Keating – biology  

And we’ve already talked about some of them. So one of them I think is really getting people to have less fear about Biology. The reality is that we are biological creatures, we have an evolutionary history, we come from an animal kingdom, so we are members of that animal kingdom and that creates certain opportunities and it also creates certain constraints. And so, one of the things that I think it interesting when one, as I’ve had the opportunity to talk about with social scientists and talk about with social policy people in a variety of things, they get very anxious and nervous sometimes when you start talking about Biology, but I think it’s fundamental to understand and I certainly would hope that practitioners would understand this as well.  

It has to do with what it is that’s having an impact and why is it having such a durable impact? It has an impact because in fact as I’ve said what we’re doing is building brains with these experiences; directly through the neural circuitry, indirectly through the epigenetic regulation of genetic processes. And so, we are fundamentally impacting on the biology and the social policy the practitioners experience has to understand that we’re laying down important tracks here that are going to have a long lifespan. Again, not a fixed one, not one that cannot be altered by an experience, but it gets harder and harder to alter some of the things if the wrong circuits, if the wrong things happen early on, and recognizing when things may be going off the rails not because anything wrong has happened in the child’s environment but that they have some anomaly that needs to be dealt with, right.  

So, for both normally developing children and children who are challenged in a variety of ways, figuring out and understanding that we are in fact in the business of building brains when we’re in that early child environment when we are parenting children, that is what we are doing, and we have to accept the fact that that’s an important responsibility that we have. So that’s one lesson I think that science can have.