1 000 Days to change a life

If you don’t ask questions, how will you ever know the answers? Multiply this simple philosophy thousands of times and you will have a small snapshot of the journey that social scientists like Durban-based Linda Richter take daily.

In Richter’s case the probing questions include, for example, whether genes or the environment play a more vital role in human behaviour? Does a newborn baby have an understanding of its surroundings? How important is early nurturing? How do poverty and disease affect a child’s development?

It is this insatiable passion for knowledge, developed through what she describes as “dedicated local and multi-national partnerships”, that has elevated her to the highest scientific level in the country.

From this month the affable, down-to-earth scientist, a distinguished research fellow at the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC), can officially be described as a “leading international re-searcher”.

She is one of a handful of South African social scientists to receive an A-rated classification from the National Research Foundation.

“I’m very happy about the rating. I know how proud my family is and how much it has inspired the people I work with,” said a delighted Richter, who had just flown into Durban after one of her monthly stints at the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Geneva.

Richter is seconded to the fund for half her time to advise on vulnerable children. But her heart lies in Africa, which she says “is in my blood – I’m here for the long haul”.

Now she is preparing for a national conference on early childhood development in East London, where she will present the results of a diagnostic review.

She led a team that analysed what had been achieved and what still needed to be done to improve the early development of young children in SA.

Her office in the HSRC’s block at Intuthuko Junction in Cato Manor is a flurry of papers, files and magazines. One wall is dominated by a poster of a young father with his six-month old baby – part of one of her ground-breaking long-term projects to analyse the role and importance of father figures in SA society.

“Sorry about the mess,” she apologises.

The state of her office is soon forgotten as she breathes life into an issue that “consumes” her day and night: children at risk, their welfare, care, needs, education, rights and future.

“Family has always been an important part of my life. My mother never completed her high school education, but she made sure her children were given every opportunity. We weren’t wealthy, but we had a grounding of love, ethics, effort and enquiry all rolled into one.

“It is the environmental benchmark that has dominated my life – maybe that is why I am so determined that other children have the same start. But we have a long way to go.”

The World Health Organisation’s Department of Child and Adolescent Health and Development reports that nearly 11 million children die every year before the age of five.

Almost 40 percent die within the first month and millions who survive live diminished lives, unable to develop to reach their full potential.

Taken a step further, Richter’s academic thrust has been to focus on those who provide – or fail to provide – protection for vulnerable children and adolescents, whether the children are victims of sexual abuse, slavery or trafficking; children with Aids, street children or orphans living in poverty.

The answers, she says, are often found in research that spans a generation or more.

A key research mission, of which she is principal investigator, is the flagship Birth-to-Twenty (Bt20) project that began in 1989 and enrolled 3 273 SA children from all race groups in Joburg.

“We have followed more than 2 300 children and their families for 22 years, studying their growth, health and wellbeing. For the past few years, we have been enrolling their children in a third-generation study of the determinants of health and disease.

“The research includes not only pregnancy, birth and early development, but schooling, home environment, friendships and peers, tertiary education and job opportunities.”

Emerging from this two-decade “work in progress”, says Richter, are some “critical pointers” that she and fellow researchers hope will lead to new thinking of investment in children’s well-being.

What has become patently obvious, she says, is that growth and parenting during the first two years of life has significant effects on adult outcomes. It sets a person’s growth and development trajectory.

“It is like growing a bean in cotton wool with water and sunlight. Starve the bean of any of the needed elements and its potential will be thwarted, no matter how much you try to make up for it later.

“We need to pay much more attention to the 0-2-year infant developmental phase because its neglect has serious consequences for the country.”

She says children who have not had the advantages of good nutrition and a strong mother/caregiver-to-child interaction from birth generally achieve fewer years of education and learn less.

“There is no doubt this is what the research is telling us – that achievement is not as much about genetics as we used to think, but about the environment that a child absorbs during the first 1 000 days of its existence.”

There is strong evidence, she says, that the “conditioning” of the developing brain is closely associated with the nurturing relationship with caregivers and with human nutrition.

“We see the human cost on children living in institutions, conflict, refugee camps and other settings that deprive them of stable, caring relationships. We also know from heart rate measurements that there is an extraordinary sensitivity in newborns and young infants to the way human beings react to them, and that they are able to distinguish human from non-human events.”

The emphasis now, she says is not only to gauge the effects of early environmental factors, maternal characteristics, family infrastructure and access to services, but to do something about it.

There are encouraging signs the National Planning Commission has taken these findings on board.

“How we design primary health, development and care programmes for mothers, other caregivers, newborns, and young children today will shape what happens in future generations.” - Sunday Tribune

Fact file:

Professor Linda Richter (PhD) is a distinguished research fellow at the Human Sciences Research Council.

In 2001 she was made a fellow of the University of KZN – a fellowship is conferred for life for distinguished academic achievement.

She is an honorary professor in psychology and an elected fellow of the University of KwaZulu-Natal, an honorary professor in the department of paediatrics and child health at the University of the Witwatersrand, and a research associate in the department of psychiatry at the University of Oxford in Britain.

Richter is now on contract from the HSRC to the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Geneva, as senior specialist: health of vulnerable children.