Best Beginnings

George speaks with Josephine McCartney, CEO of the Childhood Trust, London's child poverty charity, reaching 390,000 children across all 33 boroughs through a network of 150 frontline grassroots organisations.  They discuss what 38% child poverty in London really means for children's inner lives, why only 2% of London's council houses come with furniture, how the Childhood Trust's Transforming Spa...

George speaks with Matt Buttery, CEO of Triple P - the Positive Parenting Program - the world's largest evidence-based parenting programme, operating across more than 80 countries. They discuss why parenting is a public health issue, what the evidence really shows about what helps families, the 10-to-1 gap between Sure Start's peak investment and today's family hubs funding, and what 700,000 Austr...

Dr Dan Wuori, founder of Early Childhood Policy Solutions and author of the Grawemeyer Award-nominated book The Daycare Myth, joins Best Beginnings to make the case that separating childcare from education is a century-old myth that has cost children, families, and taxpayers an extraordinary amount. The conversation covers the neuroscience of when learning begins, what the UK's childcare expansion...

Dr. Stephanie Culler, co-founder and CEO of Persephone Bioscience, joins George to share the findings from the My Baby Biome study, one of the largest examinations of the infant gut microbiome ever conducted in the United States. They discuss how antibiotics, C-section births and modern diet have disrupted the bacterial ecosystems babies need to develop healthy immune systems, and why even breastf...

Christian Guy, Executive Director of the Royal Foundation Centre for Early Childhood, joins Best Beginnings to talk about what it actually takes to shift a society around the earliest years of life. The conversation covers the Shaping Us framework, the ADB infant observation scale, what a visit to Reggio Emilia revealed about genuine long-term investment, why early childhood needs the urgency of c...

Professor Linda Mayes, Director of the Yale Child Study Center, joins George to explore what it really takes to change a child's story. They discuss the neuroscience of parenting, why stress overwhelms the reward of caring for a baby, how addiction co-opts the brain's reward system, and what the Minding the Baby intervention has shown about the limits and possibilities of early support. Linda also...

Anxiety disorders are more common than depression in the perinatal period, but most parents and most clinicians still don't know it. In this episode, George speaks with Dr. Fiona Challacombe, Associate Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Oxford, on perinatal OCD, the misdiagnosis crisis, what attachment research shows about the parent-infant bond, and what effective treatment loo...

Professor Claire Hughes, Cambridge's deputy director at the Centre for Family Research, joins Best Beginnings for a conversation shaped by more than twenty years of following the same children from the age of two.  She talks about what siblings are actually doing for each other's development, why fathers' sensitivity grows through watching their partners, why the Millennium Cohort Study shows that...

Dr Sanjiv Nichani OBE, consultant paediatric intensivist and author of Movement is Medicine, joins Best Beginnings to explain why young children's brains are evolutionarily defenceless against smartphones and social media and what the science says about the antidote. He shares what he started seeing in his own clinic, the neuroscience behind why the developing brain cannot resist addictive algorit...

Season 2 of Best Beginnings starts 8 September. This trailer brings together six of the voices joining George this season, moving from the science shaping a child's biology to the systems and relationships shaping their everyday life. New guests will be confirmed throughout the season, with full episodes dropping from 8 September.

Camilla Reid, author of Pip and Posy and I Am Ready for School, joins Best Beginnings to talk about what children really need before they start school. In a wide-ranging conversation with George, she makes the case that school readiness is about confidence and self-management, not academic preparation, and explains why five minutes of shared reading a day from birth to five can add nearly 1.5 mill...

Sally Hogg, founding director of Start Strong and founder of the 1001 Days Movement, joins Best Beginnings to explain why early childhood investment keeps cycling through without lasting change. She discusses the gap between what the British public believes about early years and what they demand from government, the "feckless parent" narrative that holds back political action, and what a new gover...

Lizzie Gaisman, CEO of the Richmond Project, joins George to discuss the findings from the UK's largest ever survey on how people feel about numbers and what it reveals about a confidence crisis that starts early, falls hardest on mothers and travels between generations.  They cover why maths anxiety leads to real skill decline, why low-income mothers are both the most affected and the most motiva...

Jodie Reed, co-CEO of Home Start UK, joins George to talk about what 9,000 trained volunteers do for over 60,000 families every year and why that work can't be replicated by statutory services. They cover why family isolation is a structural trend that didn't recover after the pandemic, what the data reveals about the families Home Start reaches, why most families will never engage with a formal p...

Dr Ingrid Katz, Director of the Yale Institute for Global Health, joins George to talk about one of the most important questions in public health and early years: why don't people use support that's free and available? Drawing on 20 years of research in perinatal HIV clinics in southern Africa, she explores trust, stigma, community co-creation and the practice of humble inquiry — and what all of i...

Lauren Seager-Smith, chief executive of the For Baby's Sake Trust, talks with George about the programme working at the intersection of domestic abuse and the first 1001 days of a child's life. In this episode, they discuss why pregnancy is a critical window for intervention, why working with fathers protects babies and what the evidence says about love, connection and the prevention of violence....

George spoke to Anna Heuschkel, policy researcher and early years lead at the Centre for Young Lives, about the state of childhood in England and what it will take to close the gaps. From the dismantling of Sure Start to the risks inside the government's 75% school readiness target, this is an honest conversation about what the evidence shows, why it keeps being set aside, and why getting early ye...

Reading enjoyment among children is at a 20-year low. Only one in three children now say they enjoy reading in their free time. So what will it actually take to reverse that decline and why does it start in the earliest years? In this episode, Babyzone CEO George Looker is joined by Laura Henry-Allain MBE, creator of Jojo and Gran Gran, the first Black British animation produced for CBeebies, Nati...

The 1001 Critical Days Foundation is one year old. In that time it has allocated £1.5 million in grant funding, published screen time guidance that has been cited internationally, supported the nationwide rollout of Dad Matters and begun advocacy work in Norway and South Africa. For Will Quince, its first ever Chief Executive, it is only the beginning. Will spent nine years as MP for Colchester an...

Before a baby says their first word, they have already been communicating for weeks. Tracking faces, directing gaze, passing objects back and forth and waiting to see what happens next. These are not random behaviours. They are the foundations of everything language will become. Professor Paul Seedhouse is Emeritus Professor of Human Spoken Interaction at Newcastle University and one of the world'...

Sophie Livingstone MBE, CEO of Little Village and Chair of the Baby Bank Alliance, joins George Looker to talk about what essential items really mean for families experiencing poverty. From slings to high chairs, Sophie explains how practical support changes lives, why dignity is central to everything Little Village does, and what it means to design early intervention around families rather than s...

Most parents questioning whether they are getting it right are already doing well enough. That is not reassurance. That is what the science shows. Dr Martha is a clinical psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with children and families. She trained at UCL and the Tavistock, spent 18 years in the NHS and has built an Instagram community of over 290,000 people. Her Sunday Times numbe...

What is fast-paced screen content actually doing to your child's brain? And why does every parent recognise the mood their child comes off a screen in? Professor Sam Wass is Professor of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of East London, leader of the Baby Dev Lab, and one of the psychologists from Channel 4's multi-award winning series The Secret Life of 4 and 5 Year Olds. In...

What does money have to do with how a child develops? Everything, argues Alex Christopoulos, Director of the Aviva Foundation. In this episode, Alex joins George to explore how financial insecurity shapes the environment children grow up in, affecting parental stress, presence and responsiveness in ways that directly impact early development. Alex draws on his background in international children'...

What if the secret to raising curious, confident children was already in your kitchen cupboard? Sergei Urban is the founder of The Dad Lab, one of the most followed play based learning platforms in the world. With over 10 million followers and 3 billion YouTube views, his content is used in classrooms worldwide including by the Australian government. He has done all of it without a science degree,...