Iain Duncan Smith, former Conservative leader and also Chairman of the Centre for Social Justice, a policy group independent of the Conservative Party, claimed that family breakdown had ‘physical and detrimental’ effects on children and that children from broken homes and dysfunctional families have undeveloped brains and start school with the mental capacity of one-year-olds.
He warned that people from such families would make up a quarter of the population within three generations.
Mr Duncan Smith gave his formal evidence to a House of Commons committee looking into crime prevention last week. He stated that children were entering nursery school unable to speak properly because their brains had failed to grow at a critical period of development. He said:
‘In the first three years the brain is not developing at the rate it should develop, which puts them ... at the beginnings of their formal education at a distinct disadvantage with their peer group, in the sense that their brain is probably at the level of a child of one but being asked now to comprehend and make decisions at that of the level of a child of three and four.’
He also told The Sunday Times that children from broken families ‘simply bump along at the back and at the bottom’ and rarely caught up without intensive intervention.
‘Basically what is happening with these children is they are probably going to school with a brain the size of a child of one, as opposed to the brain it should be at the age of three. They are the ones who often arrive in their nurseries unable to speak and have no language at all, have no social skills and are often quite violent,’ he said.
‘It becomes phenomenally expensive to rectify this because you are now trying to play catch-up with a brain that has only a limited amount of time to develop,’ he added.
It is reported that Mr Duncan Smith based his comments on research by the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, which found that neglect in early childhood could affect brain size.
According to the results of the research, brain scans indicated that a relative lack of parental words, touch and social interaction in the first years of life could lead to underdevelopment of parts of the brain. The scans showed that three-year-old children suffering extreme sensory deprivation and neglect had significantly smaller brains than other children of the same age.
He added that family breakdown meant that in many cases the children never caught up on their education and were more likely to become drug addicts, alcoholics or criminals.
In December 2009, the Centre produced a paper arguing that over their years in authority the Government had consistently undermined the institution of marriage and the importance of two-parent families.
In January 2010, the Centre’s new Green Paper on the Family examined the scale and nature of social breakdown in Britain under Labour and identified five pathways to poverty: family breakdown, economic dependency and worklessness, educational failure, addiction and personal indebtedness.