Does the Neuroscience Research on Early Stress Justify Responsive Childcare? Examining Interwoven Epistemological and Et
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Does the Neuroscience Research on Early Stress Justify Responsive Childcare? Examining Interwoven Epistemological and Ethical Challenges Bruce Maxwell & Eric Racine
Received: 20 December 2010 / Accepted: 5 April 2011 / Published online: 16 April 2011 # Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract This paper examines interwoven ethical and epistemological issues raised by attempts to promote responsive childcare practices based on neuroscience evidence on the developmental effects of early stress. The first section presents this “neuroscience argument for responsive early childcare”. The second section introduces some evidential challenges posed by the use of evidence from developmental neuroscience as grounds for parental practice recommendations and then advances a set of observations about the limitations of the evidence typically cited. Section three highlights the ethical implications of the neuroscience argument for responsive early childcare. It argues that the neuroscience argument, first, fuels unwarranted parental anxiety by unduly raising the stakes of families’ early childcare choices and, second, threatens public confidence in developmental science’s potential to inform childcare practices and policy that enhance children’s health and well being.
B. Maxwell (*) Department of Education, University of Quebec, Trois-Rivières, Ringuet building, room 2061, 3351 boul. des Forges, Trois-Rivières, Quebec G9A 5H7, Canada e-mail: [email protected] URL: www.uqtr.ca/BruceMaxwell E. Racine Neuroethics Research Unit, Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal (IRCM), 110 avenue des Pins Ouest, Montréal, QC H2W lR7, Canada
Keywords Neuroethics . Responsive early childcare . Developmental neuroscience . Parenting . Translational research . Attachment theory . Neurodevelopmental disorders . Depression . Anxiety . ADHD . Autism The promises of beneficial applications of contemporary neuroscience have reached stakeholders and the public far beyond the clinical sciences and the context of healthcare [1, 2]. The use of functional neuroimaging in the American legal context, for example, has been attempted (but dismissed) in two recent decisions [3, 4]. Other areas are economics and marketing [5] where the promises of knowledge from neuroscience applied to publicity campaigns have left powerful impressions and elicited strong reactions among the public [6, 7]. The enthusiasm for translational neuroscience within and beyond healthcare has been critiqued as being unwarranted and may have taken some neuroscientists themselves by surprise. The propensity to oversell neuroscience’s import has been described by Morse, for example, as the “brain overclaim syndrome”, as “neuro-realism” [8], and more bluntly as “brain scam” by the editors of Nature Neuroscience [9]. The phenomenon has several probable causes including the misinterpretation of the promises of neuroscience but also excitement about the sheer novelty of neuroscience in the eyes of both experts and public stakeholders [10–14]. Given the ethic
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