Neurobiological limits and the somatic significance of love: Caregivers’ engagements with neuroscience in Scottish parenting programmes

Abstract

While parents have long received guidance on how to raise children, a relatively new element of this involves explicit references to infant brain development, drawing on brain scans and neuroscientific knowledge. Sometimes called ‘brain-based parenting’, this has been criticised from within sociological and policy circles alike. However, the engagement of parents themselves with neuroscientific concepts is far less researched. Drawing on 22 interviews with parents/carers of children (mostly aged 0–7) living in Scotland, this article examines how they account for their (non-)use of concepts and understandings relating to neuroscience. Three normative tropes were salient: information about children’s processing speed, evidence about deprived Romanian orphans in the 1990s, and ideas relating to whether or not children should ‘self-settle’ when falling asleep. We interrogate how parents reflexively weigh and judge such understandings and ideas. In some cases, neuroscientific knowledge was enrolled by parents in ways that supported biologically reductionist models of childhood agency. This reductionism commonly had generative effects, enjoining new care practices and producing particular parent and infant subjectivities. Notably, parents do not uncritically adopt or accept (sometimes reductionist) neurobiological and/or psychological knowledge; rather, they reflect on whether and when it is applicable to and relevant for raising their children. Thus, our respondents draw on everyday epistemologies of parenting to negotiate brain-based understandings of infant development and behaviour, and invest meaning in these in ways that cannot be fully anticipated (or appreciated) within straightforward celebrations or critiques of the content of parenting programmes drawing on neuropsychological ideas.

Neuroparenting: the Myths and the Benefits. An Ethical Systematic Review

“…The same was found in interviews with 22 Scottish parents who followed a parenting course in which neuroscientific information about child brain development was provided [21]. The authors found that parents adapted or rejected the neuroscientific insight based on their own needs.…”

“…Some studies used a more sociological analysis, exploring parenting norms [12,14,17]. Others used a qualitative empirical design that give insight into the experiences of parents [4,13,[18][19][20][21], adolescents [9], or policy makers [15,22]. Two studies had as primary target to review neuroscientific literature on which the neuroparenting advice are based [23,24].…”

“…Or, they emphasised that neuroparenting advices depict ideal situations in which a parent has ample time to respond to every cue of her child, while in real life, their children often have to wait a few minutes until parents have time for them. Parents did not think that such brief delays in responding to children's needs would result in any harm [21].…”

A consideration of the social dimensions and implications of neuroimaging research in global health, as related to the theory-ladened and theory-generating aspects of technology

“…As existing scholarship has demonstrated, such introductions and forms of reification have happened in a range of nations. At the same time, this research has also revealed that there are limits to the extent to which accounts of the self and of distress have been neurobiologized as a consequence of the proliferation of neuroimaging ( Barnett et al., 2020 ; Broer et al., 2020 ; Pickersgill et al., 2011 ). People - including, of course, neuroscientists themselves - are often subtle and creative in whether and how they ascribe significance to the brain and imaging technologies.…”

‘The intelligent and the rest’: British Mensa and the contested status of high intelligence

“…Intelligence self-tests and training publications that were popular throughout the 1970s and 1980s resonate in our era’s ‘brain training games’ (Pickersgill et al , 2017). 56 Similarly, debates about parenting strategies for optimal brain development (see Broer, Pickersgill, and Cunningham-Burley, 2020; Nadesan, 2002: 411–14; Pickersgill, 2013: 329–30) cannot be disconnected from past discussions about high intelligence in children. Not coincidentally, imaginaries of cognitive enhancement and ‘smart drugs’ envision merit and distinction in one’s private and professional life through the optimized use of the mind and the brain (Bloomfield and Dale, 2020).…”