Jan Macvarish

In December 2017, the House of Commons Parliamentary Science and Technology Committee put out a call for submissions to an Inquiry that would consider the evidence-base for early intervention policies, with a particular focus on ‘Adverse Childhood Experiences’ or ACEs. This article analyses those submissions and the transcripts of the Inquiry’s oral sessions in the belief that they constitute a useful window through which to explore the types of claims being made in ACEs discourse. Our aim is to assess whether the ACEs phenomenon represents a continuity with what has been termed the ‘first three years movement’ (Thornton, 2011a, 2011b) – social policy and philanthropic activism which focuses on the earliest years of life in the name of preventing social problems ‘down the line’. In particular, we consider constructions of parents as determinate of these social problems through their influence on their children and the ways in which these are gendered in new ways.

This article discusses the findings of a study tracing the incorporation of claims about infant brain development into English family policy as part of the longer term development of a ‘parent training’, early intervention agenda. The main focus is on the ways in which the deployment of neuroscientific discourse in family policy creates the basis for a new governmental oversight of parents. We argue that advocacy of ‘early intervention’, in particular that which deploys the authority of ‘the neuroscience’, places parents at the centre of the policy stage but simultaneously demotes and marginalises them. So we ask, what becomes of the parent when politically and culturally, the child is spoken of as infinitely and permanently neurologically vulnerable to parental influence? In particular, the policy focus on parental emotions and their impact on infant brain development indicates that this represents a biologisation of ‘therapeutic’ governance.

This article reviews a particular aspect of the critique of the increasing focus on the brain and neuroscience; what has been termed by some, ‘neuromania’. It engages with the growing literature produced in response to the ‘first three years’ movement: an alliance of child welfare advocates and politicians that draws on the authority of neuroscience to argue that social problems such as inequality, poverty, educational underachievement, violence and mental illness are best addressed through ‘early intervention’ programmes to protect or enhance emotional and cognitive aspects of children's brain development. The movement began in the United States in the early 1990s and has become increasingly vocal and influential since then, achieving international legitimacy in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the UK and elsewhere. The movement, and the brain‐based culture of expert‐led parent training that has grown with it, has been criticised for claiming scientific authority whilst taking a cavalier approach to scientific method and evidence; for being overly deterministic about the early years of life; for focusing attention on individual parental failings rather than societal or structural problems, for adding to the expanding anxieties of parents and strengthening the intensification of parenting and, ultimately, for redefining the parent–child relationship in biologised, instrumental and dehumanised terms.

In Britain over the past 12 years, despite the normalising of sex and reproduction outside marriage, and contrary to the evidence that there are fewer teenage parents than in the past, teenage parenthood has become amplified as a social problem. The existence of such a paradox suggests that this problematisation has captured a number of significant political and social dynamics and anxieties, in particular, the co-existence of widespread concern with social disorder and moral decline with the recognition that past forms of social and moral ordering have an alienating rather than a cohering effect. This paper explores: how the problem of teenage pregnancy has been both amplified and redefined; the role of public health discourse in de-moralising the problem; expanding notions of harm to the child; the construction of the teenage mother as lacking in rational and moral agency; and the construction of her and her child as a social threat. Through an engagement with critiques of teenage pregnancy policy, risk theory and recent developments within the study of ‘parenting culture’, this paper seeks to explain why the ‘teenage mother’ has such symbolic power despite an apparent de-moralisation of sex.