For this post I want to thank all the people who have said to me something along these lines: “Children can’t really know what’s best for them/can’t consent/can’t make this decisions until they are 5/10/16/mature enough/adults.” In other words, people who have said that children’s brains “aren’t mature enough” at certain ages and stages and therefore we must default to the adult’s idea of what is in our child’s “best interest.”
They have used the construct of child development to justify overriding consent, to justify an idea of children’s brains as not quite complete, and I thank them!
I thank them because this initially rings true. Of course their brains are developing! Their bodies are developing too! That is why we, the parents, exist! To make decisions FOR them. We know best. Our brains are fully developed and make all the good decisions. We understand consequences, we have impulse control, and we have more experience.
Hmm okay.
I’ll be honest - taken at face value, some of this rings so true that I’ve struggled to push back on it in any meaningful way, for a long time.
But of course, without even having read a book or consulted a paper, we can say that no matter what someone’s brain is going through, they are born with the human right to make autonomous decisions. Human rights apply to kids too - because children are human. (Why do I feel I have to keep saying that?!)
That, right off the bat, is the first and perhaps foremost reason children should have a say in ALL decisions about their lives. Regardless of what we might believe about their brains and bodies, they are people. I’m not sure why people then immediately jump to, “Oh but children can’t just do whatever they want.” Having a say doesn’t mean they get to do whatever they want; it means they get to have a voice, and we get to listen and discuss and work together on all things. It is their right to.
But back to the brain development people, which are really the same people as the child development people (in other words, the people who base decisions around learning, parenting, schooling, and health predominantly on what we know (or think we know) about developmental stages). Because these people are LOUD. They apparently know what children need based on all the things they know about children’s brains and bodies.
They know this because they base it on the construct of child development - because it is a construct! It’s not actually “the truth about children.” It’s a framework that Western developmental psychology has constructed, to understand how children grow and learn and exist in the world.
It is helpful in MANY ways (remember I said this!). It can also be biased, not the full picture, not helpful, and even harmful.
Gail Sloan Cannella, a researcher, academic and early childhood educator, writes about how the language of child development comes from a very specific cultural and political background, and yet is now take to apply to all children everywhere. It is “assumed that the language of child development represents Truth and benefits all children, from whatever culture, socioeconomic background, or historical period,” she says.
But in fact, like all constructs, the idea of child development contains a million assumptions and is not at all a universal truth.
One assumption is the idea of progress. This is an idea that pervades our culture, especially in Western, industrialized countries, to the point we don’t even question it. We assume that we are always “works in progress” and that we should always be progressing, getting better, getting more efficient, or however we want to measure progress. Because we definitely want to measure it!! Basically we end up seeing progress as the normal state of affairs, and anything other than progress as stagnation or failure.
This idea of progress as inevitable is embedded in the school system. Children always have to be improving. Upward progress (and isn’t progress always upward?!) or lack thereof is perhaps one of the biggest measures of whether a child is “thriving,” or “underachieving.”
The idea of progress is everywhere: we equate progress in our culture with gaining knowledge in scientific matters, getting “better and better” technology, more “advanced” systems - it is so embedded we cannot even stop to consider whether some of this “progress” might actually have harmed us. Might actually not be progress at all - but decline, devastation, disruption.
Erica Burman wrote, “The investment in portraying development as progress works to deny our histories of the personal costs in ‘growing up’… turning the complex disorder of individual development into orderly steps to maturity reflects.. interests in maintaining social control.”
Progress has be used to label some groups and some cultures and some societies as “ahead” and some as “behind” or “less developed.” And to label some groups of people as less than, as other. Including children. It justifies our constant monitoring and surveillance of children, to check they are “developing right.”
As Burman says above, over-reliance on child development and an idea that our children will progress in an orderly, linear way is an adult way to maintain control over children. We have created whole institutions and industries around “the complex disorder of individual development.”
Cannella places the birth of this idea in Enlightenment philosophy in the West, the further solidifying of it at the beginning of industrialization in the US and Europe (to explain and justify industrial growth), and in Darwin’s Origin of the Species (evolution as progress). More recently, it was picked up and adopted by the field of developmental psychology; progress then started to look linear, to have a predetermined direction and specific stages, and an underpinning in science and reason.
It also served to maintain European belief in racial superiority - the idea of development is essentially a justification for domination. It bears remembering that this idea of brain development was also applied to women, and to people from non-European cultures, at several points in time. It led to IQ testing, which we now know to be biased and inaccurate. (Someone (who? I forgot!) describes intelligence as the thing intelligence tests measure. Ha!)
Child development is basically a science that is intensely politically and culturally motivated. It is not the absolute truth on how children grow - it’s only an illusion of truth.
There are several other points to this: much of the research around child development has been carried out in WEIRD countries (what Henrich et al coined as Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. I have issues with some elements of this acronym, but it makes sense in this context). This means that the child development research is based overwhelmingly on a small proportion of the global population - a frankly, utterly unrepresentative sample! Yet we claim it represents children as a category.
Another point is that brain development and neuroscience was initially constructed as a separation of mind and body - and we know now that that too, is a Western construct.
Child development universalises one group of people and that in itself is a problem, because children are conceived of differently depending on where they are born in the world, and which culture they grow up in. There is no one universal, globalized childhood! Expectations of growth, of role in community, or abilities and much more, vary hugely from culture to culture, from community to community.
In a similar way, there is no universal human brain. Neuroscientist Chantel Prat talks about how when we make generalisations about brains, we end up with a one-size-fits-all model that actually fits nobody. Or, we end up with a binary that can also be misleading, because often variation is wider within each group than between them.
This applies to child development too - children’s brains are as varied and unique and different as all human brains! “The average child brain” at a given age, might actually end up representing no child’s actual brain! So if we’re talking about how adult brains are all so different and there is no ‘typical’ brain, we should also be saying this of children.
Claiming that brain development is a reason we should make decisions for our children is actually a way we control our children. What we are saying, really, is that our brains are superior, because they are “more developed.” The reality though, is that my brain is perhaps different to my 9-year-old’s brain - and THAT’S IT. It’s different! It’s different to his brain in similar ways to the way my brain is different to my father’s brain. My father is older than I am, and yet we don’t talk about older people’s brains as “more developed,” simply because they’ve been on the progress trajectory for longer. In fact, my brain might actually be more similar to my 9-year old’s brain than it is to the brain of my same-age friend.
The problem is we need to recognise we have constructed this narrative of “development” only where children are concerned. But really, what we are talking about is difference. All brains are different. All bodies are different. All humans are different.
A difference is not a deficit - the neurodiversity community knows this well.
There is no hierarchy of human beings, and no hierarchy of brains and bodies. But - for some reason, children aren’t included when we talk like this. Because we’ve convinced ourselves that their different brains are in fact not only radically different, but INFERIOR brains.
Cannella writes about how ideas about human development and progress create a narrative where humans are always deficient, never complete, never arrived. We will never become; are always becoming. Our children are the most incomplete of all humans. And she says this: “Perhaps this belief in the child as becoming actually keeps us from knowing him/her as a human being living with us in the present.”
Wow. And YES. That is it!
Our children are humans living alongside us right now, and worthy of making their own decisions, with us by their sides.
This does NOT mean we should ignore all developmental psychology. We can pay attention to neuroscience and child development ideas AND also step away from them when they start to feel like the only narrative. When they start to feel like they are sanctioning the domination of one group by another.
Because they are not the only truth about brains and growth and children - they are not reason enough for us to claim we know best, and ignore children’s voices.
They are not a justification for social control under the guise of “protecting children.”
I love this so much! I have had SO MANY THOUGHTS on these topics lately owing to situations we've found ourselves in and people we've had to deal with regarding my 10 year old. Especially this - a difference is NOT a deficit - this idea is so alien to MOST people it's frustrating.
This article has blown me away. So many elements that have already been swirling around my head. I love it