Professor Paul Howard-Jones interview

22 October 2015

Last year, you were part of the team on The Secret Lives of Four-Year-Olds. For those that missed it, explain what it was all about.

We were really getting to grips with the concept of how to access the secret world of how young children talk to each other when the adults are not there. So much of what we know about how children think is derived from child-adult interactions, and what we know much less about is how they talk to each other and – of particular interest to me – how they learn from each other. So it was wonderful to have that opportunity to be able to listen, individually, to each child’s speech, and to follow those stories as they emerge. It’s an incredibly difficult thing to do, and it can be frustrating, because obviously you can’t listen to twelve voices at once. But it’s very exciting.

 

The show’s now become a seven-part series dealing with 4-6 year-olds. Explain a bit about how the series is going to expand upon the pilot.

The major difference is that we’re looking at three different age groups of children. That gives you a real opportunity to understand the development and how things change. The difference between looking at academic literature and recording a show like this is that you’re able to grasp the intensity of the experience as it happens. And you can gain some sense of what the important factors are in their development. What are the chief features that make the experiences of a four-year-old different from a five-year-old, and different from a six-year-old. This is immensely challenging. A lot of what we know about children is from very controlled, laboratory conditions. This is very naturalistic. The children don’t really notice the cameras, they’re interacting with each other the way children do. You’re much more able to access what feels like an insider perspective on what’s happening. That is fascinating.

 

Your perspective is from an educational standpoint, isn’t it? What is your role on the show?

There’s three psychologists working on the show, and I guess we all come in with slightly different angles. I’m coming at it from a psychological point of view. I also spend a lot of time doing neuroscience research, but essentially, the thing I’m most interested in is learning and education. So the psychology and the neuroscience is important to me in terms of understanding how we learn. This is an excellent opportunity to understand how those scientific concepts – theory of mind and brain development – help explain what we’re seeing in the day-to-day experience of these children.

 

What justifies you watching these children so closely in this way? 

It's really important to scientifically understand how children form secure friendships, because these are essential for their well-being in terms of happiness and also learning. A missing part of the scientific jigsaw is the detail of how their relationships form and fracture over time, as they move from one interaction to the next, from one part of the playground to the next. The "Secret Lives" project provided a unique opportunity to follow those stories. 

 

Over 50 children across three ages at a critical point of development - how does this project rank in terms of scientific significance?

Thousands of hours of data were collected during filming and this data set has real potential for providing new scientific insight. Many of the abilities children develop between 4-6 years old are foundational for their adult lives, and this data could be immensely helpful in illuminating the processes involved. I'm hopeful researchers at the University of Bristol will soon begin a formal analysis that will generate new insights into children's learning and development. 

 

Are there key stages of development, or is it a steady rate of development from birth until adulthood?

No, it’s not a steady rate. Different abilities develop at different rates, and can be discontinuous as well. When you see a change happen, and you see a child doing something they haven’t done before, they appear to have learnt, but they don’t always continue doing it – sometimes they slip back. So you get overlapping waves – the movement is generally forward, but you get quite a lot of back-sliding as well. That’s completely natural. But it’s definitely not a linear process of abilities stacking up one on top of another. It’s a lot more complex than that.

 

Broadly speaking, are the ages 4-6 quite a key stage of development?

Absolutely. When they’re coming in at four-years-old, they’ve learnt some language, and they’re learning to relate to others, and they have a concept of what a friend is. But an awful lot of what they seem to be struggling with is regulating their emotions enough to get through the day. There’s all sorts of desires and impulses they have which are not appropriate at that moment, which have to be delayed, or possibly completely inhibited. And during that year, most of the children achieve that. And when they come in at five, they’re already able to perform as part of a group. But even at that age, their friendships are very much on a one-to-one basis. They’re social life is chaotic, because they haven’t really learn how to think about groups as a whole. You get a real sense of the chaotic, dynamic socialising, and how relationships are being broken and reformed on a minute-by-minute basis, and how exhausting that is emotionally, and how confusing it can be for the children when things don’t work out and someone doesn’t want to be your friend. Then, at six years old, you’re beginning to gain a lot more sense, and relationships are a bit more stable.

 

Do you think that you get a pretty good idea of each individual child’s personality by the end of the show?

You think you do. But every day you watch them, you re-form your ideas about their motivations and their abilities, because they are constantly taking you by surprise. It is really fascinating to watch. I think what I’ve been more successful at is trying to identify the barriers that they are facing, and what they are trying to learn. As the days have gone along, I’ve been able to identify targets that they need to achieve in order to be able to build stable relationships or just be happier in the classroom. And most fascinating is the contribution that other children make in helping them reach those targets. That’s the thing that we don’t understand fully – the contribution that other children make to children’s development. We’re much better at understanding the importance of adult interactions.

 

Have you had any fundamental beliefs or preconceptions challenged during the process of making this series?

Yes, I have. I think I didn’t understand the intensity of the experience. I think unless you’re following a child round, really shadowing them, without them knowing you are there, you don’t gain that. I have been amazed to see, for example, one four-year-old boy organising an activity, and being able to organise another five boys, and within a space of two or three minutes, as each boy comes up to him, he interacts in a different way with each boy. They’ve learnt a different relationship, and a different way of communicating, with each of their peers. They’re exploiting that in order to organise a particular activity. They may not have any idea about how the whole group is working, but they have a good idea about how to act with individuals, and to change their approach according to context and who is in front of them.

 

That’s amazingly sophisticated!

It’s the sophistication of the children which is the most amazing thing. It really helps, actually, the fact that you’re looking at them through a screen on their level. After a while you almost forget that you’re looking at a bunch of four-year-olds. I’ve been stunned to come out of our science room and to walk past these little creatures in the corridor and realise that that little guy is who I’ve been trailing for the last hour, and who’s been achieving all these incredible things. It’s stunning. I can never get over how small they are.

 

What single piece of advice would you give parents raising kids of this age?

Adult interaction with a child is really important, and there’s no substitute for that, but don’t underestimate how much they learn from their peers.

 

The Secret Life Of 4, 5 and 6 Year Old is on Channel 4 from Tuesday 3rd November at 8.00pm