Abstract
In recent years, claims about children's developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England. While these policies assert that they are based on neuro-scientific discoveries, their relationship to neuroscience itself has been debated. However, what is clear is that they portray a particular understanding of children and childhood, one that is marked by a lack of acknowledgment of child personhood. Using an analysis of key government-commissioned reports and additional advocacy documents, this article illustrates the ways that the mind of the child is reduced to the brain, and this brain comes to represent the child. It is argued that a highly reductionist and limiting construction of the child is produced, alongside the idea that parenting is the main factor in child development. It is concluded that this focus on children's brains, with its accompanying deterministic perspective on parenting, overlooks children's embodied lives and this has implications for the design of children's health and welfare services.
Highlights
In recent years, claims about children’s developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England
Claims about children’s developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England. This has included a strong shift towards the construction of parenting as a key determinant of brain development and the child’s future
Within child health and welfare policies, we will argue that ‘neuroculture’ has led to a particular portrayal of children and childhood, one that is marked by a lack of acknowledgment of child personhood
Summary
Claims about children’s developing brains have become central to the formation of child health and welfare policies in England This has included a strong shift towards the construction of parenting as a key determinant of brain development and the child’s future. More recent developmental theories have often focused on the internalisation of adult skills and knowledge (James et al 1998; Corsar, 2011), yet this understanding of children as social actors, albeit within a world usually shaped by adults, is rarely acknowledged It is not much of a leap between the notion that children are predestined to ‘learn’ the skills from adults to the idea that the brain itself needs to be ‘wired’ appropriately, and children’s futures lives are predestined by early years brain development. Ideas of intergenerational transmission of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour through parenting is central to brain-based policy
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