Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2026
I thank Emma Roddick for using her members’ business debate slot to bring this issue to the chamber. I feel very passionately about it, as she will know, and I appreciate her doing so.
First, I want to categorically say that we thank Growing2gether for the work that it does to support children to overcome trauma and adversity. The fact that it is working with 15 schools and has paired more than 2,000 young people with more than 2,200 toddlers over the past seven years should be applauded, because that is a monumental amount of work.
We have already heard from Emma Roddick what the Growing2gether programme has done for so many young people. This national initiative in Scotland focuses on improving outcomes for babies and infants who are affected by adversity in their earliest years. As I have stated, anyone who has listened to my speeches over the past four years will know just how important the issue is to me.
I am going to go personal. When I adopted my daughters, I was told about the issues surrounding attachment disorder and the necessity of reaching certain milestones in brain development for on-going cognitive growth and physical health throughout life. It was put to me like this: every milestone met is a brick in the wall of life; if you miss one out, every brick laid on top of that gap is unstable and insecure.
If members will forgive me, I will go back a step from the work that Growing2gether does. When a baby is born, it is amazing just how important every developmental milestone is. Everything that seems minor and insignificant is essential. Something as simple as holding a baby makes a massive difference. A newborn who is not held enough is more likely to have stunted growth, poor weight gain and a weaker immune system. Touch is essential for emotional and physical development. Touch promotes vital brain connections, growth hormones and the ability to make bonds with other people, so a child who grows up without touch in their early years has a significantly harder life than one who grows up with it.
Most newborns are well versed in hearing, because they hear their mother from inside the womb. However, if they are born into an environment in which they are not spoken to, they are more likely to suffer setbacks in language, communication, social and emotional skills and speech delays.
All that makes sense, but I wonder whether members also know that those children are also less likely to be able to form thoughts and that a child who grows up in a home where they are not spoken to softly is more likely to be unable to learn or to retain knowledge than one who grows up being spoken to in that way. So much of the nurturing that happens in early years is essential for a purposeful and productive life.
The reason I mention all of that is that Growing2gether’s programme is rooted in the growing body of evidence that the first 1,000 days of a child’s life are critical to their development and that any delay or inconsistency in decision making during that period can have long-lasting consequences. Those 1,000 days add up to just two years and nine months. Decisions must be made fast because, with every week that goes by, valuable development is lost.
I am speaking about that because Growing2gether’s programme aims to improve early identification of risk for babies and infants, strengthening multi-agency working across health, social work, justice and the children’s hearings system. It aims to reduce delay and drift in decision making, particularly in cases involving care and permanence, to ensure that babies’ lived experiences and their development needs are properly understood and represented. That is timely.
I cannot argue with a single one of those requests, which are timely because, with the Children (Care, Care Experience and Services Planning) (Scotland) Bill going through Parliament, we have an opportunity to advance on those asks. I sincerely ask the minister to ensure that we do that.
I will quote one line from Growing2gether:
“Babies are not simply small children.”
We only have two years to get it right for them.