Why do some young people from really tough backgrounds
beat the odds?
And what can we all learn from them?
When I was a child, I was bounced from children’s home
to children’s home. Yeah, it was tough.
But I made it as a writer
and as a poet.
So this subject, above all, is very close to my heart.
There are no simple answers,
but we do have some really interesting clues.
Some come from a major study,
which has been following 12,000 children
in four different countries,
over a period of 20 years.
The Young Lives team, led by the University of Oxford,
tracks children in Ethiopia, Peru, Vietnam and India.
They looked at those who’d managed to beat the odds
and pulled out a few common threads.
Here are three key ones.
I didn’t have family around me,
and the absence of it actually gives you an opportunity
to see just how important
these supportive relationships are for a child.
I saw them because I didn’t have them.
Think of a baby just learning to crawl.
They only go so far before they look back.
When I looked back, there was nobody there.
However tenuous, having somebody who’s on your side,
it’s really important.
For me, I didn’t realise it at the time,
but the truth is my social worker was that person.
He didn’t feel like a role model.
He didn’t feel like a friend.
But he was something more.
He was a person keeping his binoculars
focused on my emotional state.
And that – that proved pivotal to me.
The second key element is the importance of a safety net.
Studies in the UK have consistently shown a link between poverty
and poor outcomes for kids.
Children who experience persistent poverty
are four times more likely
to be in the bottom 10% in vocabulary aged five.
Small things can make a big difference.
Like the warmth of the relationship between a parent and a child.
Reading to kids.
And having a safety net in those early years
is so important.
In Ethiopia and Peru, the Young Lives team found children
whose parents had received government support
for basics like food when they were very young
had significantly better long-term memory and cognitive skills
at the age of 12 than those who hadn’t.
The more disadvantaged the family, the greater the impact.
And there’s similar evidence from the US,
where the Baby’s First Years study looked at the impact of giving money
to the poorest families in four cities.
They gave $20 a month to one set of families, the control group,
and $333 a month to the other group.
They then scanned the brains of the babies at the age of one,
and just look at the difference.
The images on the left
show the babies from the high-cash group
and those on the right from the low-cash group.
The babies whose mothers
received the high-cash gift
showed significantly more activity
in parts of the brain
associated with language
and cognitive skills.
Wow.
When I look back at my younger self,
all I wanted was compassion.
And second chances are about just that – compassion.
I was given a book of poetry by a teacher in the children’s home
when I was 13 years of age.
But it wasn’t just the book of poetry which helped me –
though it did immensely.
It was also the fact that I was worth giving a book to.
I was lucky because I found the thing I love – poetry.
And regardless of your upbringing,
that’s one of the greatest things that a child, or a person,
can ever find –
what it is that they love.
