Latin American Perspectives in the Study of Childhood and Adolescence Poverty Through the Lenses of Neural Sciences

LIPINA, SEBASTIAN J.; SEGRETIN, M. SOLEDAD

EditorsCognitive Sciences and Education in Non-WEIRD PopulationsALatin American Perspective

Springer

Año: 2022; p. 349 - 363

In Latin America, the scientific study of the impact of poverty on emotional, cognitive, and learning development and of the evaluation of interventions aimed at optimizing it has been approached mainly by economists, pediatric epidemiologists, developmental psychologists, and to a lesser extent neuroscientists (e.g., Aurino & Burchi, 2017; Bernal & Fernández, 2013; Canet-Juric et al., 2020; Lopez-Boo & Creamer, 2019; Rubio-Codina et al., 2015; Schady et al., 2015; Segretin et al., 2016). In general, these scientific approaches refer to categories of childhood, which assume that the fragility and dependency of children require specific, natural, relatively universal care practices and socialization processes, in accordance with the norms and habits that regulate kinship relationships considered hegemonic in Western societies (Nilsen, 2017). In tune with such academic proposals, different governmental, non governmental, and multilateral organizations tend to sustain this perspective in their intervention and policy proposals (e.g., Keller, 2020; Lipina, 2021; Villalta & Tiscornia, 2014). In such cases, it is also possible to verify the use of notions of unique determinants of brain development that condition people throughout the life cycle (Lipina, 2021). Although in this perspective, the categories childhood and development usually involve the notion of integration of different aspects of human development, from the molecular to the cultural level, in general, they have a normative character based on milestones and the achievement of developmental aims supposedly consensual and universal (e.g., attachment, adult productivity) (Black et al., 2017; Gibson et al., 2015; Keller, 2020; Lipina, 2021; Nilsen, 2017). These notions, which are explicitly or implicitly proposed as prototypical, are usually based on (a) the type of predominant samples used in the academic studies, which are usually middle-class Western individuals; (b) an instrumental use of the category of childhood; and (c) the optimization of individual values (i.e., individualism) related to a certain independence of the individual in relation to his/her environment, in correspondence with contemporary Western capitalist culture, which globalization processes reproduce through the social and economic organization in different societies (Salazar Pérez et al., 2017; Yelland & Saltmarsh, 2013). Psychologically, such perspective sustains the notion of an individual autonomy in terms of independent mental states, with a focus on individual preferences for self-determination. The socialization format corresponding to this assumption usually refers to dyadic experiences in which a child participates in encounters with a single caregiver who attends his/her exclusively. Likewise, the emphasis on the face-to-face interaction format, complemented with verbalization and mentalization processes, usually also depends on primary caregivers with high degrees of formal education (Keller, 2020). On the other hand, the Latin American anthropological, historical, and sociological explorations in the field of social studies of childhood verified that different social groups can propose distinct kinship systems, care practices, and socialization processes with high degrees of variability (e.g., Canosa & Graham, 2020; Keller, 2020; Villalta & Tiscornia, 2014). From these perspectives, there would not be a single category of childhood, but multiple childhoods, which are considered socially – not natural – constructions that combine several biological, social, and historical factors, including demographic categories, experiences, and a locus for human rights and political interventions. Such perspectives contribute to the deconstruction of the category childhood proposed by the Western middle-class culture. Complementary, several studies in the field of developmental psychology have evidenced that in caregivers with fewer years of formal education and higher socioeconomic deprivations, conceptions of childhood and child development may vary with respect to the emphasis on the individual (Canosa & Graham, 2020). Consequently, these perspectives give rise to other values and practices of social regulation in which children have greater autonomy in the construction of their subjectivities and are cared for by networks of polydiadic caregivers, in which development expectations may vary in terms of the individual’s commitments to his/her social group (Keller, 2020; Lavelli et al., 2019; Lillard, 1998; Mejía-Arauz et al., 2007; Stagno, 2011). From these perspectives, the categories childhood and development are necessarily relational to the extent that any aspect of development is signified by its interdependence with social and cultural phenomena and processes of specific socio-historical moments (Lerner, 2018). In this context, the notion of integration is associated with equi- and multifinality phenomena, unlike the same notion in the more individualistic perspectives that generally limit it to accumulating information about different dimensions without operating theoretically and/or methodologically on the involved interdependent processes (e.g., Black et al., 2017). Both types of perspectives (i.e., more individualistic and more relational) are far from representing opposite poles but rather positions on a continuum in which different types of conceptual integration operate on the categories childhood and development. Such continuum is the product of the historical and dynamic implementation of concepts and biases of different academic communities, with low to moderate degrees of dialogue and interdisciplinary work (Lipina, 2021). An aspect that is usually verified in some cases is the naturalization and reification of such categories (i.e., childhood, development), which does not guarantee their ontological condition, but rather a crystallization of reduced aspects of the relational processes that characterizes development. What is common to all of them is that although all children have emotional, cognitive, and learning adaptive skills, the ways of conceiving how their developmental contexts modulate their trajectories vary depending on how their caregivers and care systems conceive the categories childhood and development. In this sense, given the expectation of the multiplicity of trajectories and developmental needs, it is pertinent to ask what it does mean to approach the study of childhood poverty from a neuroscientific perspective in Latin America in particular, given that it is a culturally heterogeneous region with respect to care and socialization practices. In the following sections, we will address the synthesis of the available neuroscientific evidence of poverty studies at the global level, a critical analysis of which are the categories of childhood and development that it assumes, to finally evaluate possible research topics that contribute to the construction of a Latin American perspective.