It is important to realise that changed families mean changed lifestyles. For instance: children without brothers and sisters (and same-age cousins as well) are more dependent on adults to play with them, take them on outings, find them playmates etc. Hence the huge growth of toddler groups, soft rooms and so on. Streets, even in many suburbs, are too dangerous for pre-school children to "play out" so they get taken to classes instead - especially swimming, Tumble Tots, dancing etc

Changes can also be associated with many mothers working while their children are babies. This results in much less emphasis on nursery routines (mealtimes, naptimes) because the children have to fit flexibly with adult working hours and childcare arrangements. Lots of babies and toddlers stay up to spend the evening with parents - some eat out in restaurants-. There are different expectations about separation: babies and toddlers are expected to accept different caregivers and to settle into groups much earlier than twenty years ago." The first day at school" is less of a watershed it was because it's almost unheard of for that to be children's first experience of being away from parents and in a group of children.

You are currently co-directing the UK's largest program of research into the effects of various kinds of day-care on children's development in the first 5 years. Can you tell us more about this project - have you reached any conclusions that you can share with us?

The Families, Children and Child Care Project is a longitudinal study of the kinds, combinations, sequences, quantities and qualities of care (including parental care) children experience in their first five years. We're looking for measurable outcomes, in terms of health and growth; social and emotional development; and cognitive and educational development. Since we only have complete data for all 1200 children through their first year, I cannot give 'conclusions' yet.

We do have some interesting findings about what childcare, and what balance between home and work mothers wanted, and about the part played by fathers. For instance, when each baby was 3 months old, we asked all the mothers what their IDEAL childcare would be later on, money and availability no object. About half wanted to stay home and take care of their own babies' full time. That's a figure which seems stable in the UK right now, being similar in the DfES repeat study of demand for childcare, and in a recently published Survey of Infant Feeding carried out for the four UK Health Departments and covering 13,000 infants.

Among the other half of mothers who, at this very early stage in their babies' lives, were using or considering anyone else's care than their own, "ideals" were sometimes unexpected. Fathers are seldom picked as "ideal carers", though by the time the babies were a year old fathers were doing quite a lot of the caring while mothers worked. Nannies - widely regarded as the Rolls Royce of childcare - were not picked as often as expected, even when cost was not an issue. Registered childminders (the much-appreciated backbone of a majority of these families working lives a year later) weren't widely recognised in their local communities - and tended to suffer from the press tendency to refer to anyone caring for someone else's child in her own home as a "childminder" whether or not she is registered.

Nurseries, on the other hand, were regarded as ideal or as undesirable, depending whether parents thought the presence of other children meant positive stimulation and learning or negative lack of adult attention and peace.

The most-often cited "ideal care" was by a grandparent (or less often, by another relative). Comparing these "ideals" with the actual care babies were getting by the time they were a year old, about two-thirds of families have the kinds of care they wanted - so a third do not. A lot more fathers are active carers. Fewer children are with grandmothers, but the difference is taken up by childminders rather than nurseries. There are about the same number of children in nurseries as there were mothers who thought that would be ideal and there are more with childminders. Almost half the mothers are staying home at this point. Very few of those who are working outside their homes are doing so full time - or near it. So very few babies are spending long hours in any form of non-family care.

Your highly acclaimed book `Children First' states that wherever there are `families' there should be family centres, reflecting and serving their particular communities. Winthrop Village in Brandon, Florida was founded in 2000. It is the world's first `children first' community. How is this initiative progressing and developing? How can people learn more about it?

Winthrop is a 150-acre new community parts of which are under construction. This master-planned community was designed by Plater-Zyberk, Architects and Town Planners of Miami under the direction of Andres Duany. The co-founder of Winthrop, Kay Beckett Sullivan, has been influenced by my work, sought to find a means to implement her ideas set out in the book. Funding these ideas required large policy shifts in government and when this process was frustrated, she along with her husband, attorney John Sullivan, began the process that ultimately led to the Winthrop development. A children first community is a physical environment designed with the specific needs of children in mind. With the interests of children integrated into the development plan, the community offers a better place in which persons of all ages can live.
For further information, contact Kay Sullivan in Brandon, Florida at (813) 681-3480.

You are on the curriculum board for Sesame Street. The Sesame Street series is a revolutionary program, designed to use the medium of television to reach and teach pre-schoolers, giving them skills that would provide a successful transition from home to school. We live in an information age, where children are exposed to many mediums - television, film, the Internet. How can we help to ensure that our children are benefiting from what they watch, read, and listen to?

Sesame Street was a path-breaker but it has had to change and adapt, not only to new views of children's entertainment - and widespread competition in providing it - but also to new knowledge of, and aspirations for, early brain development and education. We know TV isn't a good way to stimulate very small children (or bigger ones come to that) but it is harder than ever to control, or even monitor children's viewing. Many families start out rationing infants' viewing - which is easy, because under about 20 months most don't get absorbed anyway. After that, though, many busy parents don't try very hard because that screen is the best way of ensuring adult peace to "get on". Most toddlers watch at least two hours per day regularly by two years - and some estimates are much higher.

In Sesame Street's early heyday children's programming was part of the structure of many toddlers' and pre-schoolers' days. A lot of them were being cared for at home. Part of the joy of Sesame Street was that parents actually enjoyed watching with their children. Now that regular daily slot is meaningless to most families: fewer children are at home all day and many have non-stop "children's channels". Furthermore, many watch more videos than programs. The old idea that VCR's would be used to time shift children's TV programmes (so they watched the same amount, parent-selected, but at more convenient times) didn't happen. An astonishing number of people cannot programme their VCR's to time-shift and even more wouldn't think it worthwhile.

TV isn't a suitable medium for babies or toddlers, who develop and learn out of direct interaction with real people, and it needs limiting for pre-schoolers who get much more out of doing than out of listening and watching. Two hours viewing is two hours less of active play and talk. That doesn't mean it should be totally banned, though, any more than we have to ban snack foods in order to give children a good diet. Choose your times (like when a child's too tired to do anything active and/or you're too tired to talk cheerfully!) and choose his viewing. With younger children videos probably are the way to go, not only because there are excellent ones out there and parents can watch them through the first time to be sure, but also because TV programmes move too fast and leave small children behind so they stop following. As with a favourite storybook a child can have a video, or his favourite bits of it, again and again until he almost knows it by heart and can sing every song and play every part…