Best Beginnings Episode 13: Lauren Seager-Smith on the crisis hiding inside the earliest years

There are things that happen inside a home that a baby cannot name. They cannot describe the atmosphere that tightens before an argument, or explain the cortisol flooding their developing body when stress fills the room. They cannot tell a midwife, or a social worker, or a judge. They can only absorb.

That is the starting point for Lauren Seager-Smith, chief executive of The For Baby's Sake Trust, an organisation working with families at the intersection of domestic abuse and the first thousand and one days of a child's life. And it shapes everything about how the Trust operates. Not as a service that responds to crisis, but as one that asks a more difficult question: what does this baby need, and what do both of the people responsible for them need to change?

The window that opens in pregnancy

For Baby's Sake works from pregnancy through to a baby's second birthday. That timeline is not arbitrary. Research estimates that up to 30% of domestic abuse begins or escalates in pregnancy, a figure that should reshape how we think about the antenatal period. It is not simply a time to monitor physical health. It is, Lauren argues, a critical window for intervention.

Not just to stop harm already happening, but because neuroscience now shows us how clearly those early days shape a child for life. And for the parent using abusive behaviours, pregnancy can also be a moment of genuine motivation to change. "Time and time again," Lauren says, "our parents, predominantly our fathers, but not always, have said, 'I want a different outcome for my baby. I want my baby to have a different childhood than I had.'" That desire is real. For Baby's Sake builds on it.

What babies cannot say for themselves

Almost 50,000 babies are referred to children's social care each year with domestic abuse as a factor. Yet domestic abuse remains stubbornly absent from mainstream early years conversation, siloed into safeguarding, separated from the wider story of infant development, treated as something that happens to someone else.

Lauren is direct about why. "I think there's a lot of stigma and shame," she says. "It's something people find very difficult to talk about." And the babies at the centre of it have no voice. They cannot advocate for themselves. They cannot tell us what is happening in the room where they sleep.

For Baby's Sake is built around that silence. Their whole-family, trauma-informed programme asks practitioners to listen first. Many of the fathers on the programme, 25% of whom are care-experienced, are encountering that question for the first time. "They've never talked," Lauren says. "They've never talked about this before. And when you're carrying all of that weight and you're having a baby yourself for the first time, and some of our parents are still children themselves as well." It is, quietly, one of the most striking things she says across the whole conversation.

The danger of looking away from fathers

One of the most distinctive things about For Baby's Sake is that it works with both parents. Not together, each has their own therapeutic practitioner, on their own journey, but in parallel, with practitioners in regular contact with each other. The programme does not assume that families should stay together, or that fathers are always the source of harm. What it assumes is that ignoring fathers is dangerous.

Lauren cites a report called The Myth of Invisible Men. "If you don't see dads, if you don't include dads, that's very dangerous for baby." By working with fathers, practitioners understand risk in real time. They understand what is building beneath the surface. And they can support something rarer and more valuable: a father beginning to understand what his baby actually needs from him.

When children become statistics

Lauren moves between early years and a broader cultural argument with a fluency that comes from twenty years in the children's sector. She is concerned about the current conversation around misogyny and the education of boys, not because it is wrong, but because something is missing from it. "What I haven't seen in parallel," she says, "is an understanding of the number of those children who are living with domestic abuse at home. 1 in 5 by the time they're 18. We're not talking about that."

Recent Australian research deepens this argument. A large study into the protective factors that make men less likely to use violence against women found one of the strongest was having had close, loving bonds with their fathers. Men who experienced that were significantly less likely to cause harm. It is not a complicated finding. It is, in Lauren's words, "something that we don't talk about very often."

The implication is significant; supporting fathers to bond with their babies is not just good for those babies. It is, on the evidence, a form of prevention.

Love as a policy position

Lauren is pragmatic about what it will take to reach every family that needs support: collaboration, long-term system change, investment in the workforce that surrounds families in pregnancy and early childhood. Midwives. Health visitors. Social workers. Teachers. But she also has a simpler challenge, one she would offer to anyone with the power to shape how we talk about these issues. "Think about the language that you're using and what it's doing. Is that creating a safer, more accountable society, or is it creating a society with more fear, more violence, more abuse, more separation?"

Punitive language, she argues, does not produce lasting change. What does? The same things that protect children, that disrupt the cycle of harm before it begins. "It comes back," she says, "to love, care, connection."

We already know that. The evidence is now catching up.