Nature Or Nurture?

Yvonne Roberts on the latest bid by Camila Batmanghelidjh for her personal hobby horse to be well fed at the taxpayer’s expense:

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.

Yes, I know. There’s a flaw in that, a gaping flaw. But we’ll get to that in a minute.

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".

There’s a nice little marketing opportunity, eh?

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.

And if this research doesn’t prove what they hope it will..?

If, in fact, it proves the exact opposite..?

Anyone want to bet we’ll never hear about it?

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.

Indeed. And they are as expected…

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.

Hmm, all things that the 'working women can have it all!' mob would like to not see mentioned...

Sadly, Yvonne, too many children are still born to families where those are not considered as pre-requisites for reproducing. After all, the Welfare State will provide if you lack these things, won’t it?

But we’ve come to that flaw:

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.

Well, quite…

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.

And if they do?

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.

Yes, you read that right. All children.

No, I don’t know how she made that leap either.

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…

Well, can’t fail, then.

After all, we’ve put so much resource into literacy and numeracy that they are….

Oh. Wait.