Tomorrow’s Child Exhibition – 1001 Critical Days Manifesto

Tomorrow’s Child Exhibition – 1001 Critical Days Manifesto

Without a name, an unseen face

Without a name; an unseen face and knowing not your time nor place, Tomorrow’s Child, though yet unborn, I met you first last Tuesday morn.

The beginnings of this poem by Glenn Thomas was read by Ray Anderson during his TED conference talk regarding sustainability, but today its ethos is being addressed by the charity Parent Infant Partnership (PIP) UK who are facilitating an exhibition in Parliament, to continue focusing the hearts and minds of policymakers regarding the experience of being a baby in the UK.

The origins of Monday’s Child is fair of face rhyme with its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, used a fortune telling methodology to predict the life chances of childhood. Today there is incontrovertible scientific understanding which is contributing to policy discussions of the 1001 Critical days: conception to age 2 period – asking for a cultural shift in thinking about the importance of the antenatal period and its significance for future life chances of the unborn baby.

Tomorrow’s child exhibition presents a creative response to the only cross-party children’s manifesto in the country which brings together a coalition of policy-makers, professionals and parents, to enable the village around the infant-family in our local communities.

Should the day in which you are born determine your life chances? Giving every baby the best possible start in life presents us with a challenge and responsibility to consider together what that looks like in the UK. How well we are doing with what science and economics is showing us is a progressive way of thinking for better outcomes for our citizens.

Suzy Miller is the UK’s unique ‘Alternative Divorce Guide’, Public Speaker and Trainer, featured on Radio 4 Women’s Hour, the Daily Mail and C5’s The Vanessa Show.
Her submission, Suzy Miller: Alternative Divorce Guide is a series of videos under the title of “Do Babies Cause Divorce?”
The focus of these short films is how, during the first 1001 days, divorce and family separation has a range of effects upon the new life  and therefore the family as a whole, and society – both financially, health-wise and also on a deeper level of ethics/humanity.
 

Earliest relationships and children’s experiences of this right from their experience in the womb, lays the foundations of potential and building blocks to support infant and early childhood mental health.

Creative collaborations between a community of 60 artists and scientists have generated a fascinating menagerie of art objects, images and designs, which positions this exhibition as a pioneering piece of neuroscientific enterprise.

Saying bad things about Mummy: Co-parenting through divorce and separation

 
In Psychology Today, Edward Kruk has written of 11-15% of the children of divorcing parents suffering the effects of implacable hostility. In the UK, where roughly 250,000 divorces are granted every year, that estimate would equate to some 50,000-75,000 children every year.
The parent labelled with ‘implacable hostility’ is unable to see any value in their child spending time with the other parent.  But the effects of this on the child can be extreme, and the phrase used to discribe this is Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), which can begin at a very young age – even younger than 2 years old.
But there are much more subtle and common forms of alienation, and not always against the non-resident parent.
This mother shares her story:

Building babies minds has been a recent campaign launched by the charity PIPUK, recently saw over 10 million people across the UK engaged in raising awareness of infant mental health in the first national week of its kind. Infant mental health and its public message of prevention as cure, contributes significantly to children’s mental health and it is in this context that thinking about a child’s life chances can be thought about – preventonomics to give a better start for investing into our future generations.

Tim Loughton MP says:

“There is a growing acknowledgment that those first early years of a child’s life are absolutely crucial. Getting it right as parents supported by professional help and public investment where needed has the potential to make a huge difference to how that child will grow into an adult contributing to society.

Putting this approach at the heart of what Government does in which there is now buy in of all the political parties. I’m delighted to be sponsoring the Tomorrow’s Child exhibition in Parliament which is a creative response to the 1001 critical days’ manifesto from a community of artists and scientists who have worked in collaboration over many months to bring the arts and science together for such an important topic”.

Bringing art and science together to represent the names and faces of the 776,352 babies born each year in the UK and the many losses which add up to 3,564 stillbirths, 42,841 recorded miscarriages and around 186,000 through termination of pregnancy brings a focus for the infant-family and all of the joys and sorrows experienced in homes throughout our villages, towns and cities.