown we saw that in some homes, children have no access to any creative play and there is a focus on screen-based entertainment even at a very young age. There is often a lack of understanding of the needs of children at a young age and many children arrive at nursery with poor language and social skills and this creates problems for children‚’s development throughout their school career.
46% of children are not school ready when they arrive ‚’ Kindred charitable foundation 2020 (this is an increase from 35% in 2019)
We know the importance of the first 2 years of life for healthy brain development and attachment and how children‚’s experiences at this time will impact on their life chances, yet we still entirely rely on parents just picking up their parenting skills by osmosis from their own experiences of being parented.
The pause of lockdown has made it clear that we need to address these issues and this is an opportunity to think about how to be more pro-active in improving the life chances of our children
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