The Black child has no toys. He does not find around him any occasion to arouse his intellect … the early childhood of the Black always takes place in an environment intellectually inferior to any imaginable in Europe … The Black child remains inactive for long hours. He thus undergoes a terrifying head shrinking from which it is virtually impossible to recover. The neural centres of his cortex, which should normally be used for exercise, do not receive the necessary stimuli for their development.
When the Belgian professor of psychology Robert Maistriaux wrote the above in 1955 to describe African children, he was not doing anything unusual. His words confirmed what European colonisers then wished to hear: that colonised people were somewhat cognitively deficient and needed to be rescued from themselves. The fact that ‘science’ supported this view gave only more legitimacy to the colonial project. In the 1950s, such scientific claims – linking brain deficits to inadequate childcare – seemed uncontentious.
In July 2024, the cover of The Economist portrayed a golden globe in the shape of a brain against a pink background. ‘How To Raise The World’s IQ’ boasted the title, introducing the issue of how to improve children’s brain development globally through improved nutrition and mental stimulation. It features research on malnutrition, responsive care and brain development. A careful reader won’t take long to realise that the ‘world’ mentioned in the title does not, however, represent an abstract, universal category of humanity. Here, ‘how to make the world brainier’ means how to make a certain part of the world brainier. That part of the world is the Global South.
You know that the developing brain is a truly popular topic when even The Economist, hardly a child-focused magazine, dedicates a cover to it. From colonisers in the past to the economists of today, this obsession with children’s brains – and especially with the brains of Brown, poor children – seems to continue. If anything, it has only increased – no doubt thanks to the increasing popularity of neuroscience and brain-scanning technology. This is evident in the field of early childhood development (ECD) interventions – a multibillion-dollar industry – where brain-focused programmes have gained prominence. No longer merely about ensuring physical health, many early childhood interventions have the explicit goal of improving brain development. As UNICEF puts it: ‘too many children are still missing out on the “eat, play, and love” their brains need to develop …’ Together with the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO), corporate foundations and NGOs, UNICEF has also placed children’s optimal brain development at the core of its agenda.
In 2018, these UN organisations launched the Nurturing Care Framework that seeks, in part, to implement interventions to improve children’s brain development in the Global South. These consist of advising and training parents in childcare practices thought to be conducive to optimal emotional and cognitive development or, in other words, to a thriving brain. These interventions are based on two simple premises. First is the idea that parental behaviour in the first years of life can alter the basic architecture of a child’s brain. As UNICEF’s Early Moments campaign claims: ‘In this formative stage of life, a baby’s brain can form more than 1 million new brain connections every single second – a pace never repeated again.’ The second is the belief that a very particular type of childcare – described as ‘nurturing’ – is conducive to sturdy brain circuits. A series of counselling cards from the WHO and UNICEF illustrates what this entails: talking and singing (even before birth), parent-child play, frequent eye contact, etc. No one would be surprised by such advice. It is the same that parents across the world can find on the internet, in popular science magazines, in the mainstream media, and even on the blog of a multinational food company like Nestlé.
The reasoning behind early childhood interventions in the Global South seems straightforward: better parenting will enhance children’s brains, which will then in turn help children become academically successful, productive and well-adjusted adults. If generations of children can be improved this way, then entire countries could achieve economic growth, peace and democracy. The UNICEF slogan ‘Building brains, building futures’ succinctly encapsulates this reasoning. What makes parenting interventions even more attractive is that they seem like a relatively simple, cost-effective way to foster development across the Global South. Due to the expected cumulative benefits across the lifespan, for instance, the World Bank estimates that ‘for every $1 spent on early childhood development interventions, the return on investment can be as high as $13.’ Or, as the Nurturing Care Framework puts it, with a poetic touch: ‘If we change the beginning of the story, we change the whole story.’
And what could be wrong about changing the beginning of the story if this produces better outcomes for children and society? Who could argue against teaching parents to play with their children, talk frequently with them, and respond sensitively to their emotional needs? Why should we not help children, especially those from poor countries, to reach their full potential, develop better brains, and thus have a brighter future? It seems like a no-brainer.
However, these questions make sense only if you start from two interrelated assumptions. One is that there is something fundamentally wrong with how parents in the Global South raise their children. The other is that issues like poverty, low income, unemployment, political instability or wars are somehow traceable to individual deficits. The questions thus make sense only if you accept, as Maistriaux and his colleagues thought at the time, that the problems of poor people in the Global South are their fault. Or, in this case, of their own faulty brains.
These assumptions are barely hidden in the scientific literature on the topic. For example, a 2022 ECD study published in The Lancet estimates that 74.6 per cent of all toddlers in low- and middle-income countries, 92.1 per cent of toddlers in sub-Saharan Africa, and even 99.5 per cent of the toddlers in Chad do not receive even ‘minimally adequate care’. According to these staggering statistics, almost nobody in the sub-Saharan region can provide appropriate care for their children. Another influential article in The Lancet estimates that around 200 million children under five in low- to middle-income countries ‘fail to reach their developmental potential’. These children will ‘do poorly in school and subsequently have low incomes, high fertility, and provide poor care for their children, thus contributing to the intergenerational transmission of poverty.’ Nationwide parenting interventions would, in theory, break this cycle of poverty by creating the first, fully equipped ‘breakthrough generation’. One does not need to be Frantz Fanon to see similarities with colonial narratives. While today race has been replaced by poverty, the attribution of deficits remains the same.
This story is undoubtedly attractive. The privileged of the Global North and South can find some solace in the idea that they have little responsibility for social and economic inequality. If bad childcare and poor brain development are major contributing factors to poverty, then it is mainly parents’ job to overcome it. The causal link between economic status and brain capacity also implies that the privileged owe their prosperity primarily to their optimally developed brains. Finally, early interventions offer an opportunity of doing something allegedly transformative with relatively little money and effort. While good intentions might animate these efforts, the rampant deficit view of people in the Global South has ramifications that go well beyond the sphere of early childhood. If even developmental science and prestigious UN organisations suggest that poor people in the Global South are prone to cognitive deficits, socioemotional maladjustments, criminality and high fertility, why should European countries welcome them? Xenophobic anti-immigration policies – already on the rise everywhere in countries of the Global North – seem to find legitimacy in such thinking.
Proponents of child removal argued that Native people failed to provide adequate home environments
But it’s not just a matter of representation. This intrinsic deficit view raises serious questions about the politics of interventions and the rigour of the scientific evidence supporting them. This is all the more important given the intrusive nature of interventions that aim to radically alter parent-child relationships. Indeed, it was not so long ago when similar claims served to justify brutal colonial projects.
A good reminder is the case of the Indigenous child removals, which saw Indigenous children in the United States, Canada and Australia systematically removed from their families and placed in boarding schools or with white middle-class families. The practice continued throughout the 20th century, with the last federally funded residential school – Kivalliq Hall in Canada – closing in 1997. In their time, these schools were considered an entirely benevolent endeavour, good for them and for society. The rationale was similar to contemporary early interventions: since, apparently, ‘[I]ndigenous women did not know how to properly care for their children’, others needed to step in. The historian Margaret Jacobs has pointed out that, in the American West and in Australia, ‘many white women reformers believed it was essential to remove [I]ndigenous children, particularly girls, from their families to protect them from what white women perceived to be sexual exploitation and abuse.’ To this day, Black and Native American families are heavily overrepresented in child protection investigations and child removals.
Among other things, proponents of child removal criticised the use of the cradleboard, a baby carrier with a rigid frame, by Indigenous mothers in North America, or argued that Native people failed to provide adequate home environments. The endeavour was framed in terms of a civilising mission to produce better citizens. As an advocate argued in 1890: ‘No uncivilised people are elevated till the mothers are reached. The civilisation must begin in the homes.’ The violent and devastating consequences of Indigenous child removals are today widely recognised. But for thousands of children and families, it was too late.
Early childhood interventions today do not call for systematic child removal nor are they explicitly on a civilising mission. Their objective is innocuously described as ‘enabling young children to achieve their full developmental potential’ or ensuring optimal (brain) development. Instead of removing children from their parents’ influence, they focus on improving parents’ behaviour. Its claims are purportedly based on neutral, state-of-the-art scientific evidence. However, this science ignores two crucial questions. Who gets to define what human potential and optimal development are? And how are parenting practices and children’s abilities assessed?
The way children are cared for varies across cultures. How you feed, talk, play with and educate children is inextricably linked to local values and moral goals. Child-rearing practices vary, depending on the cultural, social, economic and environmental context, without this meaning that one form is necessarily better or worse than others. These insights of cross-cultural research are largely ignored in the scientific literature that guides early childhood interventions. These instead draw on ideas and measures of optimal development in mainstream developmental psychology, a discipline largely based on research by and with Western, especially anglophone middle-class (aka WEIRD), subjects.
This leads to an inevitable result: anything deviating from the Western norm is automatically depicted as negative. Take as an example the Lancet’s ECD study, which suggested that the vast majority of parents in the Global South don’t provide adequate care for their toddlers. This relied mainly on data from UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS). The following questions measure the quality of early stimulation and learning: does the child attend an organised learning or early educational programme? Does the child’s household have at least one book and at least one toy? The parents who responded negatively to one of these questions were classified as providing ‘minimally adequate’ care. Those who answered no to both were seen as failing to provide early stimulation and learning opportunities.
Using such questions to assess early stimulation is just like using English to evaluate non-English speakers. They reflect what counts as proper stimulation in a typical Western, urban middle-class environment – those who do not use this grammar can only be found to use no grammar at all. This is because the questions don’t allow caregivers to tell us about the other multiple learning opportunities children encounter in their everyday lives. Toddlers who do not attend a formal educational programme may, for example, be routinely engaged in practices of ‘observing and pitching in’. Such experiences help young children develop attention, responsibility and cooperative behaviour. Were we to assess Western middle-class parents by asking how frequently they encourage toddlers to observe and pitch in in communal activities, they would likely be judged as performing poorly.
If parents don’t act as expected from urban middle-class Western parents, they are then inadequate caregivers
Children without a toy or a book at home may still have a rich world available for playful exploration. In many societies, parents allow their toddlers to spend all day outdoors, freely and independently exploring the real world with their siblings, cousins and peers. This provides abundant early stimulation and contributes to the development of different social skills, including autonomy and responsibility. In these contexts, parents don’t need to arrange playdates (another question used in the MICS to evaluate toddlers’ amount of peer contact). Were we to assess Western middle-class parents by asking if they let their toddlers venture alone into the streets of New York, they wouldn’t fare very well.
Due to its Western, urban middle-class bias, early childhood science implicitly promotes Western, urban middle-class skills and behaviours in caregivers and children across the world. In this context, a child has reached their full potential when they behave and think like a Western, urban middle-class child. In much of the literature, this cultural bias is glossed over, and findings are presented as if they were entirely objective: if parents don’t act as expected from urban middle-class Western parents, they are then inadequate caregivers. If children do not perform well on tests measuring Eurocentric skills, based on procedures familiar to Western upper middle-class kids, they can be depicted as developmentally retarded.
The dominance of the Euro-American middle class in early childhood interventions is a direct reflection of its dominant cultural and political position. Given this hegemony, one could argue that perhaps it’s not a bad idea to give children across the world a chance to become proficient in this way of being. If English is the most important language, isn’t it good to learn English? To some extent, interventions follow precisely this logic. An important goal, for instance, is to improve children’s school readiness. The early stimulation, the educational toys and books at home, the intense parent-child verbal interactions: aren’t these suggestions helpful in preparing young children for academic success? Perhaps yes, but only under certain conditions. It may work for the elites in the Global South, who can afford intensive, time-consuming parent-child interactions, and have access to private international schools and the means to send their children to study abroad (ie, in the West). It’s questionable whether such targeted early interventions would be helpful for poor families, who may not even have access to a school that serves their needs and aspirations.
But structural issues are not even contemplated by those proposing these Western ideas. Instead of discussing whether the Western parenting style they promote is even useful under different circumstances, or whether an education system needs improvement, the starting assumption here is one of deficit.
One only needs to look at the most glamorous (and demeaning) argument of all: that people in the Global South need to become ‘brainier’. This focus on the brain is ironic since, among all types of scientific evidence, brain-based claims are the most scientifically elusive. There is no research showing that poor people in the Global South have stunted brains, as that issue of The Economist suggested. Most research about the effects of deprivation on the developing brain comes from studies of children adopted out of Romanian orphanages after the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989, where they’d had minimal human contact. Most children in the world will never experience such extreme conditions. And yet, the spectre of the stunted brain pervades public imagination. It is a spectre powerful enough for The Economist to devote an entire issue to the ‘problem’ of stunted brains in the Global South, without showing any evidence of brain studies in these countries.
Instead of making grand claims based on scant evidence, perhaps we should stay with what we already know about early childhood development in the Global South: that is, quite little. In the past, similarly unsubstantiated deficit arguments about non-European children and their families justified deeply problematic interventions. We cannot make these mistakes again. Sweeping statements about stunted brains and suboptimal development should be looked at with suspicion, not make the headlines of world-leading magazines. Most important, rather than implementing top-down solutions, and conducting expensive, large-scale surveys and intervention trials, early childhood interventions should place local caretakers’ expertise, needs and perspectives at the centre of their efforts. Parents everywhere are aware of what their children need – and probably have a good sense of how to improve things based on the specific circumstances in which they live. There is no single path to achieving a thriving brain – and no single meaning to it. It is time to acknowledge this.
