Abstract
The focus of these books is on theories that the editors and authors see as currently hegemonic and also damaging to the welfare of children. One of my questions on finishing reading what the authors have to say is whether they have hit the right targets.
Two of these books are edited collections and one is the product of the work of three authors (Gillies, Edwards and Horsley). Across the three slim volumes, many European authors are represented, with a slight preponderance of scholars from the United Kingdom, but there are no scholars from the majority world. Nonetheless, some important global issues are addressed, particularly in relation to the colonisation of international thought and practice on the best means of dealing with child poverty (e.g. Penn in Vandenbroeck et al.).
Despite the three decades of active and impressive research and analysis from scholars who associate themselves with the field of childhood studies, it is a sad reality that the often shared principles behind this field of scholarship are limited in their reach, both in the academy and in real-world applications and that other models dominate public and professional thought and practice.
O’Dell et al. set out to consider ‘different childhoods’ and to challenge ideas about ‘development (which) position children as either deserving or undeserving of help and protection and naturalise particular ways of developing through time’ (p. 1). They see developmental psychology and developmental discourse as central in promulgating this normative vision of children and childhood. Children who stand outside the norms dictated by developmental psychology are, they claim, viewed as ‘different and transgressive in some way’ (p. 2). Each of the nine substantive chapters deals with an example of ‘transgression’ and the ‘non-normative child’ (p. 4). The shared perspective in this collection of essays derives from the work of the critical psychologist Erica Burman. The editors and authors of individual chapters take just a few of Burman’s ideas, mostly those she first wrote about in the 1990s in the first edition of her book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology (1994). (Although this text was revised in 2008 and again in 2016, the core ideas have not changed very much.) They then use them as a basis to attack developmental psychology for its perceived role in establishing rigid norms against which all children who are in some way different are seen as abnormal and marginal. I consider this position as both specious and outdated. Mainstream developmental psychology is certainly not without its problems but it is time that people caught up with its current manifestations, which are a long way from viewing development as fixed, biological, progressive, uni-directional, de-contextualised and so on (see, for example, the relational, dynamic systems approach taken by many authors in the theoretical volume of the Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental Science, Theory and Method, 2015). The authors could also familiarise themselves with the history of psychological tests and clinical diagnostics, which have very little to do with developmental psychology. Many of the practices they critique are associated with psychiatrists and paediatricians and when psychologists are involved, they are typically educational and clinical psychologists. In general, they might appreciate also that the reasons why some children who are different find themselves misunderstood and rejected has to do with human beings’ deep-rooted problems with dealing with difference, which certainly pre-date the arrival of developmental psychologists. It is a pity that these authors hang their hat on attacking the Straw Man of developmental psychology (as they represent it) and on their partial interpretation of Burman’s work because some of the studies reported are of interest and of value and do not need the added polemic.
Two chapters illustrate this point particularly well. First, in a timely chapter on gender variance in childhood and adolescence, Katherine Johnson challenges the ideas behind the DSM classifications of gender identity disorder and gender dysphoria, pointing out that they both pathologise behaviour that falls outside the norm and perpetuate the view that the individuals involved are distressed and disordered and need fixing. Enabling trans children and youth to transition physically starts earlier and earlier. Johnson argues that this is because it represents a pathway to the goal of sex and gender certainty, seen as the desirable outcome for all. Instead she argues, we should resist this form of heteronormativity and explore options and ways of thinking that allow children to ‘embrace (their) inbetweenness’, as one teenager, whom Johnson quotes, puts it (p. 37). For children and young people, finding common cause with other gender variant young people is seen by Johnson as just as important as accessing gender identity services. Johnson’s call for ‘the depathologization of gender variance’ and her hope that society can support ‘growing up different’ is brave since, in the current climate where support for trans-aspiring children is seen to reside in enabling their physical transition, it is deeply controversial.
Second, a chapter by Maxine Woodhouse examines construals of the role of mothers in the child obesity epidemic. She claims that developmental psychology – and its habit of mother-blaming – is complicit in individualising the causes of child obesity and distracting attention from structural problems, such as lack of money and access to healthy foods, which are the more likely culprits. Woodhouse, is, I think, correct, in stating that wrong ‘choices’ by mothers are often the focus of attention from campaigners and politicians, although the connection to developmental psychology is somewhat stretched. She makes the important point that food practices are ‘expressive of identities, values and aspirations’ (p. 61) and gives examples of studies where researchers have gone beyond the simplistic marker of SES to understand the meaning of food and the impact of socio-economic circumstances on food practices. Public campaigns exhorting mothers to breastfeed and give their children ‘healthy food’ may well be doomed to fail without an understanding of the complex meanings of food and the socio-economic contexts that influence adult and child food buying and consumption.
Both of the other books engage with the current dominance of neuroscience and its unhealthy adoption by politicians and advocates who favour a neoliberal economic perspective on society. To my mind, popularised and distorted versions of neuroscience and neo-liberal politics are targets that are both more immediate and more threatening to children’s well-being than ‘developmental psychology’. The Gillies et al. text benefits from being the cohesive work of three authors. It is more weighty and substantial than the collection of essays by Vandenbroeck and colleagues although both books cover similar territory, and do so effectively. Vandenbroeck encapsulates a key message from both texts by commenting on ‘how a social problem (is) politically framed as an individual problem and how science (is) misused to legitimise this individualisation of responsibility’ (p. 5).
Both books focus on the early years and identify the way in which early years’ practitioners and advocates, most of whom sincerely want the best for children, have adopted the discourses around critical periods for brain development and the economic gains to be made, supposedly, from early investment in children’s lives. In their commitment to supporting children in their early years, they have backed a set of arguments that appear to be hard-nosed and evidence-based and that work with policy-makers and politicians but are in reality perpetuating inequality and distracting attention away from the actual causes of poverty and social dysfunction.
Vandenbroeck’s introduction also takes a few side-swipes at developmental psychology, while making the point that a focus on early formation theories is not new in thinking about influences on children. In this regard, the new brain sciences feed into an existing widespread belief, among scientists and lay people alike, that the first few years of life mark a child’s development for life. While this may be true for some aspects of physical development, it does not seem to be the case for many aspects of psychological development and learning, except where deprivation is extreme, as with the institutionalised Romanian children who are the focus of the English and Romanian Adoptee (ERA) study (Rutter et al., 2009). Even where children are severely neglected prior to adoption, the psychological consequences are not always catastrophic or long-lasting, as that study’s findings confirm. Much of the continuity observed in behaviour and psychology is due to the continuity of context. Vanderbroeck quotes approvingly the work of John Bruer, whose book ‘The myth of the first three years’, still stands almost 20 years after its publication in 1999 as an excellent critique of early formation dogmas. Bruer’s scepticism stands in marked contrast to the cynicism of Shonkoff and Bales (2011), who are connected to the influential Harvard Centre for the Developing Child. They argue for the use of ‘simplifying models’ to get new scientific findings across to child policy makers and in doing so promote an inevitably distorted picture of what neuroscience tells us about early child development. It is they who first promoted catchy, often mechanistic, metaphors like ‘brain architecture, ‘toxic stress’ and ‘serve and return’.
The third of the five chapters in the Vandenbroeck collection is by Sue White and Dave Wastell, who have written elsewhere on the social implications of new findings in the biological sciences. In this chapter, they address some of the issues also covered by Gillies at al., relating to the promotion of early intervention by UK politicians across the political spectrum. They add a section on the influence of brain-based policies concerning the early years on social work practice. They note that early intervention discourse is being used to justify non-consensual adoptions in the United Kingdom. Removal of children at birth has risen steeply over the last decade. In 2015, the Council of Europe criticised UK adoption policy for causing the ‘removal of children from women who had been subject to domestic abuse or who are suffering from depression; in short’, White and Wastell note, ‘those mothers who may also be potential beneficiaries of “early intervention” strategies’ (p. 47). A fatalistic view of the consequence for infant brains of stress and neglect has resulted in the removal of ‘asymptomatic’ infants from their mothers and/or families. As the authors conclude ‘the notion of damaged infant brains creates the conditions for one of the state’s most draconian interventions – the compulsory removal of children on the precautionary principle’ (p. 51). White and Wastell are certainly not arguing against adoption or the protection of children from abuse and neglect but they question the ‘science’ behind the so-called evidence-based policy and the selective use of scientific findings, which tend to be more tentative and equivocal than policy makers and practitioners might wish.
Helen Penn’s chapter is titled ‘Anything to divert attention away from poverty’ and argues that early intervention policies, bolstered by brain discourse, serve to individualise and de-politicise problems that are often the direct consequence of poverty. Penn takes a global perspective. She notes that 60% of the world’s children live in poverty and that every day sees the death of c. 19,000 children under the age of 5. Early intervention is being promoted by international bodies as a solution to the problems faced by these children. For example, in 2014, UNICEF published a report called ‘Building better brains: New frontiers in early child development’. Penn doubts that the ‘standard Western play based interventions’ (p. 61) offered as a solution to presumed poor brain development will have much effect given their cultural insensitivity and failure to face the root causes of child and family hardship. She concludes that ‘brain stimulation is a distracting and misleading shortcut to understanding of poverty’ (p. 63).
The Gillies et al. text focusses mainly on the recent history of ‘prevention and early intervention’ as a policy mantra in the United Kingdom. This may be seen to limit its interest. But the thinking they carefully describe and deplore is very evident elsewhere, in countries such as Ireland and the United States (where it originated and still flourishes). This way of thinking may be creeping into other countries where the commitment to the welfare state and to social justice is, for the moment, more robust. Undoubtedly, brain talk is becoming global and the early identification and management of ‘at risk’ children is being promoted by organisations such as UNESCO, UNICEF and the WHO. It is cheaper than the redistribution of wealth and less troubling to the status quo and those who profit from it.
The proximal mechanisms by which the infant brain is damaged, according to the version of brain discourse discussed in these texts, are inadequate or inappropriate stimulation, poor mother–child ‘attunement’ and attachment, and the effects of toxic stress in pregnancy and in the first years of life. The damaging conditions are thus readily seen as failures on the part of mothers, who can be educated in the right way of behaving through early intervention programmes. Thus, through re-educating the mothers or providing early education/behaviour management for children – or even through removal of children – educational failure, crime and social disorder can be prevented. This viewpoint was widely taken up after the work by US-based, Nobel prize-winning economist, James Heckman (2006) on early years investment was embraced internationally by child advocates, politicians and policy-makers. His graph showing the gains to be made by early investment has been reproduced hundreds of times all over the world. Local culture and values are seen as irrelevant. Children and their brains are the same wherever you find them, or so it goes.
There are important issues to be discussed around the current preoccupation with neuroscience and how it undermines more rounded conceptions of personhood, and indeed of what it means to be human (see, for example, Tallis, 2016). Both Gillies et al. and Vandenbroeck and his authors are at pains to say that they are not attacking neuroscience as such but the distortions and simplifications of neuroscience, typified in the widespread reproduction of Perry’s image of the brains of normal and ‘extremely neglected’ 3-year-olds (Perry, 2002). This is a generous but perhaps misguided stance. Certainly current policy is making use of poor or poorly understood science but the advance of neuroscience and the reductionist thinking that typically goes along with it has broader implications for the way we see ourselves and the way we see children.
In conclusion, it is important for scholars, practitioners and activists who are interested in children and how they are situated to be alert to the current ideologies and discourses that impact on children’s lives and influence the way children are perceived. These books all set out to interrogate what they see as powerful discourses that are ultimately harmful to children. While the insights and findings of developmental psychology can be misused and should always be open to scrutiny, the O’Dell et al. text – notwithstanding the intrinsic interest of some of the contributions – seems to me to be banging an old drum. The abuse of neuroscience and its alliance with neo-liberal thought and social policy are, on the contrary, both more current and more threatening.