Why can’t mums choose? - Rethinking Child Benefit and childcare spending - Frank Young

During the first 1,000 days (from conception to age two) of a child’s life their brain is developing rapidly, even in the womb – where the majority of the 86 billion neurons an adult has are formed.84 By the age of one the size of a child’s brain is already almost three-quarters of adult volume on average, and by age two it is on average 83 per cent of an adult’s volume.85 At the age of two, 700 n. [...] A recent article in the ‘Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine entitled Childcare outside the family for the under-threes: Cause for concern?’ explains some of the scientific evidence: 79 80 IZA World of Labor ‘Can universal preschool increase the labor supply of mothers?’ IZA World of L. [...] These close maternal bonds are ‘essential in the shaping of the neural architecture of the amygdala [the part of the brain responsible for emotional regulation] and its connections to the pre-frontal cortex [the grey matter which plays a large role in personality development]’.93 90 Denis Pereira Gray, Diana Dean and Philip M Dean, ‘Childcare outside the family for the under-threes: cause for conc. [...] This figure rises to 65 per cent for mothers with pre-school age children.139 What the public thinks In the 2018 edition of the British Social Attitudes survey, a majority of UK adults believed that the best family structure for a family with a child below school age was for the mother to work part-time and the father full-time (32 per cent),140 or for the mother to stay at home and the father to. [...] This survey found that 86 per cent of the British public felt the main reason parents of a child under five years of age use childcare was to help parents to work, with only 12 per cent saying it was of any benefit to the child.144 The same survey found that 56 per cent of the public felt there were disadvantages to children under three attending nursery, with the reasons ranging from children bei.