When I was about 12 I watched a film called The Bad Seed in which an angelic, Anglo Saxon, well-brought-up little girl kills with grace and ease and no conscience whatsoever. She is adopted and her biological father, it transpires, was a serial killer. Bad girls (and boys) are born not bred, was the message. Now, Camila Batmanghelidjh, the redoubtable founder of the charity Kids Company, has launched an online campaign, Peace of Mind – One Neuron at a Time to raise £5m to prove that there is no evil seed. Rather than being born "bad", the wiring in some children's brains has been affected by abuse or neglect as babies and toddlers.
Kids Company has built a three-dimensional virtual brain on the internet, inside of which there are 1m socially networkable neurons available for a donation of £5 each. You can join the Peace of Mind website by paying for a neuron and thereby investing in a "good brain". The money will go to research that hopes to establish that overexposure to fright hormones damages children's brain development and leaves them unable to calm themselves except by committing violent acts, according to Batmanghelidjh. Academics will use brain scans to show which parts of troubled children's brains are overactive and which are underused. In addition, they will examine the impact of providing "surrogate parenting and loving care". The money raised will also lobby for a change in the way that vulnerable children are supported in the UK.
Batmanghelidjh argues that 1.5 million children and young people in the UK have no respite from fear or abuse and "we have not risen to the point of finding a meaningful solution". Of course she's right – but many of the ingredients that may provide a solution are already well known. They include parent-to-parent help, family group conferences in which the extended family comes together to solve the problem before a child is whisked into care, a Rolls Royce service for a child in care instead of the shameful shambles that continues to exist, and old-fashioned ideas such as a decent income, housing and a premium on parental time. What's missing is the political and public will to bring them into an effective strategy that will help not just on the most vulnerable children but every young person.
Ten years ago, a committee of American academics came together to consider over a couple of years the expertise on early childhood development, including neuroscience. Its recommendations were published in From Neurons to Neighbourhoods. None of the recommendations surprise. What matters for every young child, the academics said, is secure attachments, good quality childcare, and the interest of and love from parents and carers. And if that isn't available in the family, action has to be taken quickly to provide it elsewhere.
The plasticity of the brain – the ability of the neurons to knit together again and remap the brain so, for instance, speech-impaired people can learn to have a clear voice – is also already well established. Norman Doidge in The Brain that Changes Itself lists study after study. What's less well understood is why some children from equally abusive upbringings remain resilient: their behaviour is not destructive and their brains appear not to develop the malformations that signal neglect.
What's likely is that love – and its absence – isn't the only reason for feral and violent behaviour. Genes may play a small part. But predictive behaviour is just that – it's predictive, not a certainty. Nature versus nurture is now acknowledged by many to be too simplistic. Somewhere in the adult attempts to juggle work, time, selfishness and money, all children are losing out.
The American committee of academics pointed out that society was changing and the needs of the young are not being addressed – whether they are born with nothing or surrounded by material excess. The academics also warned of the attitudes that breed inertia, including the division between those who support high investment in early childhood services and those who say it's not worth the cash – or the cost of the brain scan – because "it's all in the blood".
What the committee argued for instead were resources on a par with those focused on literacy and numeracy skills to be devoted to translating "the knowledge base on young children's emotional, regulatory and social development" into interventions that work and are evaluated (not thrown together in endless pilots, as in the New Labour era, with too little time for initiatives to work before the next flurry of bright ideas are imposed). Ten years on, Batmanghelidjh is now making a similar request. We appear to fail to understand is that it's not just other peoples' children who are affected adversely by the society in which we live – but often our own as well. It's the same spectrum. The question is – do we care? And if we do, how does that translate into effective action?
