The council that invented toxic stress asserts effects from racism must guide child development programs

CATEGORY: CONTROL OF LANGUAGE AND IDEAS

Jack Shonkoff, M.D., founder National Scientific Council on the Developing Child

Source: Center on the Developing Child 6/5/24 email newsletter
Read time: 2.3 minutes
 
This Happened
On June 5, 2024, a group that promotes the theory of toxic stress released a report on “human variation” that adds racism to the list of stressors.
 
Who Did This?
The eleven-member National Scientific Council on the Developing Child is a private group of academic scholars on child development. The group was formed in 2003 to advocate for the narrative of toxic stress as the keystone for reforming public health policy in the United States. Since 2006, the council has been housed within the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. Both the Council and the Center were founded and are run by pediatrician Jack Shonkoff. The council was formed with researchers so that their science credentials would give the council the appearance of authority. As noted in the report, their mission is to have “an evidence-based approach to science synthesis that is informed by the peer-reviewed literature and recognizes the shared opportunities for government, businesses, communities, and families to promote the well-being of all young children.”
 
The Claim
The new report released by the Council is titled “A World of Differences: The Science of Human Variation Can Drive Early Childhood Policies and Programs to Bigger Impacts. Working Paper 17.” The Council releases approximately one long working paper per year as part of the many promotional materials and infographics that the Center disseminates. These longer working papers are designed to set the intellectual framework that buttresses the Center’s advocacy efforts.
 
The main message of this working paper ostensibly was that there are individual differences in traits, or “human variations,” that make individuals vulnerable to harm and that also may limit some individuals from receiving the full benefit from childhood public health programs.
The paper did not provide details about these variations, but did mention broad group categories of parent education, family income, race, ethnicity, and community environment, and broad individual categories of temperament, aggression, and executive functions.
 
These variations that limit the effectiveness of programs should be viewed as new, crucial opportunities to reallocate funding to target certain groups.
 
Analysis
While the working paper was framed as being about a scientific issue of human variation, the emphasis was on racism. Race, racism, or systemic racism was mentioned 21 times in the 17-page report. No other type of variation received as much emphasis.
 
The paper seems to be an attempt to add racism into the framework of the toxic stress and adverse childhood experiences (ACE) movements. The conventional ACE research claims that ten ACE events can cause extraordinary damage to brains, cause physical diseases, and thereby hinder human flourishing. This paper seems to imply that racism be added to the well-known list of ten ACE stressors.
While scientist activists have been increasingly trying to link racism to neurobiological damage in recent years concurrently with efforts to promote other progressive liberal projects (i.e., critical race theory, DEI, and transgenderism), there exist no credible set of strong, reliable, or replicable evidence that racism causes permanent brain damage or physical disease. There are other more viable explanations for why certain poor health outcomes are associated with different races.
Simultaneously, the report’s recommendation that targeting certain groups based on racism can increase the impacts of childhood programs was asserted without evidence. There is no body of evidence that has shown this.
 
Why Is This Happening?
Malicious racism should, of course, be addressed in society, but this working paper takes a further step with a unique argument that racism is a toxic stress that damages brains and health. As has been noted in other Trauma Dispatch posts, both the toxic stress and ACE narratives are controversial, unproven theories that are based on weak, cross-sectional studies.
 
It was not clear in the paper why racism was suddenly emphasized after twenty years of advocating for toxic stress. As with nearly all social justice causes, as the movements drag on and the arguments become stale, advocates realize that they need to refresh the message to revitalize public interest and remain relevant. This has been called the March of Dimes syndrome after the organization that was founded in the 1930s to address polio, but was compelled to change their mission to birth defects after polio was vanquished. After twenty years of activism and sixteen previous working papers, perhaps the Council realized racism would enhance their message.
 
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