http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php A grown-up discussion of parenting English jennie@bristow.com Copyright 2013 2013-01-22T12:11:10+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_generation_war_over_abortion_rights/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_generation_war_over_abortion_rights/#When:12:11:10Z Among abortion activists, there’s a worrying shift from supporting choice to demanding ‘justice’. By Jennie Bristow. abortion and contraception 2013-01-22T12:11:10+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/what_future_for_the_family/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/what_future_for_the_family/#When:12:10:19Z When it comes to parents, the Lib-Cons are as manipulative and distrustful as their predecessors. By Jennie Bristow. marriage and family 2013-01-16T12:10:19+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/from_freewheelin_sixties_to_fearmongerin_noughties/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/from_freewheelin_sixties_to_fearmongerin_noughties/#When:12:08:45Z Everyone talks about the impact, whether good or bad, of the tumultuous Sixties - but two in-depth books about that decade say and reveal more than most. By Jennie Bristow. generations 2012-12-27T12:08:45+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/how_can_parents_stand_up_to_supernanny/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/how_can_parents_stand_up_to_supernanny/#When:11:13:04Z A Q&A with Jennie Bristow.Are you not over-egging it a bit when you talk of a ‘supernanny’? And do you not fear that you might not be making parents more paranoid by encouraging them to be subversive, rather than just good parents? Jane Bishop, Whitstable, England I’ve always had reservations about the term ‘nanny state’, which rather simplistically emphasises top-down bossiness; and I should say that I haven’t got a particular problem with Jo Frost from reality television show Supernanny. I use ‘Supernanny’ as a metaphor, for something more cultural than merely political, which recognises that people do buy into the idea that parenting experts are somehow a good thing, as shown by the popularity of the TV show. As for ‘subversive parenting’: again, that’s more a joke about the hyper-conformity demanded of people’s parenting practices than it is a call to arms. Parenting isn’t political or radical, and nor should it be. As a thirtysomething woman, I am glad that I am not allowed to be beaten and that there are laws against it and that a person who does so will be prosecuted. But children are also people and thus surely should have the same rights. Surely the state has the duty of protecting the weaker people in society? Nicola, UK Can children not expect to have their rights protected by the state – even when they cannot protect those rights themselves? Richard Reynolds, Hazelmere I don’t think the prescriptions of modern parenting culture have anything to do with protecting children. I’m horrified by the way in which horrific cases of child abuse and murder, from Jasmine Beckford to Victoria Climbie, have been used over the past 50 years to justify greater intervention into everyday family life - to the point where not providing your child with the ‘optimal’ start in life, by failing to follow such dubious edicts as making them eat their five-a-day, is now considered to lie on the child-abuse spectrum. Of course there are a minority of people who harm children, but in general the adult population protects children - and it is this idea that contemporary parenting culture has done its best to undermine. Nigel Parton’s book Safeguarding Childhood: Early Intervention and Surveillance in a Late Modern Society is a good read on this shift. As for children’s rights - political rights are for adults, who are capable of fighting for and exercising them. Adults have a duty to protect and to raise children. The notion of ‘children’s rights’ is a dangerous sleight of hand, which redefines rights as something that should be bestowed by the authorities and used as a mechanism to undermine parents’ authority. This is actually very bad for children, who don’t want rights anyway - they want adults they can trust and look up to. In the society we live in right now, teenagers are not given the opportunity, and thus, gain no experience with looking after young children as they are usually shipped over to the grandparents rather than being looked after by teenage babysitters. Can’t the government’s encouragement and attempt to destigmatise parenting classes be seen as a positive thing, rather than an attempt to control society? Evelina Julin, London I gave birth for the first time earlier in the year and must say I’m becoming much more sympathetic to the idea of parenting classes. Many of my friends haven’t had children yet and at the moment much of the information I’m getting is from the internet. As long as they’re voluntary, what’s wrong with drawing upon other people’s knowledge? It can’t be completely relative how to bring up children. While I take the point about the ‘tyranny of the expert’, surely sometimes experts are useful? Laura Stephens, London Teenage babysitters are great, and the increasing lack of informal contact between young children and teenagers/young adults can be seen as a product of the fearful culture that surrounds childcare today. This is why I have been so vocal in opposition to CRB checks and other aspects of the professionalisation and regulation of informal childcare arrangements and activities - these trends make different sections of society more wary of each other, make parents more isolated and dependent on official sources of advice and experience, and of course these things don’t protect children anyway, they just make them more bored. (See Licensed to Hug, by Frank Furedi and Jennie Bristow.) As for parenting classes - successive governments’ interest in these does not come from a genuine desire to help parents out. If they wanted to do that, there are any number of more practical things they could do: from providing an affordable childcare network to stopping MPs and think-tanks from providing policy documents based on deterministic neurobabble. Parenting classes are part of a social-policy agenda that seeks to ‘responsibilise’ parents, by scaring them about the supposed consequences of refusing to conform to official life-management advice - and yes, they are an attempt to control society. I’m with the Foucauldians on that one: a good book to read on the history of all this is Jacques Donzelot’s 1977 classic The Policing of Families. I don’t personally have a problem with people going along to parenting classes or looking on the internet to pick up a few tips if that’s what they want to do. But so much of the advice is contradictory that parents often end up quite confused, so they make their own decisions about what to do in the end while at the same time justifying those decisions in deference to one or another expert. It would be much better if the experts all shut up and let people consult their partners, parents, or friends - who would give advice that is just as useful, without the tyrannical ‘expert’ stamp. The idea that there used to be an ‘autonomous family’ is challenged by many social thinkers, including Christopher Lasch, who described professionals as far back as the 1920s who were colonising family life. But surely there is something real about this idea of the autonomous family or at least something specific and different about state intervention into the family today? Stuart Waiton, University of Abertay Dundee Going back to Donzelot - the modern state has always tried to meddle in and manipulate the family, but it at least had to contend with the ideal of family autonomy. What has changed in the past two decades is the extent to which this ideal has been comprehensively trashed. The normalisation of parenting advice, parenting classes, policy that explicitly seeks to indicate how parents should conduct everyday family life, the idea that parents are ‘partners’ or ‘co-parents’ with the state - all of these are indications that the idea that politicians should stay out of family life is seen as a relic of the past. It’s the demise of the principle of family autonomy that has opened the door to wholesale intervention; allowing the officials to do what they often tried to do in previous eras, but could never pull off. One particular example of the standards parents are pressured to live up to mentioned in your book is that parents should help their children with homework and push them to do well in school, yet being a ‘pushy’ parent should be avoided for fear of harmful effects on the child’s development. This being a contradiction in itself, do you think the government has double standards when it comes to parenting? Evelina Julin, London Yes. Which indicates that this advice isn’t grounded in any particular knowledge or aspiration to improve ‘parenting’ (whatever that means), but is about meeting other instrumental ends. Do you think gay couples are as capable of raising fully-rounded children as straight ones? If so, should they not be allowed to marry? Amanda Johnson, London I think gay couples can do a fine job of raising children, as can straight ones. And I think it’s great that modern society has the technical means, through fertility treatment and social acceptance, to allow gay couples to have children and raise them if that’s what they want to do. But I don’t go with the prevailing idea, in many academic and policy circles, that gay parents actually make better parents than straight ones, because they plan the whole endeavour really seriously, have relationships that don’t include sexual inequality, and (because they tend to use fertility treatment) have more money than many straight families. That’s a totally wrong-headed notion, born out of a growing prejudice about heterosexual relationships and unplanned pregnancies. Across the generations, human life has been created and formed by people falling in love and having children; the passion and muddled messiness of human relationships is what makes them creative and fulfilling. A genuinely tolerant society would defend the integrity and joy of the normal heterosexual family just as much as it refuses to castigate the gay family for being different. As for gay marriage - Brendan O’Neill has said it all best. The political elite’s gay-marriage bandwagon seems to be to be very much about using a particular, and artificial, idea about ‘gay marriage’ to stamp on more traditional ideas of marriage or family norms. It’s horribly intolerant, and I don’t think there’s anything beneficial for actual homosexual parents in the elite’s manipulation of the gay cause. As well as demonising parenting, the government has attacked abortion and supported gay marriage. How do these things square up, as it doesn’t seem as straightforward as the government being pro-family or promoting Victorian values as of old? Ceri Dingle, WORLDwrite The current government seems quite contradictory in many of its pronouncements and policies, which reveals something about the incoherence of the current political era. There does, however, seem to be a strong ‘social conservatism’ trend among those in or around the government, which is neither traditionalist nor progressive, but is aggressively therapeutic and extremely fearful. This approach relies very strongly on the idea that people cannot make responsible choices unless they are correctly manipulated (or ‘nudged’) to do so, and seeks to present responsible behaviour as a continuous process of individual risk-management where there is no scope for getting things wrong. According to this perspective, babies should be talked to in the right way until they are two, otherwise their synapses will fuse in a delinquent fashion forever; abortion is a problem because it gives teenagers the idea that it’s okay to have sex and make mistakes with their contraception; individuals should be provided with official relationships-counselling from their school years through to retirement to enable them to manage their love lives. It’s a rather joyless outlook, and very unforgiving. You’ve said that to raise children, we have to see ourselves as adults first. In an age when many adults don’t do that – remaining ‘kidults’ - does this mean they are not raising their children properly? James, London Was David Lammy right to say the smacking ban led to the riots? Mark Samuel, Brighton There is a genuine problem with the extent to which adult authority can become weakened through successive generations, and I do think we saw a bit of that in last year’s riots. Parents feel - to use Frank Furedi’s phrase - de-authorised by a culture that dictates how they should use persuasion rather than discipline to attempt to control their children, and makes them doubt every spontaneous action. In addition, the message that parents aren’t up to the job is transmitted directly to children via schools and popular culture, so this just fuels the sense of infantilisation. However, growing up and rising to the occasion aren’t rocket science; people have been doing this throughout history. So it’s a real mistake to say that society should deal with the problem of the ‘kidult’ by adapting to it, through treating parents even more like children (and thus infantilising them further). Far better to recognise the role that official intervention has played in creating this problem, and to start to cut the apron strings. I’ve just started reading the Yummy Mummy book by Liz Fraser. She says that to prepare yourself for being pregnant you need to detox because if you are full of toxins then your baby will clog up, too. She says you have to flush the poisons out of your system ideally before you become pregnant. What do you think of the idea of the toxic mother? Jane Sandeman, IOI Parents’ Forum I think that’s an apt - and very depressing - metaphor for how parents today are often viewed. It’s particularly striking in relation to mothers, who have gone from being idealised as nurturing givers-of-life to being depicted as physical and emotional hazards to their children. From what pregnant women eat and drink to the problem of inadequate maternal ‘bonding’ in infancy and its supposed effect on the baby’s brain, it seems like everything a mother does now has a causal (and probably negative) effect on her child. The idea that your parents fuck you up has been around at least since Philip Larkin; but these days it often takes a more biologised or ‘scientised’ form, through claims about nutrition or neuroscience. These claims should be exposed as the nonsense they are, and set against a more human and rounded recognition of the parent-child relationship, which understands love to be more than a particular set of words and babies to be more than brains surrounded by a set of cells. Why are parents today so obsessed with their kids? Is this healthy for them or their children? Jason Smith, Institute of Ideas Are you not a parenting ‘expert’ of sorts? I can imagine you won’t go along with that, but anyway – what one bit of advice would you give to parents today? Cheryl Coombs, Essex In my personal life, I’m just a parent - certainly no expert at that. I do know quite a bit about parenting culture though, which is quite a different thing. I would advise anyone who is interested in parenting culture to check out the work of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, and the Institute of Ideas Parents’ Forum, where there are lots of interesting people engaged in understanding and critiquing the causes and consequences of ‘paranoid parenting’. Jennie Bristow is author of Standing up to Supernanny and co-author of Licensed to Hug. She is an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, editor of Abortion Review and Parents with Attitude, and runs the editing service Punctuate! This Q&A was published on spiked. 2012-08-29T11:13:04+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/how_the_nationalisation_of_parenting_stoked_the_riots/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/how_the_nationalisation_of_parenting_stoked_the_riots/#When:11:13:24Z The state’s relentless undermining of parental authority has created a world in which no one knows how to control children or teens. By Jennie Bristow. crime and antisocial behaviour 2012-07-17T11:13:24+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/abortion_and_the_thirty-something_woman/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/abortion_and_the_thirty-something_woman/#When:11:42:09Z Women in their early thirties are having both more babies and more abortions. How do we account for this shift? By Jennie Bristow. abortion and contraception 2012-06-14T11:42:09+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/keep_abortion_out_of_adoption_policy/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/keep_abortion_out_of_adoption_policy/#When:11:18:12Z Encouraging women seeking abortion to give birth and do adoption instead ignores the birth mother’s feelings. By Jennie Bristow. abortion and contraception 2012-06-12T11:18:12+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/how_anti-abortionists_are_upping_the_ante/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/how_anti-abortionists_are_upping_the_ante/#When:11:24:41Z Heated debate about abortion is good - but pro-lifers' new tactic of harassing individual women and doctors is cowardly and wrong. By Jennie Bristow. abortion and contraception 2012-03-19T11:24:41+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/divorcing_marriage_from_morality/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/divorcing_marriage_from_morality/#When:11:28:56Z By promoting it as a least worst lifestyle option, modern defenders of marriage are undermining its best aspects. By Jennie Bristow. marriage and family 2012-01-10T11:28:56+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_fresh-faced_look_at_growing_old/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_fresh-faced_look_at_growing_old/#When:13:52:21Z In Never Say Die, Susan Jacoby elbows aside old prejudices about ageing and the ‘illderly’ and asks instead how society can sensibly cope with having lots of older people. Review by Jennie Bristow. ‘But hoping for worse health and shorter lives hardly seems consistent with the American dream.’ With such pithy insights, Susan Jacoby - the fiercely rational intellectual whose previous books include The Age of American Unreason - exposes the banality of modern prejudices that have become attached to old age and the process of ageing. One such prejudice is that ageing has been redefined as a state of mind, in which people are exhorted somehow to think themselves young. This means, argues Jacoby, that the real problems of disease and infirmity associated with real, ‘old old age’ are dismissed. As she argues: ‘In real old age, as opposed to fantasyland, most people who live beyond their mid-eighties can expect a period of extended frailty and disability before they die. Given the high proportion of illderly among the old old, the common boomer fantasy of dropping dead after a heart attack while making love at the age of ninety-five bears about as much relationship to the reality of old age as the earlier boomer fantasy of painless childbirth without drugs bore to the reality of labour as experienced by most women.’ Cheery stuff, huh? Fortunately the energy and sharpness of Jacoby’s writing makes this a rather less gloomy read than the endless rounds of policy discussions about the ‘burden’ imposed on pension systems and healthcare by an ageing population. There’s a lot to disagree with, and rather too much solipsism in Jacoby’s ready reflections on her own life and the circumstances of her loved ones. And there’s an element of fatalism to Jacoby’s view of ‘old old age’ itself. But in general, Never Say Die is a refreshing attempt to define the problems of ageing in social and cultural, rather than purely individual, terms and find fresh ways of engaging with those problems. For example, the book’s concluding chapter, while acknowledging rather awkwardly that she is attempting to fulfil her friends’ demand to end the book on a ‘positive note’, nonetheless makes some convincing arguments. Jacoby recommends that old people stay in cities, close to amenities and other people, rather than moving to ‘retirement communities’ where they can easily become trapped in their apartments with no transport or reason to leave; and that they are able to keep working: ‘I confess that I cannot understand the appeal of unlimited “free time”, as one does not need to be a workaholic to question the advisability of too much leisure.’ Above all, she recommends staying angry: ‘Refusing to conform to the emotionally correct image of old age as a time of placid contemplation is an affirmation of self.’ Where Jacoby struggles - as she recognises - is in dealing satisfactorily with the issue of care for those for whom independent minds and bodies are already a thing of the past. Discussing her 89-year-old, infirm mother and her grandmother, who died just after her hundredth birthday, Jacoby - who, as a self-confessed ‘baby boomer’, is about 65 - writes: ‘Mom needs help, but I can no more give up my life now - or, to be honest, I am no more willing to give up my life - than I was 15 years ago. Nor was my mother willing to give up her life so that she could provide her own mother the kind of full-time care that Gran provided for my great-grandmother.’ And this, really, is the baby boomer paradox that Jacoby both reflects and reflects upon. The ‘myth of the new old age’, which peddles the sentiment that you can defy old age through a lifetime of neurotic health-obsession and ‘positive outlooks’, is itself a product of the two cultural turns associated with the generation born in the postwar boom: the culture of narcissism, whereby the focus of human activity becomes increasingly oriented around a therapeutic conception of the self; and the cult of youth, where anything new and young is seen as desirable and valuable, compared to the ‘outdated’ or ‘old-fashioned’ perspectives derived from age and experience. As the baby boomers become older, it is little surprise that this famously self-obsessed generation turns its attention to the problems of ageing and finding individual strategies to carry on partying, often through limiting their lives in the here and now through a preoccupation with healthy-living strategies borne out of the desperate pursuit of longevity. But is this all their own, selfish fault? It is often argued that the baby boomers’ rampant individualism means that they are the ones failing their elderly parents; yet this argument is contradicted by the fact that many of this generation do, in practice, have significant caring responsibilities for their elderly relatives, as well as for their young grandchildren. The baby boomer nervousness seems to me less about what they are prepared to do for their dependants, than about what they are prepared to expect from their children when the time comes. So the individualism of the ‘new old age’ can be seen as much as a defence strategy as it can the self-centred pursuit of youth. The fact is that there is no individual solution to getting older - and, as is now becoming very apparent, nor is there a ‘social’ solution to the problem of elder-care in the form of the welfare state. The question of how society looks after its old, like that of how we care for children, is a generational one, which can only be resolved through a debate about the responsibility of young and middle-aged adults to their dependants: essentially, their parents and their kids. The problem, as Jacoby so starkly reflects, is that this generational issue is often understood in entirely privatised terms - ‘giving up my life’ to care for my ageing mother, for example. This ends up being the experience of many people - especially women – and has helped to fuel the search for a solution to care of the elderly that somehow lies ‘over there’, within the systems and institutions of the welfare state. And it has led to the presentation of the ‘ageing’ problem in the unrealistic and de-humanised way Jacoby helps to illuminate, where older people are either portrayed as bouncing around youthfully with no needs at all, or as a depressing drain on society’s resources. Yet the reality is that care of the elderly does have to start with the family. This is not to argue that those who care for old old people and the ‘illderly’ should simply be left to do so entirely on their own. Jacoby’s argument about the advantages of cities over dedicated retirement communities hints at the fact that, in some areas of life, organic relations between generations still persist, offering opportunities for informal contact and care. At a more formal level, better medical care and more focused forms of care support could ameliorate some of the practical and financial difficulties experienced by individuals – often who are relatively elderly themselves – on a day-to-day basis. Recognising a generational responsibility does, though, require a different orientation towards ‘giving up my life’: not martyrdom, but a greater confidence in what individuals can be expected to cope with, and their responsibilities towards one another. The fear of ‘becoming a burden’ that is so often articulated by older people implies that generational transfer is a one-way transaction; that people’s lives have value only when they are either youthful or obviously useful, and that the elderly are a social problem rather than a collection of individuals with different needs, personal resources and relationships. If society had a general sense that care of the elderly was, like childcare or care for disabled people, part and parcel of everyday family life, there would be the basis to develop more collaboration within and between generations, and a more focused and flexible debate about where healthcare and other social resources can best be directed. It would certainly beat the futile, life-limiting quest to stay ‘forever young’.  Jennie Bristow is editor of Parents With Attitude, author of Standing Up To Supernanny, and co-author of Licensed to Hug. She is also editor of Abortion Review, and an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies at the University of Kent, where she is studying the problem of generations. This article was first published on spiked. 2012-01-04T13:52:21+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_fresh-faced_look_at_growing_old/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/a_fresh-faced_look_at_growing_old/#When:11:28:01Z In Never Say Die, Susan Jacoby elbows aside old prejudices about ageing and the ‘illderly’ and asks instead how society can sensibly cope with having lots of older people. By Jennie Bristow. grandparents and ageing 2011-12-23T11:28:01+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/we_dont_need_to_talk_about_hating_kids/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/we_dont_need_to_talk_about_hating_kids/#When:17:28:43Z Lionel Shriver’s Orange Prize-winning novel turned award-winning film about a woman who can’t love her son has been hailed for revealing a hidden truth about motherhood. This mum isn’t empathising. By Jennie Bristow. parenting culture 2011-10-28T17:28:43+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/parents_should_rise_up_against_this_neurotrash/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/parents_should_rise_up_against_this_neurotrash/#When:11:35:42Z Dodgy neuroscience is being used to justify unprecedented levels of state intrusion into family life. By Jennie Bristow. parenting culture 2011-09-19T11:35:42+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/lib_dems_announce_free_parenting_classes/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/lib_dems_announce_free_parenting_classes/#When:10:01:45Z Free parenting classes are to be offered to all families with children under the age of five in a new scheme announced at the Lib Dem conference. parenting culture 2011-09-18T10:01:45+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/come_back_superwoman_the_lost_ideal_of_combining_motherhood_and_work/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/come_back_superwoman_the_lost_ideal_of_combining_motherhood_and_work/#When:19:49:20Z The ideal of the 'Superwoman' juggling motherhood and work has been scotched. Now the pressure on women is to be perfect carers, with careers like a dirty secret. By Zoe Williams. childcare and working mums 2011-09-17T19:49:20+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/dump_the_neurotrash_and_leave_parents_alone_say_academics/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/dump_the_neurotrash_and_leave_parents_alone_say_academics/#When:10:26:40Z If 'the science says' that children's brains are hardwired by the age of three, should we automatically believe this claim? Not according to speakers at an academic conference at the University of Kent this week. Rather, we should see policymakers' obsession with neuroscience as a rather pathetic and pernicious excuse for intervening in toddlers' lives, and telling parents what to do. Jennie Bristow reports.Dr Ellie Lee, director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, told the Monitoring Parents conference that social policy in Britain is increasingly informed by claims made in the language of ‘brain science’. Such policy documents rest on the claim that ‘research shows’ that young children’s brains are moulded by the way they are parented in the early years, so that such attributes as anti-social behaviour and low levels of literacy are already ‘hard-wired’ into children by the time they start school. In this way, the authorities are mandated by ‘the evidence’ to intervene more aggressively into family life in the early years; and this is justified by the claim that early intervention will make future social problems disappear, thus saving the Treasury millions of pounds in the long run. There are a number of problems with this policy approach: the first of which is that the ‘brain science’ upon which claims about early intervention are made is not science at all, but, according to Lee, ‘prejudice masquerading as research’. This prejudice was soundly debunked by the American philosopher John T. Bruer back in 1999, in his influential book The Myth of the First Three Years. At the conference Bruer was joined by the neuroscientist Stuart Derbyshire and the philosopher-polymath Raymond Tallis, in exposing the gulf between what neuroscience can tell us about the workings of the human brain (a bit) and what it can tell us about child development and the human condition (not very much at all). The key points, it turns out, are elementary. First - Observing the popularity of images that show the shrivelled brain of an ‘extremely neglected’ child to make the neuroscientific case for early intervention, Bruer explained that by the age of three, the brain is about 85% of its mature weight or volume - but that does not mean that it has reached 85% of its function. Scary neuro-images of small brains confuse brain size with brain development: the two are very different things. Second - Many of the claims about early intervention are based on studies of Romanian orphans raised in conditions of extreme neglect and emotional deprivation, and animal studies of kittens partially blinded at birth. These studies tell us nothing about the development of toddlers in general: as Derbyshire put it, ‘It is incorrect and dishonest to argue that if severe neglect causes a problem, less severe neglect causes a lesser problem’. Third - What Raymond Tallis termed ‘neuromania’ is based on an absurdly reductionist view of the human condition, which elides conscious, complex human behaviour (falling in love) with animal instinct (mating). The marshalling of junk science to treat human beings as a form of livestock reveals the dehumanising presumptions, and consequences, of our obsession with the brain. So the evidence behind ‘early intervention’ is, for the most part, ‘neurotrash’. But even if it were sound science, it would still be problematic to rely on brain scans as a guide to how we should conduct social life. A central problem with the phrases ‘research tells us’ or ‘evidence suggests’, which now form the basis of most social policy, is that policymakers no longer have to justify why they think a policy should be introduced - they are, supposedly, just doing what the science tells them to do. Similarly the public - as well as academics outside of the particular discipline of neuroscience - are excluded from debate about the rights and wrongs of a particular policy, on the grounds that they do not have the technical expertise to comment. Even if ‘the evidence’ were sound, as an approach to policymaking that takes as its mission ‘the science tells us’ is inherently exclusionary and undemocratic. In the case of neurotrash, the evidence upon which policy is based is entirely flawed - and this reveals a highly troubling situation. Despite academics like John Bruer doing their best to engage with the scientific claims, the dogmatism of policymaking is such that it does not seem to care whether societies are organised around dealing with real problems, or whether it is enough to base social policy on the unsubstantiated prejudices of the authorities. In this context, it is perhaps not surprising that many of the policy documents currently appearing in the UK move effortlessly between claims that ‘the evidence suggests’ (when in fact it doesn’t) to shrill, dystopian anecdotes about children coming to school without knowing their own names, or defecating on classroom floors. In this way, the promiscuous use of flawed evidence leads to a casual disregard for the truth. That’s really not clever. Jennie Bristow is author of Standing Up To Supernanny, co-author of Licensed to Hug, an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies (CPCS), and a contributor to the Huffington Post UK, where this article was first published. A longer version of the article is published on spiked. parenting culture 2011-09-17T10:26:40+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/why_parents_shouldnt_feel_guilty_if_they_cant_devote_time_to_their_toddlers/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/why_parents_shouldnt_feel_guilty_if_they_cant_devote_time_to_their_toddlers/#When:10:19:33Z Critics are rejecting the theory that children need close attention in their first three years, dismissing neuroscience as 'neurotrash'. By Viv Groskop. parenting culture 2011-09-11T10:19:33+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_london_riots_were_not_a_product_of_permissiveness/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/the_london_riots_were_not_a_product_of_permissiveness/#When:10:24:29Z Blaming the looting on the ‘liberal experiment’ of the 1960s is not only wrong - it could also make the real problems in urban communities worse. By Jennie Bristow. community, politics and policy 2011-08-30T10:24:29+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/health_and_safety_excuse_for_unpopular_decisions/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/health_and_safety_excuse_for_unpopular_decisions/#When:09:11:07Z Councils and companies are using health and safety rules as an excuse to make "unpopular decisions" banning low-risk activities, a watchdog says. health, and safety 2011-08-24T09:11:07+00:00 http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/camerons_cure_will_make_society_sicker/ http://www.parentswithattitude.com/index.php/site/camerons_cure_will_make_society_sicker/#When:09:18:39Z The PM's post-riots promise of more intervention into troubled families is mad – it is precisely such intervention that devastated parental authority. politics and policy 2011-08-23T09:18:39+00:00