Thus, the first book on child care in history was by Vallambert in 1565, centering its discourse on the good understanding required between the nursemaid and the infant, understanding necessary to maintain the balance between moods (Parrat-Dayan 1997). Thus, Vallambert wrote: “If the mother is delicate, if she cannot be available to bathe him, feed him and soothe him when the baby cries, if she cannot stand the child’s odors, it is better to choose a wet nurse”. We remember that Élizabeth Badinter had used the nannying of children by women from privileged backgrounds in those times to support her thesis on the non-existence of the maternal instinct.
In the 18th century, the time of Rousseau, the child was judged to be “good” and it was society that perverts it. Parents were made aware that the human being is “naturally good” and that doctors would be putting the accent on hygiene and disqualifying the nursemaids.
The 19th century was Pasteurian, the fight against microbes became the great cause and doctors took control over mothers to control hygiene. The phrase “child care” appeared, but at that time, the baby was considered only as a digestive tract that had to be protected. The medical establishment would supervise mothering, interfering in the mother–child relationship, and would judge body contact and attachment behaviors as being of no interest. Cleanliness was more important than affection and the child was, in fact, an object.
Then, finally, from the second half of the 20th century, the “child king” that we know today appeared, affection took precedence over hygiene, psychology became the theoretical body of reference for the education of children, the needs and rights of the child became recognized and the baby became a person, according to Dolto’s famous formula. Painless childbirth, massages, songs and so on, all contributed to child well-being in the 1970s.
The child has thus progressively found himself at the heart of parental narcissism, as well as producing overprotection, preoccupations and guilt. The child’s autonomy is theoretically a target, but do these parental positions really favor the subject’s autonomy? These ambivalences are reflected in the choice of child care, interrupting the work of mothers (but not suitable for the new status of women), childminders and crèches.
To conclude, we can see how the conceptions of childhood, family, mothering and the place of the child in society have been, are and will be perpetually evolving social constructs. This will be evident again in the chapter at the end of this book on homoparental families.
1.7. Adolescent development and its contemporary evolution
The problem of adolescence is well known: theoretically at the optimum of health, the second decade of life, also called the “tumultuous decade”, is characterized by significant mortality and morbidity, from avoidable causes related to behavioral problems, against which psychological interventions often have little effect. Yet, while adolescence is a period of vulnerability, it can also be a period of opportunity for prevention, thanks to significant skills in learning and plasticity.
1.7.1. The (psychological and biological) “dual agenda”
Youth vulnerability can be linked to what we have called a “dual agenda” (Assailly 2019), or, to be more precise, the coordination of two trends.
On the one hand, a purely biological, physiological tendency called the “secular trend in puberty”, attested by biologists, physiologists and doctors. Compared with our ancestors, puberty, as observed by physiological and physical changes in the bodies of young boys and girls, appears earlier in life, on average two years earlier than in previous centuries, for both boys and girls.
This secular trend has stabilized and, although it is not completely explained, hypotheses are increasingly being put forward around hygiene, nutrition, chemical pollutants and endocrine disruptors, factors similar to the contemporary obesity epidemic. As puberty is mainly a hormonal triggering phenomenon, all of the factors affecting the hormonal life of the embryo (its first exposure to testosterone) and the adolescent (its main exposure to testosterone) may play a role in this earlier triggering.
On the other hand, a psychosociological phenomenon that can be described as the “increasing precocity of behavioral disorders”, attested by educators and psychologists, among others (“what previous generations did at 14 is now experienced at 12”), and which is reflected in the earlier average age of onset of all kinds of problems (such as regular and excessive consumption of alcohol, tobacco, use of illicit drugs and antisocial behavior).
It is only recently that neurobiologists and brain imaging specialists have helped us to better understand the relationships and interactions between these two historical developments and how risk-taking in adolescence is being constructed in the confrontation between two neurobiological agendas.
According to the dual systems model (Steinberg 2010) and the related maturational imbalance model (Casey 2015), adolescent risk-taking can be understood in terms of two distinct dimensions – incentive processing and cognitive control – that mature on separate time scales and are underpinned by distinct neurobiological circuitry.
From puberty onwards, the subject becomes more sensitive to rewards, novelty and sensation seeking, due to changes in the functioning of the dopaminergic system, a “socioemotional” system that involves limbic structures, the amygdala, the nucleus accumbens and other areas of the brain associated with judgments about the attractiveness of stimuli.
This stimulus-processing system develops rapidly in early to mid-adolescence; adolescents show greater reactivity in the ventral striatum in response to rewards than do children or adults and the extent of ventral striatum reactivity correlates with real-world risk-taking.
This system is activated by a strong secretion of testosterone during puberty, which is, of course, much higher in boys than in girls. So this “reward system” is activated earlier now, from the beginning of puberty.
In late adolescence, self-regulation is enhanced by a second system, the “cognitive control decision system”, located in the prefrontal areas (responsible for executive functions such as memory, attention, planning, inhibition and flexibility). This system regulates decisions about reward and peer pressure. Unfortunately, this control system does not mature until the age of 22, 23 or even 24.
For example, white matter volume increases until the mid-20s, particularly in brain areas involved in high-level cognitive control. Thus, this neural maturity gap is thought to result in increased sensitivity in adolescents to rewards and emotions without a concomitant increase in their ability to control their behavior.
The problem of adolescence is thus a problem of the agenda between these two systems, the first developing more rapidly than the second and producing that strong increase in the search for sensations and rewards that the adolescent can find in risk-taking, this being the means of satisfying this need. With the secular changes in the age of puberty, this also allows us to understand why risky behaviors and their potentially dangerous consequences are occurring earlier today.
Thus, the issue is not that adolescents are more impulsive than adults or that they seek more rewards than adults; the issue is that they do not sufficiently understand the associations between behavior and consequences (and the balance between benefits and costs: “If I have one more drink, I will be more euphoric but I might also get my license revoked”). This has been shown using functional brain imaging: the synaptic chains connecting the limbic to the prefrontal regions are not “finite” (“myelinated”, to use the technical term), so there is not enough synchronization between cognition and affect.
Brain imaging has also shown the influence of this coordination on resistance to peer pressure, a highly significant factor
