Abstract
Challenging the Politics of Early Intervention is an accessible and compelling book. It offers a timely critique of the accepted consensus that intervention to influence parenting in children’s early years is the way to prevent economic disadvantage and secure ‘massive savings’ (Allen, 2011) for the state. At the heart of the book, the authors call into question the use of ‘objective’ neuroscience, deployed as a moral call for early intervention, and they analyse the ‘essentialist ideas of how child brain development (and assumed consequences) have become detached from actual neuroscientific knowledge and have taken on a life of [their] own’ (4). Moreover, the text offers a challenge to the use of such knowledge as the justification of interventionist social policies.
The book draws on material from two research projects – namely, the ‘Brain Science and Early Intervention: Tracing the New Biologisation of Parenting and Childcare’ project and the ‘“Troubled Families” and Inter-Agency Collaboration: Lessons from Historical Comparative Analysis’ project. Chapter 1 opens with the all-too-familiar but nonetheless arresting Perry brain-scan images depicting one ‘normal’ child’s brain and one allegedly having suffered ‘severe neglect’. This now recognisable and powerful visual, featured prominently on the cover of the Allen (2011) report, has since attained the status of seemingly incontrovertible evidence that ‘poor parenting causes lasting damage to babies’ and young children’s brain development’ (1). The chapter details how we have experienced this message as a circular discourse, with various think tanks recycling the ‘findings’, thereby lending weight to the argument through ‘cumulative referencing’ (5). The brain-scan image serves as a potent emblem for the misappropriation and deployment of such science to influence social policy, and the chapter outlines the ‘slippage’ from these apparent findings to social policy.
In chapter 2, ‘Citizens of the future’, the authors detail the evolution of English social policy predicated on the idea that deprivation is transmitted down the generations. They note how the 19th- century concerns about children’s moral development led to a preoccupation with physical health, which included physiological development leading to the present-day concerns about an infant’s brain development.
Chapter 3 focuses on recent research and developments linking parenting to child brain development with a focus on ‘five key biologised motifs’ – namely, maternal attunement, synaptic density, cortisol, critical periods and the pre-frontal cortex. The chapter also explores how brain-science claims came to define and propel a campaigning movement for early intervention in the UK – a logical expression of social investment policies. This chapter discusses the coupling of brain science and social policy, and the way in which a rhetoric of neuroscience was ‘harnessed almost accidently as a highly persuasive public relations vehicle’ (46).
‘In whose best interests’ is the focus of chapter 4, which includes a detailed analysis of the relationships between business, politicians and professionals who have seemingly embraced the investment narrative in advancing particular social policies. These relationships are further explored in chapter 5 through case studies of Wave Trust, the Family Nurse Partnership and the Parent Infant Partnership. The chapter is part critical analysis of the origins of contemporary early intervention policy and part exposé of associated vested interests. I was particularly interested to read an investigation into highly questionable network governance arrangements between numerous charities, edu-businesses and think tanks supported by forms of philanthro-capitalism to deliver outsourced public services.
Chapter 6 is entitled ‘Saving children’ and explores how the neo-liberal paradigm is infusing policy and practice in the early years. Informed by practitioner interviews, this chapter highlights how early intervention informed by brain science is perceived as a way of ‘saving’ children from inadequate parenting, especially by mothers. This is built on in chapter 7, ‘Reproducing inequalities’, in which the focus is on the way gender, social class, ethnicity and poverty are embedded and reproduced through early intervention policies. In particular, this chapter investigates the ways in which poor working-class and minority ethnic mothers are framed as the source of individual, and national, social problems, as well as being the solution, provided they engage in sanctioned parenting programmes.
The final chapter, ‘Re-claiming the future: Alternative visions’, urges caution in the deployment of neuroscience as the evidence for early intervention policies and highlights the risks associated with a neo-liberal ideology used to optimise and regulate behaviour. In contrast, a socially just, more collectivist approach to addressing structural inequality through redistributive policies is advocated.
This book offers a refreshing antidote to the increasing proliferation of reports which have utilised the Perry brain scans and related messages. As policy research and critique, it offers robust and detailed analysis of some of the essentialist ideas informing recent intervention developments. I would have been interested to read about other recent ‘parenting initiatives’, such as the way in which Sure Start local programmes evolved from being locally driven and parent-led to a more explicitly centralised, outcome-focused initiative, and also more recent developments, such as the failure of the CANparent voucher trial. However, this does nothing to detract from the book’s forensic analysis of the recent policy trajectory of early intervention.
Although the focus of the book is from a UK context, the inherent messages would resonate to wider global audiences where successive social policy interventions frame working with young children. The book will certainly be of value to those researching early intervention, policymakers and those teaching postgraduate students in childhood studies.
This text contributes to a body of work which argues for more critical analysis of early intervention, early education and childcare policy, and the questionable use of (largely positivist) research to justify ideologically driven social policy decisions in the name of children and families. In questioning the dubious use of ‘brain science’, it sits alongside work by Vandenbroeck et al. (2017) in offering insights into the historical roots and dominant discourse of a perceived relationship between neuroscience, parenting and child development.