What did taking part involve?

We interviewed mothers and fathers to help us build a full picture of each child’s life. This included mothers and fathers who live apart from their baby’s other parent, whatever involvement they had with their baby.

We invited one parent, usually whoever spends the most time with the baby, to complete an interview, usually done in person with an interviewer.

We asked the other parent to complete a separate shorter interview. This was shorter as we only needed to ask some questions once per baby or household. These interviews were done online, in person and sometimes by telephone.

Ipsos, an independent research organisation, carried out these interviews.

When did Generation New Era fieldwork happen?

We interviewed mothers and fathers when their baby was around 9-12 months old, to understand health and development in the first year of life.

In England, Wales and Scotland, interviewing started in Autumn 2023. Interviews finished by end of June 2024.

In Northern Ireland, interviewing started in April 2024. Interviews finished by the beginning of September 2024.

In total, 1918 families took part: 1005 families in England, 273 in Wales, 319 in Scotland and 321 in Northern Ireland.

1850 mums and 1256 dads took part.

What did the interview cover and what did we find?

Answering questions about yourself and your baby

We asked you about your baby, your experiences as a mother or father, and about you and your family.

1) About your baby

We asked you about your baby’s:

• Health: three quarters of the babies were in very good health and didn’t have any longstanding health conditions.
• Behaviour and development: for example, we found out that more than ¾ of babies spent some of their day watching screens.
• Sleep: on average the babies woke up 3 time a night and slept for 10 hours a night.
• Diet: nearly ¾ of babies had been breastfed at some point.
• Activities they do with you: parents most often played with toys, cuddled and talked to their babies throughout the day.

2) About your experiences as a mother or father

We asked you about:

• Your home and family: we found the average age of parents was rising (e.g. around 20 years ago 4 in 10 first time mums were over 30, whereas in Generation New Era this was now 6 in 10).
• Your work situation (including any maternity or paternity leave)
• Your health and wellbeing: most parents were satisfied with their lives and more than 9 in 10 parents said they felt very or fairly competent caring for their child. 
• Your pregnancy and baby’s birth: we found that nearly all babies were born in hospital, and 13% had to spend time in a neonatal unit after birth.
• Your relationship with your baby: parents found some aspects of parenting challenging, for example over 50% worried they were not doing enough for their baby.
• The support you receive from people in your life
• Any services you or your baby use
• Any childcare arrangements: 2 in 5 families relied on relatives to look after their baby, and this was most often the child’s grandparents.

3) About you and your family

We also asked some wider questions about you and your family, including:

• Any other children you have
• Family finances
• About the area you live in
• Key information about your child’s other parent and any partners

You can find out more about what we found in our ‘Learning from Generation New Era’ booklet which families were sent in October-December 2024.

Adding information from administrative records

Government departments and agencies, such as the NHS, routinely collect administrative records about all of us to help plan and provide services.

We would like to add information from health, education and social care records about you and your child to your study responses. This makes the study even more useful for researchers and policymakers, who will use this information to improve public services for everyone. This was covered as part of your interview. While no further interviews are planned with families in the first phase, we may still add information about you and your child, if you gave us permission for this.  

Find out more by clicking the ‘Adding more information about you’ button below.

Giving a saliva sample

We asked some parents and their babies to add genetic information to the study, to help understand how genes influence people’s lives, and how genes and the environments people experience work together.

You can read more about what being part of research about genes involves by clicking the button below.

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What happens next?

The study team at UCL have now been asked to make Generation New Era a much, much bigger study. This next phase of Generation New Era will include around 30,000 babies born in 2026, making it over ten times the size of the first phase that you took part in, and the largest national birth cohort study in UK history. 

We had hoped to be able to invite all families in the first phase of Generation New Era to take part again in the future. However, the scale of the new phase of the study means that unfortunately we are not able to continue interviews with families from the first phase.  

We realise that this may be disappointing, but we would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your valuable contribution. If things do change in the future, we hope you will be happy for us to get in touch.  

The information that you and other families have provided will continue to be used, for many years to come, for research to improve lives of children and families in the UK. Find out more about this on our looking after your information page. If you’d like to tell us that you’d prefer us to stop using the information you gave us, please get in touch.