KEY POINTS:
In the wake of last week's convictions for Nia Glassie's brutal abuse and murder, I can't really argue with those who say some people shouldn't be allowed to have children - though I have trouble working out exactly how we'd stop people breeding. Forced sterilisation on the grounds of low IQ and low income, perhaps?
I once worked with a woman who came from a well-to-do South Island family. Her mother was mentally ill, but her family kept that shameful fact hidden, so that she never received any psychiatric help. She married and had children, whom she basically terrorised behind a wall of respectability.
Her mother should never have had children. Given the science on child brain development, my colleague was lucky to emerge relatively sane and functional.
I remember talking once to a social worker about another child. He'd suffered such awful abuse in his short life that if he had lived, she said, he would have been a severely damaged individual and in all likelihood an abuser.
It's frighteningly easy to create a sociopath. Just deprive a baby of love, of nurturing touch and smiles, of enriching experiences, and let it experience only violence, fear and anger in its first few years, and then watch the damage.
The result might look a lot like Michael and Wiremu Curtis, who were convicted last week of Nia's murder. And had Nia lived, had she survived the brutal injuries to her head, she might have grown up to find herself in much the same situation as her mother - publicly vilified for abusing her own children.
Neglect and violence affect brain chemistry and architecture, often irreversibly.
According to Dr Bruce Perry, an expert on child trauma and developing brains, children who suffer early and chronic neglect have brains that are smaller than those of the average child. Their brains have fewer cells and fewer connections between these cells. These differences can be dramatic; children who endured severe, pervasive and early neglect can have brains that are smaller than the brains of 90 per cent of children their age.
Neuroscientists tell us that the neural wiring that takes place in the early years of life sets a child's course for life.
In the first three years, the human brain develops to 90 per cent of adult size and puts in place most of the systems responsible for all future emotional, behavioural, social and physiological functioning.
Our brain architecture is the result of genetics interacting with the environment. We need specific sensory experiences, the right signals from our environment at the right time, to complete our brains.
But neglect and abuse can disrupt the process, Perry has written, resulting in "malorganisation and compromised function", and affecting our capacity for humour, empathy and attachment.
"Just as the brain allows us to see, smell, taste, think, talk and move, it is the organ that allows us to love or not," Perry writes.
"The systems in the human brain that allow us to form and maintain emotional relationships develop during infancy and the first years of life. Empathy, caring, sharing, inhibition of aggression, capacity to love and a host of other characteristics of a healthy, happy and productive person are related to the core attachment capabilities which are formed in infancy and early childhood."
Perry writes it may take many years of hard work to repair the damage from only a few months of neglect in infancy - if repair is possible at all. "Most neglect is not due to evil caregivers. It is due to isolated, overwhelmed, ignorant or distressed caregivers. In addition, there is a wide range of caregiving beliefs and practices tolerated in our society. Unfortunately, some of these are developmentally ignorant and insensitive to the needs of developing children."
Actually, most of us are ignorant of how children's brains develop. If we knew as much as the authors of a 2007 Canadian report (The Early Years Study 2: Putting Science into Action), we would be outraged at how little is being done for our youngest citizens.
The report's authors say the most serious brain drain in our societies is happening before children get to school, and that science and logic provide compelling evidence that investment in early childhood development would provide greater returns for society than any other type of human capital investment.
Nobel economics laureate James Heckman agrees. Society underinvests in the early years, yet such investment would not only save money in later interventions, it would boost economic productivity, too, he believes.
"Many major economic and social problems can be traced to low levels of skill and ability in the population," he wrote in Science magazine (June 2006), citing a rising highschool dropout rate, the 20 per cent of the US workforce that's functionally illiterate, rising levels of violent crime and property-crime levels.
* Tapu.Misa@gmail.com
