By Dot Tumney
When it comes to developmental biology and politics, Lysenko stuffed up the environmental determinists, and Hitler's lot rendered genetics untouchable. Hence the nature/genetics nurture/environment debates have been a circus of cycles and backlashes.
The February 3 Time magazine cover story, "How a child's brain develops", provides an interesting initial foray into the political implications which might result from the last decade of research. This is refining the understanding of how environmental factors interact with developing brain structure.
Assuming that a child is "fully wired" or "possessed of complete operating software" at birth has meant that the social responsibility for brain development was regarded as finished.
Since the brain circuitry depends on interactivity and continues for years into a child's life, an impoverished environment may quite reasonably be deemed developmental abuse.
Until now, social policies have ensured food, shelter, clothing and education programs to remedy defects in physical environment — at least minimally and possibly with requisite grovelling or bureaucratic gavotte. Stimulating interactions are harder to quantify, but defects are very easy to blame only on parents.
Ensuring the vitality of the next generation has always been the big one for any social system. In the US, shunting mothers off welfare in the context of these findings is causing concern about long-term effects, especially since good quality child-care is not an option on low incomes.
The Time article arrived simultaneously with the January 29 Sydney Morning Herald, which had a feature on the changing definition of families and the reprioritising of children to fit in with the mortgage payments.
The '50s family is heading for its use by date as the "only way" to bring up children: working dad, dependent mum, two kids, quarter acre block, new house and all on one income. This was the ultimate in privatisation.
The informal social support networks stretched and developed chronic automobile dependency. Official social infrastructure hasn't caught up yet.
John Howard is going to have to choose between his ideal family and his economic system. Families are tailored by economics. Totally redomesticating food preparation, for example, would seriously dent the economic statistics. Besides, the domestic food manager is out working for the mortgage.
The determined yearning for the '50s family that Howard and Co are trying to stuff down our collective throats has hit the wall of economic rationalism, which really does quite nicely with lots of small households all buying processed meals.
The '50s household was designed to produce a large labour force at minimum expense. The '90s household might be called a work force reducing model: lots of consumer potential and fewer potentially unemployed youth hanging around locally. The shit jobs can all be exported after all. The unemployment pool needn't be kept on shore for intimidation purposes in the age of the individual contract.
Both the Time and SMH articles, from different angles, ended up with a plea for quality child-care, and though this may just have been journalistic style, there was a flavour of production quality control rather than human development. One child, middle class parents are under enormous pressure to get a perfect offspring, and "bad parenting" poor people are seen as a threat to the social order, especially by budget cutters.
Immediate improvements required: child-care services as opposed to mass minding. Paid parental leave for as long as required. Not counterposing the two, you mindless number crunchers, since they aren't interchangeable.
Fundamental revolution required: stop wasting social productive forces by propping up private profits. Use them for realising humanity's developmental potential. People aren't a luxury product, or a disposable "resource". People are the point.