The precarious infant brain
The precarious infant brain
This chapter examines how biological thinking is merging with the project of human improvement. It reviews social policies, tracing the ways in which neuroscience has been invoked to relocate a moral project within a scientific rationality. We deconstruct one such report in particular, the Allen report, which has been influential in the UK. The Chapter explores the emergence of a preventive mind-set in social policy which promotes intervention early in infancy to address inter-generational social disadvantage. The idea that the brain is critically susceptible to early experience, predetermining the rest of the life-trajectory, has led to the “the myth of the first three years”. We systematically debunk this myth: what the science actually shows is plasticity and resilience.
Keywords: parenting, Allen Report, infant determinism, early intervention, decade of the brain, myth of the first three years, brain plasticity
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