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Early Intervention

The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. Anything that helps to prevent a repeat is to be welcomed. I want to focus on a topic that we do not often discuss in the Chamber: the importance of love. Love in a prevention context begins with conception. It needs to go on throughout the baby's life, but the critical period is conception to the age of two years. There is a very important reason for that: a loved baby who has his needs met will generally learn that the world is a good place and that people are generally kind. That baby will grow up expecting to be able to form secure bonds, make friends and hold down a job, and will generally have more capacity to lead a normal life. On the other hand, the baby who is neglected or abused, or inconsistently treated, suffers two profound impacts. First, the baby who is left to scream is unable to control or regulate his or her feelings. When a baby knows something is wrong, he does not know whether it is because he is too hot, too cold, bored, tried or hungry—he just knows something is wrong, and he looks to an adult carer to sooth his feelings, relax him and get him back off to sleep. When a baby is left to scream all the time, the stress hormone in the baby's body—cortisol—rises to a level where it harms his immune system, and that harm can be permanent. What is more, if the baby constantly experiences raised stress levels, he becomes tolerant of his own stress level. You or I, Madam Deputy Speaker, might be excited by a scary episode of ““Doctor Who””, but somebody with a high tolerance of their own stress level might need to go out to stab somebody to get the same level of excitement. Being permanently left to scream therefore has a profound impact on a baby. The second impact is even more amazing. When a baby is born, his brain is barely developed; he simply has the amygdala, with the fight or flight instinct. Between six and 18 months old, the frontal cortex—the social part of the brain—starts to develop and puts on its peak growth spurt. That growth is literally stimulated by a loving relationship between baby and carer. Playing games such as peek-a-boo or gazing into baby's eyes and saying, ““I love you”” and ““Aren't you beautiful?”” literally stimulates the development of the baby's brain. Conversely, as we saw from the appalling situation in Romanian orphanages, the orphans, who had no human contact at all, literally suffered brain damage; they were unable to communicate in any way, because they had had so little human contact.