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Lewis, M. H., Scheurer, M. E., Green, R. C., & McGuire, A. L. (2012). Research results: preserving newborn blood samples. Science translational medicine, 4(159), 159cm12-159cm12.

_{Although the extent to which DBSs currently are used for biomedical research has not been fully documented, the potential impact of such research is far-reaching...Genomic information from these samples could be linked to databases with clinical information collected throughout life, which provides unprecedented opportunities to learn about health and disease physiology from the early stages of life... DBSs are an exceptional source of epigenetic information that can be used to study in utero exposure genomics and the effects of both in utero and ex utero exposures to chemicals and infectious agents. This information can be used to distinguish causal from consequential epigenetic variation....At this time, we cannot predict with any certainty exactly what the benefits of research using DBSs might be, and it may take decades before the impact of this research is fully realized. However, if these samples are destroyed we will never define the benefits that can arise from making these rare collections of biological materials available to scientists...DBSs possess value beyond their use for newborn screening. If the research community wishes to take advantage of these resources, it must advocate for policies that support the development of an infrastructure to promote the retention and use of DBSs for biomedical research.}

Howell, R. R. (2006). We need expanded newborn screening. Pediatrics, 117(5), 1800-1805.

_{For many conditions, when newborn screening detects an abnormality that can be effectively treated, it can make the difference between a healthy life and one that requires long-term care. For this reason, the World Health Organization in 1998 recommended that newborn screening be mandatory and free of charge when early diagnosis and treatment could benefit children. Carlson recently commented that “newborn screening represents one of the major child health advances of this past century.” Those of us who have cared for infants affected with conditions for which screening has been introduced would agree heartily with this comment. Our ability to identify affected newborn infants, when totally asymptomatic, and institute programs and treatments that prevent serious morbidity and mortality is a great privilege for the pediatrician. A core of our specialty is preventive medicine, such as the practice of the careful evaluation of infants through weight and measurement in an effort to detect and treat serious underlying medical conditions.}

Therrell, B. L., Johnson, A., & Williams, D. (2006). Status of newborn screening programs in the United States. Pediatrics, 117(Supplement 3), S212-S252.


Kwon, C., & Farrell, P. M. (2000). The magnitude and challenge of false-positive newborn screening test results. Archives of pediatrics & adolescent medicine, 154(7), 714-718.

_{This study examined for the first time to our knowledge the national data available from newborn screening programs in the United States and determined the salient characteristics of various screening tests for 3 hereditary metabolic disorders and 2 congenital endocrinopathies with emphasis on positive predictive values (PPVs) to delineate the magnitude of false-positive results...The magnitude of false-positive results generated in newborn screening programs, particularly for congenital endocrinopathies, presents a great challenge for future improvement of this important public health program. Attention must be given to improved laboratory tests, use of more specific markers, and better risk communication for families of patients with false-positive test results.}

Tarini, B. A., Christakis, D. A., & Welch, H. G. (2006). State newborn screening in the tandem mass spectrometry era: more tests, more false-positive results. Pediatrics, 118(2), 448-456.

_{State newborn screening programs have expanded dramatically in the past decade. Because the benefit of such testing may be unclear in some cases and because the number of infants who may receive false-positive results and may be labeled falsely as having disease is potentially sizeable, a more cautious approach is needed.}

Botkin, J. R., Clayton, E. W., Fost, N. C., Burke, W., Murray, T. H., Baily, M. A., ... & Ross, L. F. (2006). Newborn screening technology: proceed with caution. Pediatrics, 117(5), 1793-1799.

<sub>The American College of Medical Genetics (ACMG) recommends a significant expansion in the number of conditions targeted by newborn screening (NBS) programs. In this commentary we advocate a more cautious approach. NBS dates to the early 1960s, when the technology developed to conduct large-scale testing on dried blood spots for phenylketonuria (PKU). PKU remains the paradigm condition for NBS because of features of the disease and its treatment, which are particularly advantageous to population screening. It is a condition that silently causes neurologic devastation but is amenable to early detection and effective prevention with a diet of moderate burden and complexity. Many children affected with PKU and their families have benefited from state screening programs over the past 4 decades because of collaboration between health departments, families, primary care providers, and metabolic specialists.

However, PKU screening is not an unmitigated success. There was initial uncertainty about whether children with variant forms of hyperphenylalaninemia required treatment and about whether affected children require life-long dietary management. Indeed, some children with benign conditions were seriously harmed from unnecessary restrictions in their diets. In addition, long-term studies demonstrate decrements in cognitive function for affected children and adolescents who are not fully adherent to the diet, yet adherence to the diet is challenging because of its poor palatability, high cost, and limits on insurance coverage in many policies. Affected women who are off the diet are at high risk of bearing severely neurologically impaired children. Only recently have many programs begun tracking affected women to enable notification, education, and management. These difficulties by no means negate the value of NBS for PKU, but they highlight the problems with the successful implementation of a population-based screening program even when a model condition is targeted.</sub>

Tang, J. L. (2005). Selection bias in meta-analyses of gene-disease associations. PLoS medicine, 2(12), e409.

_{Since the 1980s, meta-analysis has been widely used in summarizing results from clinical trials of medical interventions and has also recently gained increasing attention in studying gene-disease associations. However, selection bias may occur in meta-analyses due to the inability to identify and include all conducted and relevant studies. Such selection bias can cause exaggerated or even false-positive gene-disease associations. Failure to include all relevant studies is largely caused by selective publication of studies with certain results (publication bias), and the inability to identify studies published in languages other than English (language bias). Selection bias has been well recognized in meta-analyses of clinical trials. Less is known about selection bias in meta-analyses of studies of gene-disease associations; such studies generally address weak associations and thus are particularly vulnerable to biases... Selective publication can cause publication bias, which in turn could lead to false gene-disease associations in meta-analyses. It would be a disaster if a genetic screening program (in which healthy people are tested for a gene and offered a treatment if they test positive) were based on such a false association.}

Almond, B. (2006). Genetic profiling of newborns: ethical and social issues. Nature Reviews Genetics, 7(1), 67-71.

_{Identifying genetic factors that could reliably predict health risks for individuals has the potential to bring great health benefits, both for the individuals concerned and for health-care providers. Genetic profiling at birth would allow a person's genome to be analysed at an early stage, and the data electronically stored for future use. However, although this might seem like an attractive proposition, it carries with it serious ethical and social concerns that would need to be addressed if the genetic profiling of newborns were ever to be considered on a population-wide basis.}

Grosse, S. D., Rogowski, W. H., Ross, L. F., Cornel, M. C., Dondorp, W. J., & Khoury, M. J. (2009). Population screening for genetic disorders in the 21st century: evidence, economics, and ethics. Public health genomics, 13(2), 106-115.

Guttmacher, A. E., McGuire, A. L., Ponder, B., & Stefánsson, K. (2010). Personalized genomic information: preparing for the future of genetic medicine. Nature Reviews Genetics, 11(2), 161-165.

Knoppers, B. M., Sénécal, K., Borry, P., & Avard, D. (2014). Whole-Genome Sequencing in Newborn Screening Programs. Science translational medicine, 6(229), 229cm2-229cm2.

_{The availability of whole-genome sequencing (WGS) is likely to change the practice of population screening programs such as newborn screening (NBS). This Commentary raises key ethical, legal, and social issues surrounding WGS in NBS and suggests a need for deliberation regarding the policy challenges of introducing sequencing in such programs. Any change in the goals of NBS programs should be discussed carefully and should represent the best interests of the child.}

Garver, K. L., & Garver, B. (1994). The Human Genome Project and eugenic concerns. American journal of human genetics, 54(1), 148.

Lazer, D., & Mayer‐Schönberger, V. (2006). Statutory frameworks for regulating information flows: Drawing lessons for the DNA data banks from other government data systems. The Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics, 34(2), 366-374.

_{Data collection about individuals is necessary for the operation of the modern state. By the same token, the governmental collection of personal information has raised justified concerns among citizens: who within government should be able to access this information? How can and should it be used? With whom within government, and in the public (if anyone) may such personal information be shared, and under what circumstances?...The sensitivity of information is a malleable thing. What is a completely innocuous piece of information in one context may be terribly harmful in another...Genetic information is an extreme example, where data that are not interpretable today might yield great insights tomorrow. More generally, data about individuals become more powerful in the context of other data about those individuals. Digitized information can easily be separated from its original context, and injected in a different context. Moreover, technological capabilities of information processing make it enticing to re-purpose information– that is to use it for other purposes than originally intended. Why not run a victim’s fingerprints against a database of fingerprints from yet unresolved other cases? Why not use motor vehicle registration data to track people’s movements around the country over time?....While the digitization of information has made it much easier to re-purpose and re-contextualize information, the underlying problem has been with us for a long time. Take as an extreme example the effort in the 1930s by the Netherlands to redesign their population information systems. The clear purpose of this endeavor was to improve administrative efficiency. However, part of the data that they collected, for innocent reasons, was each citizen’s religious affiliation. Catastrophically, these data systems fell into the hands of the Nazis, and, arguably, as a result, Dutch Jews were killed at a much higher rate than any other Jews in Western Europe during the Holocaust. This very small amount of data collected on Dutch citizens (representable by a single bit), benign in one context, was re-purposed in deadly fashion in another context.}

Anthes, E. (2009). Living Laboratories: Our digital detritus is about to launch the social sciences into the age of big data and bigger ideas. Seed. February. 81-83.

_{The combination of all this data with major advances in quantative analysis has spawned a social-science revolution, one that investigators say is changing the fundamental nature of research in their fields...Purpose-built technologies capable of gathering even more sophisticated kinds of information about human behavior are also entering the scene...Patterns of cell phone movement reveal the flow of people...The methods could reveal more about the state of a population than surveys and canvassing ever could.}

Bowman, J. E. (1994). Genetic screening: Toward a new eugenics. It Just Ain’t Fair: The Ethics of Health Care for African-Americans. Westport, Praeger, 165-181.

Sankar, P. (1997). The proliferation and risks of government DNA databases. American journal of public health, 87(3), 336-337.

Wertz, D. C. (1998). Eugenics is alive and well: a survey of genetic professionals around the world. Science in Context, 11(3-4), 493-510.

Brase, T. (2009). Newborn genetic screening: the new eugenics. CCHC Report. April.

Pres. Counc. Bioeth. (2008). The Changing Moral Focus of Newborn Screening: An Ethical Analysis by the President's Council on Bioethics.

Roberts, D. E. (1992). Crime, race, and reproduction. Tul. L. Rev., 67, 1945.

Duster, T. (2004). Selective arrests, an ever-expanding DNA forensic database, and the specter of an early-twenty-first-century equivalent of phrenology. Tactical Biopolitics, 159.

_{Who could possibly be opposed to the use of these technologies for such crime-fighting purposes? The answer is a bit complex, but it has to do with some hidden social forces that create a patterned bias determining that certain populations will be more likely subjected to DNA profiling and the resuscitation of some old and dangerously regressive ideas about how to explain criminal behavior. It is now commonplace to laugh at the science of phrenology, once a widely respected and popular research program in the late nineteenth century that attempted to explain crime by measuring the shapes of the heads and faces of criminals. Yet the idea that researchers begin with a population that is incarcerated, and then use correlational data from their bodies in an attempt to explain their behavior, is very much alive and well as a theoretical and methodological strategy in the contemporary world. When researchers deploy computer-generated DNA profiles or markers and correlate them with those of people caught in the grip of the criminal justice system, the findings take on the imprimatur of the authority of human molecular genetics. Despite the oft-chanted mantra that correlation is not causation, the volatile social and political context of such correlations will require persistent vigilance and close monitoring if we are to avoid the mistakes of the past.}

Rose, N. (2000). The biology of culpability: Pathological identity and crime control in a biological culture. Theoretical criminology, 4(1), 5-34.

Mark W. Leach, A Eugenics Common Sense?, Public Discourse, July 31st, 2012.

<sub>This year has seen a rash of medical studies reporting on developments in cell-free fetal DNA (cffDNA) prenatal testing. Not too long ago, one commentator cautioned that as prenatal genetic testing becomes more pervasive, our society risks developing a “eugenics common sense.” The reporting on the new cffDNA testing suggests that some have already developed this sensibility.

In October 2011, Sequenom, a publicly traded company, introduced its version of cffDNA prenatal testing. As the name suggests, floating in each expectant mother’s blood stream are bits of DNA from the child she is carrying. The new testing procedure tests this fetal DNA and can detect with the greatest reported sensitivity whether the fetus has Down syndrome. Because of false positives, cffDNA testing remains a screening-type test, providing a reassessment of the likelihood that the child has Down syndrome; it is not a diagnostic test, yet...

In his recent column for Slate—headlined “Fetal Flaw”—Will Saletan praised the advances in prenatal testing for informing mothers if they are pregnant with a “defective fetus.”..A month before Saletan’s article, Newsweek reported on the “epidemic of special needs kids.” As the charged word “epidemic” suggested, the article discussed the growing burden of caring for more children with autism and Down syndrome because of the costs of medical care. Almost lamentably, the article notes that these burdens have been somewhat compounded because, due to societal advances in medical care and inclusion in mainstream society, individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities are now enjoying longer—and therefore costlier—lives.

Burden. Defective. Epidemic. These were terms commonly used in the eugenics era at the turn of the last century to justify compulsory sterilizations and involuntary euthanasia.</sub>

"Genetic screening is inevitable. Hysterical warnings of genocide will always be likely to fall on deaf ears in a culture, because the 'typical citizen' can hardly come to think of himself or herself as living in a society that could be so brutal in its selective extermination of a people. That was as true of the 'good Germans" in 1937 as of the 'good Americans" of 1830 who could crush human life and quell slave rebellions with Christian righteousness. The direct route to eugenics is not the issue, nor is it likely to be an issue. It is a more insidious situation about which I would issue a warning and venture a prediction. At the extremes there is a life-threatening genetic disorder, and it is not difficult to acheive a concensus about screening for it. But this is the far end of the continuum... The power of the technological advances is such that there is now a possible new attitude to be adopted - that 'the defective fetus' can be eliminated. The elimination or prevention of the 'defective fetus' is the most likely consequence and ultimate meaning of a genetic screen."
-Troy Duster, Backdoor to Eugenics, 1990, page 128.

Chamberlain, D. B. (1998). Babies don’t feel pain. Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots, 168-192.

_{For centuries, babies have had a difficult time getting adults to accept them as real people with real feelings having real experiences- a situation which their twentieth-century cyborgification has only enhanced. Deep predjudices have shadowed them for centuries: babies were thought of as subhuman, prehuman, or, as sixteenth-century authority Luis deGranada put it, 'a lower animal in human form'.}

Chamberlain, D. B. (1989). Babies remember pain. Pre-and Peri-Natal Psychology, 3(4), 297-310.

_{Babies have been crying at birth for centuries but we have been reluctant to accept their cries as valid expressions of pain which will register in memory. Despite mounting evidence, the characteristic reaction of psychologists and medical practitioners to infant pain has been one of denial. Key myths about the brain have provided the rationale for painful procedures. Against this background, studies of the infant cry prove that crying is meaningful communication. Examples of prenatal and perinatal cries are examined. Evidence for the pain of circumcision is found in personal memories and research findings. A final section focuses on pain in the NICU, the delivery room, and the nursery and concludes with an appeal that all painful procedures imposed on newborns be reconsidered.}

Cunningham, N. (1990). Ethical perspectives on the perception and treatment of neonatal pain. The Journal of perinatal & neonatal nursing, 4(1), 75-83.

Gottfried, A. W., & Gaiter, J. L. (1985). Infant stress under intensive care. Baltimore: University Park Press.

Anand, K. J., & Hickey, P. R. (1987). Pain and its effects in the human neonate and fetus. N Engl j Med, 317(21), 1321-1329.

Lester, B. M., & Boukydis, C. Z. (1985). Infant crying: Theoretical and research perspectives. Plenum Publishing Corporation.

Lummaa, V., Vuorisalo, T., Barr, R. G., & Lehtonen, L. (1998). Why cry? Adaptive significance of intensive crying in human infants. Evolution and Human Behavior, 19(3), 193-202.

Lawson, J. R. (1990). The politics of newborn pain.

Owens, M. E., & Todt, E. H. (1984). Pain in infancy: neonatal reaction to a heel lance. Pain, 20(1), 77-86.

Kennedy-Caldwell, C. (1989). Pain in infancy. Journal of Neuroscience Nursing, 21(6), 386-388.

Pernick, M. S. (1994). A calculus of suffering: pain, professionalism, and anesthesia in nineteenth century America.

Rana, S. R. (1987). Pain—a subject ignored. Pediatrics, 79(2), 309-309.

Talbert, L. M., Kraybill, E. N., & Potter, H. D. (1976). Adrenal cortical response to circumcision in the neonate. Obstetrics & Gynecology, 48(2), 208-210.

"The number of tools an obstetrician can employ to address the needs of the fetus increases each year. We are of the view that this is the most exciting time to be an obstetrician. Who would have dreamed, even a few years ago, that we could serve the fetus as physician?"
-Jack A. Pritchard and Paul C. MacDonald, Williams Obstetrics, 1980, page vii.

Wow, continued:

Joseph Cornell

Salvador Dali

Diane Arbus

Cindy Sherman

Mark Ryden

Kent Williams

“We were not meant for this. We were meant to live and love and play and work and even hate more simply and directly. It is only through outrageous violence that we come to see this absurdity as normal, or to not see it at all. Each new child has his eyes torn out so he will not see, his ears removed so he will not hear, his tongue ripped out so he will not speak, his mind juiced so he will not think, and his nerves scraped so he will not feel. Then he is released into a world broken in two: others, like himself, and those to be used. He will never realize that he still has all of his senses, if only he will use them. If you mention to him that he still has ears, he will not hear you. If he hears, he will not think. Perhaps most dangerously of all, if he thinks he will not feel. And so on, again.”
-Derrick Jensen, The Culture of Make Believe, 2002, page 345. 

Narvaez, D., How Modern Societies Violate Human Development: Violating what humans need and changing human nature., May 4, 2014.

Felitti, V. J. & R. F. Anda. (2005). The Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) Study. Atlanta: Centers for Disease Control and Kaiser Permanente.

Feshbach, N.D. (1987).  Parental empathy and child adjustment/maladjustment.  In N. Eisenberg & J. Strayer (Eds.) Empathy and Its Development (pp. 271-291). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sanchez, M.M., Ladd, C.O., & Plotsky, P.M. (2001). Early adverse experience as a developmental risk factor for later psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 13 (3), 419-449.

Chapman, D. P., Dube, S. R., & Anda, R. F. (2007). Adverse childhood events as risk factors for negative mental health outcomes. Psychiatric Annals, 37(5), 359.

Anisman, H., Zaharia, M.D., Meaney, M.J., & Merali, Z. (1998). Do early-life events permanently alter behavioral and hormonal responses to stressors? International Journal of Developmental Neuroscience, 16(3-4), 149-164.

Dube, S. R., Fairweather, D., Pearson, W. S., Felitti, V. J., Anda, R. F., & Croft, J. B. (2009). Cumulative childhood stress and autoimmune diseases in adults. Psychosomatic medicine, 71(2), 243.


Felitti VJ, Anda RF, Nordenberg D, et al. Relationship of childhood abuse and household dysfunction to many of the leading causes of death in adults. The adverse childhood experiences (ACE) study. Am J Prev Med 1998;14:245--58.

Brown DW, Anda RF, Henning T, et al. Adverse childhood experiences and the risk of premature mortality. Am J Prev Med 2009;37:389--96.

Anda RF, Felitti VJ, Bremner JD, et al. The enduring effects of abuse and related experiences in childhood: a convergence of evidence from neurobiology and epidemiology. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci 2006;256:174--86.

Dong M, Anda RF, Felitti VJ, et al. The interrelatedness of multiple forms of childhood abuse, neglect, and household dysfunction. Child Abuse Negl 2004;28;771-- 84.

Foley, D. E. (1997). Deficit thinking models based on culture: The anthropological protest. The evolution of deficit thinking: Educational thought and practice, 113-131.

Susan Rosenthal, "Mental Illness or Social Sickness?", Chapter 3 of SICK and SICKER: Essays on Class, Health and Health Care, May 18, 2008.

_{Children are especially vulnerable to deprivation and have a limited capacity to articulate what’s wrong. So they protest in the only ways they can – with symptoms and behaviors that alert us that something is wrong in their world...In most schools, youngsters are forced to sit still in closed rooms for long periods of time and memorize information that has no connection to their lives. The ones who fall behind can be labelled with Reading Disorder, Mathematics Disorder and Expressive Language Disorder. The restless, defiant ones can be labelled with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, Conduct Disorder, Oppositional Defiant Disorder, and Disruptive Behavior Disorder Not Otherwise Specified. Once labelled, these children can be forced to take toxic, mind-altering drugs. Even in families that can provide the material necessities of life, overstressed adults have insufficient time to meet their children’s emotional needs. When children protest by acting out, parents are encouraged (more often pressured) to consult doctors and other experts who “diagnose” these children, not the situation to which they are reacting.
Anxious youngsters who are not getting enough attention, or the right kind of attention, can be labelled with Separation Anxiety Disorder. Children who have suffered severe abandonment, abuse, trauma or neglect can be labelled Reactive Attachment Disorder. Although these children are reacting predictably to their plight, the DSM-IV declares them mentally ill. Such labels do nothing to change children’s situations so they can get what they need...No one is asking, “What do these children need, and how can we provide it?” To preserve a crazy-making system, the healthy, protesting child is labelled “crazy” and medicated into a subordinate, defeated child.}

Narvaez, D., Panksepp, J., Schore, A., & Gleason, T. (2013). The Value of Using an Evolutionary Framework for Gauging Children’s Well-Being. Evolution, early
experience and human development: From research to practice and policy, 3-30.

_{The evidence across animal, human psychological, neurobiological, and anthropological research is increasing and converging to demonstrate lifetime vulnerability of brain and body systems among those with poor early care. Even when medicines are available to alleviate symptoms of dysfunction, the underlying suboptimal structures remain. This problem may be particularly true for emotional and moral functioning. A host of public, personal, and social health problems that may have their roots in early experience have been skyrocketing in the United States and increasingly around the world (e.g.,psychological problems such as attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder, autism, anxiety, and depression, not to mention psychosomatic conditions such as diabetes, hypertension, and a variety of autoimmune disorders)....Mammals require abundant nurturing care for optimal postnatal development. Catarrhine mammals in particular require profound social care.}

Bio-Psychosocial View on Neurodegenerative Diseases, Part 1 of Dr. Gabor Mate's presentation on Neurodegenerative Diseases. For these presentations. Dr. Mate took a look at neurodegenerative diseases through a bio-psychosocial lens. Presented at the Annual International Restorative Medicine Conference.

"What has become plain to me, from reading anthropological accounts...analyzing our own childrearing practices and comparing outcomes, is that Western culture has
extirpated the evolved grounding of moral rationality and moral development. This has been happening for some time but may be reaching its nadir. Historically in delayed-return societies (in contrast to Small Band Gatherer-Hunter immediate-return), an ideology of sacralized leadership and centralized authority emerged, with its accompanying control of women and young men by older men. Those with power (older men) fostered an ideology that established fixed relations among humans (e.g., institutionalized marriage). Fixed relations were given power over individual autonomy. Further, the possessions that accumulated with power were themselves imbued with mystical power over human autonomy (e.g., private property). The pinnacle of this mythology is a capitalist system so powerful, pervasive and destructive that it ‘shall not be named’—it is taken as a baseline for how reality works so any questioning of its assumptions (e.g., competitiveness, self-interest, free markets) is considered absurd. Through an emphasis on consumption and materialism US cultural narratives and societal practices have denigrated close maternal, familial and community care, as well as true individual autonomy and the self-development necessary for a confident social being...Trauma and undercare of children may be a primary cause of our differences. Undercare refers to the absence of ancestral caregiving practices in early life. Ancestral caregiving among humans represent slight variations to social mammalian parenting that emerged more than 30 million years ago: responsiveness to the needs of the child, constant touch, breastfeeding for at least 2 years, multiple adult caregivers, extensive positive social support for mother and child, free play in nature. These practices are related to optimal functioning physiologically, psychologically and morally.
All these practices have diminished over the 20th century in the USA. Widespread lack of social support for optimal early caregiving may be undermining all the rest of the practices as it leads to distracted and less responsive caregivers that worsens by generation."
- Darcia Narvaez, The 99%: Development and Socialization within an Evolutionary Context: Growing Up to Become “A Good and Useful Human Being”.

“Diet, injections, and injunctions will combine, from a very early age, to produce the sort of character and the sort of beliefs that the authorities consider desirable, and any serious criticism of the powers that be will become psychologically impossible.”
-Bertrand Russell, The Impact of Science on Society, 1953, page 50.

Gray, P. (2009). Play as a foundation for hunter-gatherer social existence. American Journal of Play, 1(4), 476-522.

_{The author offers the thesis that hunter-gatherers promoted, through cultural means, the playful side of their human nature and this made possible their egalitarian, nonautocratic, intensely cooperative ways of living. Hunter-gatherer bands, with their fluid membership, are likened to social-play groups, which people could freely join or leave. Freedom to leave the band sets the stage for the individual autonomy, sharing, and consensual decision making within the band. Hunter-gatherers used humor, deliberately, to maintain equality and stop quarrels. Their means of sharing had gamelike qualities. Their religious beliefs and ceremonies were playful, founded on assumptions of equality, humor, and capriciousness among the deities. They maintained playful attitudes in their hunting, gathering, and other sustenance activities, partly by allowing each person to choose when, how, and how much they would engage in such activities. Children were free to play and explore, and through these activities, they acquired the skills, knowledge, and values of their culture. Play, in other mammals as well as in humans, counteracts tendencies toward dominance, and hunter-gatherers appear to have promoted play quite deliberately for that purpose.}

Peter Gray. (2013). Free to learn: Why unleashing the instinct to play will make our children happier, more self-reliant, and better students for life. Basic Books.

_{"Nothing that we do, no amount of toys we buy or ‘quality time’ or special training we give our children, can compensate for the freedom we take away. The things that children learn through their own initiatives, in free play, cannot be taught in other ways.”}

Kennair, L. E. O. (2011). Children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective: The anti-phobic effects of thrilling experiences. Evolutionary Psychology, 9(2), 257-284.

_{This theoretical article views children’s risky play from an evolutionary perspective, addressing specific evolutionary functions and especially the anti-phobic effects of risky play. According to the non-associative theory, a contemporary approach to the etiology of anxiety, children develop fears of certain stimuli (e.g.,heights and strangers) that protect them from situations they are not mature enough to cope with, naturally through infancy. Risky play is a set of motivated behaviors that both provide the child with an exhilarating positive emotion and expose the child to the stimuli they previously have feared. As the child’s coping skills improve, these situations and stimuli may be mastered and no longer be feared. Thus fear caused by maturational and age relevant natural inhibition is reduced as the child experiences a motivating thrilling activation, while learning to master age adequate challenges. It is concluded that risky play may have evolved due to this anti-phobic effect in normal child development, and it is suggested that we may observe an increased neuroticism or psychopathology in society if children are hindered from partaking in age adequate risky play.}

Sandseter, E. B. H. (2009). Children’s expressions of exhilaration and fear in risky play. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood, 10(2), 92-106.

_{Children naturally seek and conduct exciting forms of play that involve a risk of physical injury (risky play). Even though several prior studies give descriptions of risky play, none of them deeply explore children’s expressions of how they experience different kinds of risky play. This study aims to do that. The results from video observations of children’s risky play in two Norwegian preschools reveal that children experience several emotions, expressed bodily, facially, and verbally, while engaging in risky play. Their experiences include both pure exhilaration and pure fear, and quite often both emotions are present at the same time. The findings also indicate that one of the main aspects of risky play is to keep the exhilaration bordering on the feeling of pure fear; but if pure fear occurs, the play ends with withdrawal. Suggested implications of the study are that risk taking should be acknowledged as an important part of children’s play, and that children should be able to engage in challenging play adjusted to their individual sense of risk and urge for exhilaration.}


Bateson, P. (2005). The role of play in the evolution of great apes and humans. The nature of play: Great apes and humans, 13-24.

_{In all its manifestations play is characterised by its apparent lack of serious purpose or immediate goal...Play is also exquisitely sensitive to prevailing conditions and is usually the first nonessential activity to go when all is not well. Its presence or absence is a sensitive barometer of the individual animal's psychological and physical well-being...Play happens only when basic short-term needs have been satisfied, and the animal is relaxed. It is therefore the first activity to disappear if the animal is stressed, anxious, hungry, or ill.}

"Children are born with the instinct to take risks in play, because historically, learning to negotiate risk has been crucial to survival; in another era, they would have had to learn to run from some danger, defend themselves from others, be independent. Even today, growing up is a process of managing fears and learning to arrive at sound decisions. By engaging in risky play, children are effectively subjecting themselves to a form of exposure therapy, in which they force themselves to do the thing they’re afraid of in order to overcome their fear. But if they never go through that process, the fear can turn into a phobia...
The final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. According to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, which monitors hospital visits, the frequency of emergency-room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. From 2001 through 2008, the Consumer Product Safety Commission reported 100 deaths associated with playground equipment—an average of 13 a year, or 10 fewer than were reported in 1980...Even rubber surfacing doesn’t seem to have made much of a difference in the real world. David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University, analyzed U.K. injury statistics and found that as in the U.S., there was no clear trend over time. 'The advent of all these special surfaces for playgrounds has contributed very little, if anything at all, to the safety of children,' he told me...
What has changed since the 1970s is the nature of the American family, and the broader sense of community. For a variety of reasons—divorce, more single-parent families, more mothers working—both families and neighborhoods have lost some of their cohesion. It is perhaps natural that trust in general has eroded, and that parents have sought to control more closely what they can—most of all, their children...
As we parents began to see public spaces—playgrounds, streets, public ball fields, the distance between school and home—as dangerous, other, smaller daily decisions fell into place. Ask any of my parenting peers to chronicle a typical week in their child's life and they will likely mention school, homework, after-school classes, organized playdates, sports teams coached by a fellow parent, and very little free, unsupervised time. Failure to supervise has become, in fact, synonymous with failure to parent... "
-Hanna Rosin, The Overprotected Kid, The Atlantic, March 19, 2014.

Tom Bartlett, "The Case for Play," The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 20, 2011.

Bernstein, G., & Triger, Z. (2010). Over-Parenting. UC Davis L. Rev., 44, 1221.

_{Contemporary parents engage in Intensive Parenting. Parents devote their time to actively enriching the child, ensuring the child’s individual needs are addressed and that he is able to reach his full potential. They also keep abreast of the newest child rearing knowledge and consistently monitor the child’s progress and whereabouts. Parents are expected to be cultivating, informed, and monitoring. To satisfy these high standards, parents utilize a broad array of technological devices, such as the cellular phone and the Internet, making Intensive Parenting a socio-technological trend. Many legal doctrines aim at defining the scope of parental responsibilities; yet, courts, legislatures, and scholars alike have ignored this significant change in child rearing practices. Unattended, the law already plays an important role in enhancing the socio-technological trend of Intensive Parenting. In the area of custody disputes, legislatures and courts effectively enforce Intensive Parenting norms. Other recent legal developments, such as the constriction of the Parental Immunity Doctrine and recurring transformation of preferred child rearing practices into legal standards, open the door to the incorporation of additional Intensive Parenting norms into the law. This Article underscores that despite its advantages, Intensive Parenting can become over-parenting. First, the Article shows that Intensive Parenting is not a universal trend. It is dependent on class, race, ethnicity, and culture. Enforcement of Intensive Parenting in a multicultural society would increase existing biases in the child welfare system and force Intensive Parenting on those who may be financially unable or ideologically unwilling to adopt it. Second, the Article reveals that although Intensive Parenting carries important advantages, it can disrupt healthy psychological development in children. The Article, therefore, cautions against hasty incorporation of Intensive Parenting norms into the law.}

Pimentel, D. (2012). Criminal Child Neglect and the Free Range Kid: Is Overprotective Parenting the New Standard of Care. Utah L. Rev., 947.

_{Parenting in American society is a far more demanding enterprise than it once was, and the changes over a single generation are startling. Intensive Parenting is becoming the norm in the dominant American subcultures, which are embracing safety-conscious parenting approaches that might once have been viewed disapprovingly as “overprotective” parenting. Most of the change is motivated by a well-intentioned desire to protect and promote children’s safety and welfare—more specifically to insulate them from risks of physical harm and victimization, and increase their access to educational and cultural advantage. De facto legal standards appear to be evolving right along with these attitudes about proper parenting, with individual parental choices increasingly second-guessed by a society now willing to pass judgment on them...The concern here is that parents who resist the trend toward overprotective parenting, including Free Range parents who consciously choose to give their children a long leash, may expose themselves to criminal liability.}

"The objective of getting all school-aged children to school and keeping them there until they attain the minimum defined in compulsory education is routinely used in the sector of education, but this objective does not necessarily conform to human rights requirements. In a country where all school-aged children are in school, free of charge, for the full duration of compulsory education, the right to education may be denied or violated. The core human rights standards for education include respect of freedom. The respect of parents' freedom to educate their children according to their vision of what education should be has been part of international human rights standards since their very emergence."
-Statement by Special Rapporteur on the Right to Education, United Nations Commission on Human Rights, 1999.

"We were making the future," he said, and hardly any of us troubled to think what future we were making. And here it is!
-The Sleeper Awakes, H. G. Wells, 1910.

"Education...now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators and 'fans', driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people shaping and help people to shape themselves."
-John Holt, Instead of Education, quoted in Growing Without Education, GWS issue 30, page 29.

"The development of a factory-like system in the nineteenth-century schoolroom was not accidental."
-Joel Spring, Education and the rise of the corporate state, 1969, page 45.

"During the twentieth century U. S. children's opportunities to observe and participate in mature activities have been greatly curtailed. In the colonial period the workplace and the home were typically not separated, and young children participated skillfully in family work as well as community social events...As industry replaced farming, opportunities declined for children to learn work skills at home...At the beginning of the 1900s child labor laws were introduced in the U.S. to protect children from exploitation in factories. As industrialization spread, school was made compulsory and the amount of time spent in school increased. This further limited U. S. children's opportunities to participate in the mature activities of their families and communities. Schools began to serve a wider segment of the child population as a specialized child-focused setting that provided exercises to get children ready for later 'real world' work, generally without direct contact with actual mature activity...These specialized child-focused situations- especially schooling, but also pre-school lessons and child-focused conversations in families - often employ instructional practices and a concept of learning that were heavily influenced by the organization of factories..."
-Barbara Rogoff, et al., Firsthand learning through intent participation, Annual review of psychology, 54(1), 2003, page 178.

"What is at stake here is to recognize that the act of knowing is more than a technical issue, it is, in part a political issue. Knowing is not a matter of the best way to learn a given body of knowledge, but a theoretical-practical issue designed to distinguish between essence and appearance, truth and falsity. Knowledge parading under the guise of objectivity, has for far too long been used to legitimate belief and value systems that are at the core of bondage...Reality...is something other than that which is codified in the established language and 'facts'. Liberation begins with the recognition that knowledge, at its root, is ideological and political, inextricably tied to human interests and norms."
-Henry A. Giroux, Ideology, Culture, and the Process of Schooling, 1981, page 131.

Tejeda, C., Espinoza, M., & Gutierrez, K. (2003). Toward a decolonizing pedagogy: Social justice reconsidered. Pedagogies of difference: Rethinking education for social change, 9-38.

"Is it any wonder Socrates was outraged at the accusation that he took money to teach? Even then, philosophers saw clearly the inevitable direction the professionalization of teaching would take, pre-empting the teaching function that belongs to all in a healthy community; belongs, indeed, most clearly to yourself, since nobody else cares as much about your destiny. Professional teaching tends to another serious error. It makes things that are inherently easy to learn, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, difficult - by insisting they be taught by pedagogical procedures."
-John Taylor Gatto, The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher, 1991.

"The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any."
-Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, 1968, page 168.

Halton, E. (2007). Eden inverted: On the wild self and the contraction of consciousness. Trumpeter, 23(3).

_{Humans are a neotenous species, retaining new-born like characteristics much longer than other species, and for that reason, requiring patterns of socializing that can meet our prolonged developmental needs. For example, mother-infant bonding and separation between 1 ½ and 3 years of age is a socializing rite of passage not only vital for the development of empathy and autonomy, but occurs in a primate undergoing genuine brain development through the age of two that occurs in utero for other primates and mammals. Our big brains somehow bodied forth from the “omnivorous attention” required for a dematuring primate to tune in, in wonder, to the paradise of edible instinctive intelligence. I take our neoteny as requiring that our immature intelligence attune itself to the mature instinctive intelligence of all-surrounding life, without and within, that provides the signs wherein we find our maturity. Apart from that, we go mad in the long run.}

Narvaez, D. (2013). The 99%: Development and Socialization within an Evolutionary Context: Growing Up to Become “A Good and Useful Human Being”.

_{From birth, the social environment of small-band gatherer-hunters (SBGH) is vastly different from that of Western societies like the USA, creating distinctive social and moral personalities. SBGH have a companionship culture that is simultaneously deeply individualistic and collectivistic, highly pleasurable and cooperative, fostering natural virtue. Contrastingly, in Western societies like the USA, natural virtue is hard to develop because children are raised with a great deal of coercion and a minimalist approach to meeting their needs. Modern practices like these foster a self-protective brain and personalities far different from humanity’s moral potential.}

Liedloff, J. (1986). The Continuum concept. Cambridge, MA: Perseus Books.

Martin, C. L. (1999). The way of the human being. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Wolff, R. (2001). Original wisdom: Stories of an ancient way of knowing. Inner Traditions/Bear & Co.

Konner, M. (2005). Hunter-gatherer infancy and childhood. Hunter-gatherer childhoods: Evolutionary, developmental and cultural perspectives.

_{If the monkey and ape background to hominid evolution entailed a consistent pattern of care of infants and juveniles, one would expect it to have coevolved with aspects of normal or optimal development that might have become dependent on it. If so, this would presumably limit the range of facultative adaptations easily achieved in human evolution, or at least the range achieved without developmental consequences.}

Narvaez, D., Gray, P., McKenna, J. J., Fuentes, A., & Valentino, K. (2014). Children’s Development in Light of Evolution and Culture. Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution: Culture, Childrearing and Social Wellbeing, 3.

Rogoff, B., & Mosier, C.E. (2003). Privileged treatment of toddlers: Cultural aspects of individual choice and responsibility. Developmental Psychology, 39(6), 1047-1060.

Crockenberg, S., & Litman, C. (1990). Autonomy as competence in 2-year-olds: Maternal correlates of child defiance, compliance, and self-assertion. Developmental Psychology, 26(6), 961.

_{Mothers and children were observed in laboratory and home settings in a study of the relationship between maternal control strategies and child behavior. Child compliance and self-assertion were associated with less powerful control methods; defiance with power-assertive methods. A combined control-guidance strategy elicited greatest compliance and least defiance.}

Chavajay, P., & Rogoff, B. (1999). Cultural variation in management of attention by children and their caregivers. Developmental Psychology, 35(4), 1079.

Narvaez, D. The Neurobiology of Moral Sensitivity: Evolution and Parenting.

Rogoff, B., Paradise, R., Arauz, R. M., Correa-Chávez, M., & Angelillo, C. (2003). Firsthand learning through intent participation. Annual review of psychology, 54(1), 175-203.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior. New York, NY: Plenum.

Gaskins, S., & Paradise, R. (2010). CHAPTER FIVE LEARNING THROUGH OBSERVATION IN DAILY LIFE. The anthropology of learning in childhood, 85.

Paradise, R., & Rogoff, B. (2009). Side by side: Learning by observing and pitching in. Ethos, 37(1), 102-138.

Holt, J. C. (1989). Learning all the time. Da Capo Press.

_{Children learn from anything and everything they see. They learn wherever they are, not just in special learning places. They learn much more from things, natural or made, that are real and significant in the world in their own right and not just made in order to help children learn, in other words, they are more interested in the objects and tools that we use in our regular lives than in almost any special learning materials made for them. We can best help children learn, not by deciding what we think they should learn and thinking of ingenious ways to teach them, but by making the world, as far as we can, accessible to them, paying serious attention to what they do, answering their questions - if they have any - and helping them explore the things they are most interested in. The ways we can do this are simple and easily understood by parents and other people who like children and will take the trouble to pay some attention to what they do and think about what it may mean. In short, what we need to know to help children learn is not obscure, technical, or complicated, and the materials we can use to help them lie ready at hand all around us.}

Rogoff, B., Mosier, C., Mistry, J., & Göncü, A. (1993). Toddlers’ guided participation with their caregivers in cultural activity. Contexts for learning: Sociocultural dynamics in children’s development, 230-253.

Rogoff, B. (1990). Apprenticeship in thinking: Cognitive development in social context. Oxford University Press.

Gray, P. (2014). The play theory of hunter-gatherer egalitarianism. Ancestral Landscapes in Human Evolution: Culture, Childrearing and Social Wellbeing, 192.

Narvaez, D., Panksepp, J., & Schore, A. N. (2012). The future of human nature: Implications for research, policy, and ethics. Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development: From Research to Practice and Policy, 455.

Narvaez, D. (Ed.). (2012). Evolution, early experience and human development: From research to practice and policy. Oxford University Press.

"The West is a vast testimony to childhood botched to serve its own purposes, where history, masquerading as myth, authorizes men of action and men of thought to alter the world to match their regressive moods of omnipotence and insecurity. The modern West selectively perpetuates these psychopathic elements. In the captivity and enslavement of plants and animals and the humanization of the landscape itself is the diminishment of the Other, against which men must define themselves, a diminishment of schizoid confusion in self-identity. From the epoch of Judeo-Christian emergence is an abiding hostility to the natural world, characteristically fearful and paranoid. The sixteenth-century fixation on the impurity of the body and the comparative tidiness of the machine are strongly obsessive-compulsive. These all persist and interact in a tapestry of chronic madness in the industrial present, countered by dreams of absolute control and infinite possession."
-Paul Shepard, Nature and Madness, 1998, page 126–27.

"A combination of a slaughterhouse, a bordello, and an insane asylum- that's what the world really was."
-Isaac Bashevis Singer

"The insight that governmental practices reserved for the most oppressed are eventually generalized to the entire population."
-Giorgio Agamben, No to Biopolitical tattooing, Le Monde, January 10, 2004.

"Ideational processes that by their own inner logic may lead to genocidal projects, and the technical resources that permit implementation of such projects, not only have been proved fully compatible with modern civilization, but have been conditioned, created and supplied by it...It was these norms and institutions that made the Holocaust feasible...All those intricate networks of checks and balances, barriers and hurdles which the civilizing process has erected and which, as we hope and trust, would defend us from violence and constrain all over ambitious and unscrupulous powers, have been proven ineffective. When it came to mass murder, the victims found themselves alone. Not only had they been fooled by an apparently peaceful and humane, legalistic and orderly society- their sense of security became a most powerful factor in their downfall. To put it bluntly, there are reasons to be worried because we know now that we live in a type of society that made the Holocaust possible, and that contained nothing which could stop the Holocaust from happening."
-Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989, page 87-88.

"There are no ultimate institutional safegaurds available for insuring that emergency powers be used for the purpose of preserving the constitution. Only the people's own determination to see them so used can make sure of that...All in all the quasi-dictatorial provisions of modern constitutional systems, be they martial rule, state of seige, or constitutional emergency powers, fail to conform to any exacting standard of effective limitations upon temporary concentration of powers. Consequently, all these systems are liable to be transformed into totalitarian schemes if conditions become favorable to it."
-Carl J. Friedrich, Constitutional Government and Democracy, 1941, page 584.

Seltzer, W., & Anderson, M. (2001). The dark side of numbers: The role of population data systems in human rights abuses. Social Research, 481-513.

Luebke, D. M., & Milton, S. (1994). Locating the victim: An overview of census-taking, tabulation technology, and persecution in Nazi Germany. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 16(3), 25-39.

_{Nazi persecution of racial victim groups presupposed not only precise legal definitions and close cooperation among multiple governmental agencies, but also sophisticated technical procedures for locating those groups according to complex age, occupational, and racial criteria. This article shows how a variety of administrative tools - including two national censuses, a system of resident registration, and several special racial databases - were used to locate groups eventually slated for deportation and death, as well as the possible role played in this process by Hollerith tabulation technology. Patterns in the expulsion of Jews from Germany suggest that aggregate census data may have been used to guide this process as well. The precise role played by punched-card tabulation technology remains a matter of speculation. However, it is certain that as early as 1933, Nazi officials and statisticians envisioned a future in which the racial characteristics and vital statistics of every resident would be monitored through tabulation technology in a system of comprehensive surveillance. While the' "final solution" was in no sense caused by the availability of sophisticated census-taking and tabulation technologies, concrete evidence suggests that Hollerith machines rationalized the management of concentration camp labor, an important element in the Nazi program of "extermination through work."}

Aly, G., & Roth, K. H. (2004). The Nazi census: Identification and control in the Third Reich. Temple University Press.

_{It was simply not the custom to carry identification within the borders of the Reich. Such a state of affairs between state and citizen- unimaginable to us today- was taken for granted to such an extent that the Nazis felt it necessary to implement their program very slowly, step by step. They were forced to build their system piecemeal over the course of ten years, eventually cobbling together an increasingly secure network of registration laws, mandatory identification cards, censuses, and the like. It was only in the last phase of the war that they could begin to conceive of a unified system of registration- at which point they had also reached the limits of their technological know-how. At that point they could no longer handle the amount of incoming data- but these are "problems" that have been solved in our day.}

Seltzer, W. (1998). Population statistics, the Holocaust, and the Nuremberg trials. Population and Development Review, 511-552.

Urekew, R. (2002). Justice Delayed: IBM's Collaboration with Nazi Germany. HARV. INT'L REV., 23, 84-84.



"The Nazis had cunningly applied the assembly-line techniques of the Industrial Revolution to the Final Solution; everything was engineered with maximum, but entirely dehumanized efficiency."
-Judy Chicago

"Systematic extermination, as opposed to sporadic pogroms, could be carried out only by extremely powerful government, and probably could have succeeded only under the cover of wartime conditions."
-Sarah Gordon, Hitler, Germans, and the 'Jewish Question', 1984, page 48.

Rummel, R. J. (1994). Death by government: genocide and mass murder in the twentieth century. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction.

Harff, B. (2003). No lessons learned from the Holocaust? Assessing risks of genocide and political mass murder since 1955. American Political Science Review, 97(01), 57-73.