Best Beginnings Episode 20: Professor Claire Hughes on siblings, school transitions and the science of the happy learner

Every September, a particular anxiety arrives at the school gate. We speak about it as though it belongs entirely to the child - the new shoes, the unfamiliar building, the weight of a classroom full of strangers. But, Professor Claire Hughes has spent two decades watching something else happen too. The feelings that cross a parent's face as they turn and walk away. The way a mother can be transported, in an instant, back to her own first day at school twenty or thirty years before. The quiet loss that arrives when a child, for the first time, quotes their teacher rather than their parent as the authority on how things should be done.

Starting school, Hughes says, is not a child's transition. It is a whole family's.

That insight that development happens in relationship, in context, in the full texture of family life is the animating principle of more than twenty years of work. Hughes is Cambridge's deputy director at the Centre for Family Research and the author of The Psychology of Starting School. She began by following two-year-olds whose behaviour was already confounding their parents and has tracked the same children forward ever since. What she has found has consistently unsettled assumption.

The relationship research keeps overlooking

Less than 5% of all family research focuses on sibling relationships. Hughes finds that extraordinary, and says so plainly. Talk to any parent of more than one child and they will tell you immediately that the relationship between their children is one of the most significant forces in their family life. The data simply has not caught up.

What siblings offer, Hughes argues, is something no other relationship in a child's life quite replicates. Most parents do not have the stamina for extended pretend play, the kind that runs for forty minutes without a break, or returns to the same characters and storylines forty nights in a row. A sibling does. That sustained, imaginative engagement is one of the primary contexts in which young children build language, narrative thinking and the capacity to understand another person's perspective.

Siblings also teach through observation. A younger child who watches an older sibling get into trouble is already learning, calibrating their own behaviour against what they have seen, adjusting their choices accordingly. It is observational learning in its most natural form, happening every day in families across the country, largely unresearched and mostly unrecognised.

The pandemic offered an unexpected test of these ideas. In a study of families across six countries during lockdown, Hughes and her colleagues consistently found that children with an older sibling showed fewer emotional and behavioural problems. Older siblings stepped up as secondary caregivers and primary entertainers, taking on a role that gave them purpose and connection at a time when both were hard to find. The family unit, under pressure, functioned as the support structure it was always supposed to be.

What the data says about fathers

In the New Fathers and Mothers Study, Hughes set an unusual inclusion criterion: both parents had to agree to take part. This matters, she is clear about it. The participating fathers were, by definition, already an engaged group. With that caveat acknowledged, the findings are striking.

The sensitivity a father showed toward his child at fourteen months was better predicted by how sensitive the mother had been at four months than by how sensitive the father himself had been at four months. In the early months, when a mother has typically found her footing first, she is effectively modelling what responsive, attuned care looks like. Fathers who spend less time with their infants are not falling behind. They are learning from the relationship already established.

The broader conclusion is one that many working parents will need permission to accept. Quality matters more than quantity. Consistent, present, responsive time - concentrated at weekends, grabbed in small moments - is what builds the relationship. It is, Hughes says, probably enough to make sure that everything will be okay.

The transition nobody warns you about

When families in Hughes's research were asked to talk about their child starting school, most began by talking about the child. That was expected. What was less expected was what happened when they were asked about their own experience. The feelings ran deeper than anticipated. Parents found themselves confronting not just the logistics (the change in working hours, the new routines, the homework), but something more fundamental. Their child was citing what the teacher said as the authority. The unquestioned centrality they had held in their child's world was being renegotiated, and that shift arrived with weight.

For parents whose own school experience was complicated, there is an additional layer. Schools have changed. The fact that a classroom felt frightening or alienating twenty years ago does not mean it will feel that way for a child now. Separating your history from your child's experience is part of the work and it is work most families are doing without much support.

The practical advice Hughes offers is deceptively simple: go into the school transition knowing it will be bigger than you expect, for the whole family, not just for the child. That frame, she says, is itself a form of preparation.

Happy children, better learners

In Hong Kong, Hughes encountered a phrase she found troubling: winning at the start of the race. The idea, embedded in one model of early education, is that academic advantage accrues early; that children who begin ahead stay ahead and that the role of parents is to secure that advantage as soon as possible.

The data does not support it.

The Millennium Cohort Study offers a different picture entirely. Children who reported liking school in reception and year one went on to achieve one GCSE grade better across all their subjects ten years later. Not because they were academically drilled at age four. Because they were happy.

The implication for how we support children in the early school years is significant. Praising effort rather than outcome, for persistence, creativity, for the way a child approached a problem rather than whether they solved it, turns out to be more than a kindness. It is, the evidence suggests, the better long-term investment.

The state behind the behaviour

One of the most useful pieces of parenting advice Hughes has encountered comes in the form of an acronym: HALT. When a child is behaving in ways that are unexpected or hard to manage, the first question is not what is wrong with this child. It is four simpler ones: are they Hungry? Anxious? Lonely? Tired?

If any of those conditions apply, the behaviour is not the problem. The state is. And the state, unlike the behaviour, can be addressed. It holds, Hughes says, across almost every context; the meltdown at the school gate, the refusal to share, the five-year-old who cannot find their shoes. Identify the state. Fix the state.

The same logic, she adds, with something close to a smile, tends to apply to parents too.