Ideas that the quality of parental nurturing and attachment in the first years of a child's life is formative, hard-wiring their brains for success or failure, are reflected in policy reports from across the political spectrum and in targeted services delivering early intervention. In this article we draw on our research into 'Brain science and early intervention', using reviews of key policy literature and interviews with influential advocates of early intervention and with early years practitioners, to critically assess the ramifications and implications of these claims. Rather than the 'hopeful ethos' proffered by advocates of the progressive nature of brain science and early intervention, we show that brain claims are justifying gendered, raced and social inequalities, positioning poor mothers as architects of their children's deprivation.
This chapter explores how brain science and neoliberal ideas infuse and shape the understandings and practices of those working in the early years field. It considers the evangelical mission that they believe guides their work, which is to save children from the perils and consequences of inadequate parenting. It is brain science discourse that provides practitioners with what they regard as the unchallengeable ‘truth’, made visual through brain scans, which justifies their interventions and the ways that they intervene in parenting. Underlying practitioners' enthusiasm about saving children are ideas about optimising both children and mothers, and notions of intergenerational cycles of deprivations that reproduce low attachment and deficit parenting in families and localities.
This article critically explores sociological arguments for greater biosocial synthesis, centring contemporary developments in public policy to demonstrate how such a reframing of humanity tends to reinforce existing political orders and socially patterned normativities. The case for further amalgamation of the social and life sciences is examined to suggest that production of somatic markers of truth from relational encounters largely relies upon an anaemic and politically contained version of the social as acquired in early childhood. More specifically, the gendered, classed and culturally specific practice of parenting children has come to occupy a new significance in accounts of social brains and environmentally reactive genomes. This is highlighted through a discussion of 'early intervention' as a heavily biologized policy rationale framing opportunities for biosocial collaboration. It is argued that late capitalist objectives of personal investment and optimization are driving this assimilation of the social and life sciences, pursuing an agenda that traces and rescores long-standing social divisions in the name of progress.
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