There has been a lot in the papers and on the news about How the Date of your Birth can affect educational achievement. Fundamentally, the point is that when small children start school at one or two points in the school year, some children will be very much more mature and able to learn than others. At its most obvious, children born four days apart – August 29th and Spetember 2nd – will be a whole school year apart. The August child will spend the whole of his education with children potentially a year older.

Clearly this matters less when children are older. A 12 year old and a 13 year old might be fairly similar in terms of physical and intellectual development. But a child of 4 might well be very much smaller and less able to count, to deal with the orientaion of letters, have less well developed fine-motor control than a child of 5. And this might be less important if the UK did not expect children to go into an academic environment at a much younger age than virtually any other European country [or any other that I have come across]. Children who are very little be in a class where they are expected to learn to read, to recognise numbers etc, alongside children who are much readier physiologically. And if they aren’t ready, and don’t learn, they fall further behind and feel more stupid than others. With dreadful long-term effects.

This has been known for a very long time. Probably thirty years ago, we were discussing how this discrepancy could be accounted for in the system. Research from then and much more recently confirm that – in Japan, Sweden, Germany, British Columbia, the UK – confirm that the month of birth affects stuff.  The older [in the year] children do better educationally, access Higher Education more often and more readily, earn more for the rest of their lives!!!

There are Buts. Children of families who are well-educated, upwardly mobile etc are less affected. And the effects are mitigated somewhat by the age when they start school. Clearly by age 7, more physiological developments have occurred so that children can physically meet the requirements for literacy and numeracy. [Which is one of the reasons why Educational Psychologists opposed the Education Department's decision to push for very early school starts and assessment

The suggestion that exams are marked in accordance with the month of birth is just the most recent of ideas of how to deal with a very genuine issue. For a while, there were three points of entrance during the school year in the UK. In Canada, they found that starting kindergarten a year later reduced educational problems later. Maybe we should not push children into an academic setting until 6 0r 7. Perhaps we should offer these younger children more of an opportunity for catch-up learning. Perhaps we should be far more flexible about allowing children to repeat a school year [or to be accelerated]. It is an issue worth re-visiting, but the answers are not clear.

By the way, my children are June and August born and were both successful academically. Of course, the question is whether they would have been very much more successful had they been born in October?

I ended up discussing toy preferences with friends. One expressed her interest that daughter number 1 loved mechanical things, telescopes, building stuff, cars. She overcame this and was relieved when her second daughter was born – she could pass the toys on. Not true: daughter number 2 loved dolls and pet and animals and anything that required nurturing. Others spoke of their gentle boys who cared and cuddled, but others again of boys who were not happy unless they could take something to pieces. Although in the end – adulthood – girls may be generally more nurturing, there is an enormous range of temperament.

Do children love musical instruments because they do? probably. But if they don’t have access to instruments [and that would include things you can shake and bang as well as keyboards], they and you will never find out. There are, of course, families where musical interest and talent seems to be genetically programmed, or science, or sport, or literature but if we dont encourage children to attempt or interact with a whole range of activities, we shall never know what latent talent was just waiting to be developed. Gerald Durrel went out of his way to collect and freeze dead animals and had an amazingly tolerant mother; other parents applaud attempts at plays or poetry, or learn about the stars or, or, or…. Sometimes this encouragement leads to a long-term plan or prfession, often it is just a phase.

The best parenting seems to include allowing children to come across a whole range of ideas and encouraging them to take things further. ‘Come across’ not ‘Force-feed’, ‘Encourage’  not ‘Push’.

And there are now, of course, technological opportunities too. Do more boys than girls enjoy games and apps on their screens? do more girls enjoy activities that link up with others than do boys? are boys or girl more dextrous or are they the same? There are probably tendencies now but who knows if they will remain? certainly I cant imagine that any parent would allow only sons or daughters to play with a Tablet.

The future is ours to shape, but gender division does not seem to be a sensible way forward.

At 11, approaching puberty, I began to wear glasses. This apparently happens because at that point your body changes shape, muscles becaome stronger and weaker, proportions alter. I hate glasses – I wore contact lenses as soon as I could afford to, and continued to wear them until my far and short sight became too different for lenses to deal with. Then I went back to glasses. Lots of my firends had laser surgery very successfully, and I booked in for it several times and always chickened out. My grandmother [whom I never knew] taught blind children and it was always part of my awarenes that one day I might not see, read, enjoy colours, faces, flowers etc.

So I am highly conscious [hypervigilant even] of anything I come across to do with eyesight. Maybe five decades ago, it was established that new babies who were deprived of oxygen at a certain stage around birth became blind [could it really be that this was based on experiments done on black babiesin New York??] . Several years ago when we had ideas about how Omega 3 [fish oils] might help children, we looked into the research. And this said that pregnant women who were desperately short of Omega 3 during pregnancy had babies with eyesight problems – and led to women being given cod liver oil during pregnancy during WW2, and subsequently.

Then more stuff: research in Singapore showed that although most 2 year olds had perfect eyesight, by age 18,  a large proportion were short-sighted. Singapore has a large population squished into a fairly small land area, and therefore lots and lots of high-rise flats. The conslusion reached was that many of the children did not go out toplay after they got home, and that the problems arose from the lack of exercise that they gave their eyes. When you are outside, you are constantly adjusting your vision to take account of the person you are talking with, the bird swooping on the horizon, your friend’s mum coming round the corner etc this giving your eye muscles a substantial and constant workout. If you are mostly at home, you eye muscles have very little to do going from screen to book to bigger screen and back again. Muscles that are not used  tend to weaken. This was research over twenty years ago.

And now, more. This encompasses research from Taiwan and Denmark that says that daylight makes a difference to how well eyeballs grow. Children who dont experience enough daylight, have eyeballs that grow more slowly and it seems that the length from front to back of the eyeball is what makes for myopia – short-sightedness. Seems possible .

Of course, many children inherit a tendency to short-sightedness, far sightedness etc. I wore glasses from 11, my sister never needed them and we spent the same sort of time outdoors. What much research seems to show is that our bodies were designed by nature to optimise our senses etc. If we stick to the old rules – playing out, eating a broad diet, sleeping more as children, having periods of quiet and noise – our bodies are more likely to function as intended.

Appositely, following my thoughts about what constitutes an accurate memory, I have been reading a newspaper insert on Memory. It’s really well done, written by experts with experience and an interest in what research says.

I have always admitted that my memory is not very good – except it is in parts. I seem to remember quite sometimes but I am clear that I may be wrong. And perhaps that is a significant difference between me and some others. Like my sister.

The Memory piece points out that it is very rare to have an accurate memory. Americans were asked to write what had happened to them on 9.11 – where they had been, what they had seen etc – just one day later. Later, when asked, their memories were quite different although the subjects were convinced they were right. Similarly, Hilary Clinton claimed she had been attacked by a sniper on one foreign visit, although camera footage of the visit showed no such incident.

And, in a lovely experiment, young adults were shown ‘fotos’ of things that had happened in their childhood – when, in fact, the fotos had been doctored and the subjects’ faces had been put e.g. on another’s body to suggest the child had been on a hot air balloon, or had ridden an elephant etc. Two weeks later, the subjects categorically ‘remembered’ the experience that they had been shown in the photograph, although it had never happened at all. There is a belief that many of the memories we retain from childhood have been reconstructed from fotos we have seen subsequently.

This is important. It is not that people are lying, they genuinely believe that they are telling the truth and giving an accurate account of what happened. The woman who recalled the three inch gash on the victim’s forehead, ‘remembered’ it, although it couldn’t be seen on any of the fotos taken at the time. The individual who describes the robber as wearing a red jumper and glasses, believes that to be true, even though he may have been wearing navy blue and a hearing aid. Which is presumably why it is so difficult to be clear about what is truth.

It was also pointed out that we remember more fiercely the things that have most emotional impact on us. So that when twins were asked about long-ago events, there were some events that were claimed by both twins – who had been hurt in an accident, or had won a prize etc. When something matters a lot, we remember it with great conviction, even when it is wrong. Which is what my sister does. And she is wrong, of course!

I recently interviewed young men for the Courts. They were involved in separate incidents. It reminded me of all sorts. Four years ago,I spent time in Court this week with two boys I had seen a couple of months before. They admitted that they had a fight with a man, but denied starting it and kicking him in the face. I had had a three hour interview with each and believe that they did not do it. This comes from my familiarity with teenagers/adolescents but also with the really awful evidence given by others. Of course, I was not there – what do I know about what really went on!

The witnesses gave very different statements, and what they said in Court was very different to what they said immediately after the incident itself. Thus the boys were described as being anything from 5’6 to 6’1 [they are actually both well over 6’] and given clothing that included hoodies, baseball caps, tracksuits, jeans, gloves and jumpers. They apparently started a fight and kicked the victim in the face. The boys said that the man came out of the pub challenging them and admitted that they hit him. What confused me was that the magistrates accepted primarily the witness statement of the woman who said that the victim had a three inch gash on his head. This was not mentioned by him and was not visible on the fotos taken by his father at the time. His nose/face was swollen but not broken, and he drove home – my feeling was that if two big boys kick you in the face, then your nose is likely to be broken, and driving could be a problem in the short term.

The particularly worrying thing for me is how it made me question, yet again, the definition of justice.

Years ago, my son had a party at the local scout hut. He was 15 and we had borrowed some big 16/17 year olds as doormen. We parents sat nearby and periodically went over to see how things were going. Not good. Policemen seemed to be patrolling regularly. They stopped the boys and swore at them, challenging them about what they were doing. When my husband went to talk to them, they challenged him too. He was on some sort of Police committee at the time, but they didn’t know that and were the sort-of aggressive that helps you to understand why some adolescents are rude to policemen.

A friend was taken to Court for dangerous driving. He had been overtaking a caravan when it swayed out towards him and hit him. But he was a student with long hair, and the driver of the caravan was a regular middle-aged worker. My friend was found guilty.

Society is built on prejudice. This is helpful and efficient. If we all accept that the Spanish are glamorous [for example] or that men are good with engines, it saves a lot of time and energy. But it is not always helpful, and when justice is concerned, we need to take the time to make absolutely sure that truth prevails.

I am increasingly aware that Justice has more to do with who can argue better in and before Court than what actually happened. It was probably always like that, and perhaps only the naive can believe that  Truth is Absolute.