TV: Bringing up baby
Authors: I. McClure
Journal: BMJ (2001)

Child of Our Time, BBC 1, Wednesdays at 9 pm, 27 June to 11 July Life as an Infant, BBC Radio 4, Tuesdays at 9 pm, 19 June to 10 July

  Robert Winston recently publicised Child of Our Time, his latest television series, on the radio, adding his preference for radio over television, because it gets “serious points” across more easily. He also explained his noble aim to deliver demystified “science” into our living rooms. Can television succeed here, or will radio always, quietly, reign supreme?

Child of Our Time boldly expands a familiar format—reviewing 25 babies over their next 20 years—but, instead of just surveying what has happened and how these individuals react, Winston attempts to explain why such reactions occur.

Alongside Child of Our Time the BBC has recently aired Life as an Infant, the second part of Connie St Louis's large radio series, which, like its sister television project, analyses lifelong human development. The crucial difference between the two series is that, although they both set out to explain human development, only the television series projects scientific theory onto real subjects.

Wittingly or not, therefore, the BBC has provided an opportunity to consider Professor Winston's comparison of these two media and how the subject of child development can, and should, be tackled.

Compared with the radio programmes, the television series was over-reductive. In the first episode, which considered personality development, Winston explained that true character emerges after the first six months and that we are either “bold or shy.” Two of the sample children were thrown into some science (Ainsworth's “strange situation” test), and we watched the results. This test elucidates four basic patterns of attachment—secure, avoidant, resistant, or disorganised. If pathological attachment styles persist this has implications for future development. Such science, I would have thought, is key to Winston's project. However, he ignored it and reductively described the test as “a simple and well established way to measure happiness in children.” Dysfunctional avoidant attachment was elicited in the second child but was incorrectly explained as withdrawal “probably because she is unhappy, not because she is naturally shy.” Through oversimplification, Winston missed the point of the science, which is not designed to elicit character (that is, relative shyness or boldness) but attachment strategy. The lingering image of the unattached mother and her avoidant child was poorly explained and insufficiently explored.

How did radio tackle complex issues of child development? Each episode of Life as an Infant was half the length of those in Child of Our Time, but, despite this, I was struck by the amount of detail delivered. Whereas television was high-energy and bombarding, radio was relaxed and reflective. In the programme that considered how young children learn to communicate, I learnt a whole gaggle of new science. We heard about “Motherese” (the automatic communication mode of the “good enough” parent), the structures of pre-language, and why in some cases communication fails (with an expert explanation of autistic spectrum disorders). Another programme considered intelligence, again with stimulating detail, and even found time to present contrasting expert opinions—such as on the crucial question of whether an early infant can knowingly imitate its mother's facial gestures. 

When Child of Our Time considered intelligence, in the second episode, the series came alive. Whereas the first episode had squeezed infants through inaccurate slots of reassuring, moustachioed commentary, this, and the third programme on gender, focused science onto the actual children shown. What emerged with television, which Life as an Infant did not attempt to convey, was the power of human predicaments. Movingly, one child, the only survivor of triplets conceived by in vitro fertilisation, heroically progressed from a near fatal condition at 25 weeks to relative good health by her second year. Through the infants' natural, feisty reactions to the science that they engaged with, I learned nuggets of new facts, like how children's (especially boys') sexuality is garnered as much from their parents' behaviour as from their genes.

I was left informed and entertained but confused. What about the avoidant child in the first episode? Will television leave such dysfunction untreated to serve future viewers' appetite for disaster. Radio's anonymity inevitably protects child subjects. Is such a television series fundamentally unethical? Time will tell.