When Society Leaves Its Mark on the Child’s Brain

Childhood Conditions, Human Vulnerability, and Our Shared Responsibility

A child never grows up solely within itself. A child grows up in a home, a family, a neighbourhood, and a society. It grows up among voices that may be calm or threatening, in rooms that may feel safe or unpredictable, and with adults who may have time, emotional capacity, and financial security—or who may themselves live under sustained pressure. A child’s world consists not only of people, but also of rent, working conditions, school quality, access to healthcare, sleep, food, leisure, noise, overcrowding, and the possibility of imagining a future.

We have long known that such conditions influence children’s development. What is new is that increasingly precise neuroscientific research is showing how social living conditions may also be reflected in patterns of brain structure and function.

In a Perspective article published in Science on 11 June 2026, neuroscientists Lucinda M. Sisk and Theodore D. Satterthwaite discuss a large-scale study of associations between children’s environments and brain organisation. The title is unambiguous: “Childhood Environments Shape the Brain.” The underlying study, conducted by Marek and colleagues, found that socioeconomic conditions were more strongly associated with differences in children’s brain function and cortical thickness than the other variables examined.

This is a scientific finding. It is also an ethical challenge.

For if society participates in shaping the child’s brain, we can no longer regard poverty, insecurity, and social inequality as conditions that exist outside the child. Over time, they become part of the child’s embodied experience. They may influence the child’s vigilance, attention, sleep, emotional life, learning, and ways of encountering the world.

Inequality is therefore not only about what the child possesses.

It is also about what the child is gradually given the opportunity to become.

The Brain Develops Within a World

The human child is born with a remarkable openness. The brain is not fully developed at birth but continues to organise itself through the interaction between biological dispositions and lived experience. This plasticity enables the child to learn. The child can adapt to language, culture, relationships, and different environments.

Yet this same openness also makes the child vulnerable.

A brain that can be shaped by care, safety, and stimulating experiences can also be shaped by persistent anxiety, unpredictability, and deprivation. Plasticity is therefore not merely a possibility. It also entails susceptibility to adversity.

Marek and colleagues examined associations between 649 phenotypic variables and two measures of the brain: functional connectivity and cortical thickness. Functional connectivity describes how activity in different brain regions covaries and forms networks. Cortical thickness is an anatomical measure related to the structure of the cerebral cortex.

The sample consisted of a large and demographically diverse group of children aged nine to ten. The researchers found that a composite measure of neighbourhood-level social and economic opportunity showed the strongest association with functional connectivity. This measure included factors such as poverty rates, income conditions, and housing quality.

Socioeconomic variables such as household income, parental education, and the proportion of pupils eligible for free school meals dominated the strongest associations. They accounted for 37 of the 40 strongest associations with functional connectivity and 35 of the 40 strongest associations with cortical thickness.

The findings were also examined in a separate adult dataset consisting predominantly of participants of British or Irish background. The observed pattern could not readily be explained by genetic ancestry. The researchers therefore interpret the results as reflecting variation in the socioeconomic environments of childhood rather than biologically determined differences between population groups.

It is important to understand both what this means and what it does not mean.

The study identifies associations. It does not prove that one specific economic factor directly causes one specific change in the brain. Socioeconomic status is not a single influence but a composite expression of many conditions: financial security, parental education, housing, schooling, nutrition, sleep, stress, healthcare, noise, pollution, and access to developmentally supportive activities.

Nor does the research show that children growing up with limited economic resources will necessarily have poorer lives or inferior brains. It cannot be used to diagnose individual children or predict their futures.

It shows something else: that the environments we create around children are associated with the ways in which the developing brain becomes organised.

The Body Remembers Society

In social work, we have often argued that social problems do not reside solely within the individual. They arise in the relationship between the person and the environment. Poverty is not a personal characteristic. Exclusion is not primarily an internal deficiency. Insecurity is not merely a feeling that the child happens to carry.

Contemporary neuroscience adds an embodied dimension to this insight.

Society does not exist only around the child. Over time, it may become inscribed in the child’s physiology.

This does not mean that society literally determines each individual neuron. It means that the child’s body adapts to the world it encounters. When the world is experienced as stable and safe, attention can more readily be directed towards exploration, play, and learning. When the world repeatedly signals danger, the body may become more strongly organised around vigilance.

This is not a sign of weakness. It is a form of adaptation.

A child who listens for footsteps in the hallway because it does not know what condition an adult may be in is learning something important about its environment. A child who takes responsibility for younger siblings, de-escalates conflict, or makes itself invisible may develop an impressive sensitivity to changes in atmosphere. A child who must repeatedly move house, fear that the family will run out of money, or witness parental despair learns that security cannot be taken for granted.

The problem is not that the child adapts.

The problem arises when an adaptation that is necessary in one world becomes an obstacle in another.

The vigilance that protects the child at home may make concentration difficult at school. The ability to detect danger may render ambiguous situations threatening. A body that rarely rests may struggle with sleep, emotional regulation, and learning. The child may appear restless, aggressive, withdrawn, or unmotivated while in reality attempting to manage an adversity that the adults around it have failed to recognise.

This gives rise to a hermeneutic and ethical question:

What are we seeing when we see a difficult child?

Are we seeing a characteristic of the child, or are we seeing the child’s response to a difficult world?

The Sensorimotor Child

A particularly significant finding in the study is that the strongest associations between socioeconomic conditions and functional connectivity were not primarily located in regions conventionally associated with abstract thought and higher cognition. Rather, the strongest associations were found in sensory and motor regions of the brain.

Screen time and reduced sleep, both of which were more common among children of lower socioeconomic status, were also associated with connectivity in overlapping sensorimotor regions.

Sisk and Satterthwaite point out that these regions are involved in systems related to arousal and wakefulness. Arousal—the body’s overall state of readiness—acts as a dynamic regulator of brain activity, physiology, and behaviour. One possible interpretation is therefore that chronic social adversity gradually influences systems that regulate attention and vigilance.

This makes sense from the perspective of practical philosophy.

The child does not first encounter the world as an abstract consciousness. It encounters the world through the body. Before the child can explain that it is afraid, the body has already responded. Before the child can describe the home as unsafe, sleep may already have been disturbed. Before the child can articulate the parents’ financial anxiety, it may already have learned not to ask for money for a school trip.

The body often understands before words do.

A young child cannot analyse concepts such as relative poverty, social exclusion, or structural inequality. Yet the child can notice that the refrigerator is empty. It can hear conversations about unpaid bills. It can observe that other children have clothes, activities, and holidays that it does not have. It can register parental shame, anxiety, or irritability.

The social world is experienced through sound, smell, facial expression, muscular tension, movement, and atmosphere.

When neuroscience finds the strongest associations in sensorimotor networks, it therefore reminds us of something fundamental: the child’s first philosophy is embodied. The child does not ask in words whether the world is safe. It investigates the world through the whole nervous system.

Poverty Is More Than a Lack of Money

When we speak about poverty, it is often reduced to income. A family is placed either above or below a particular economic threshold. Such thresholds are necessary for statistical measurement and distributional policy, but they do not tell the whole story.

Poverty is also a lack of agency.

It means having to choose between necessary expenses that others never need to weigh against one another. It means postponing dental treatment, declining a birthday invitation, going without winter boots, or hoping that the car will last another month. For a child, it may mean being unable to participate in the activities through which friendships are formed and belonging is confirmed.

Socioeconomic status is therefore not only about material goods. It concerns the kind of everyday life a family is able to create around the child.

A financially secure family can purchase time, calm, and alternatives. It can live in a safer neighbourhood, obtain help when something goes wrong, select leisure activities, and provide the child with a quiet place for schoolwork. It can withstand a broken washing machine, parental illness, or the child’s need for additional support.

A family with limited resources may be equally loving, responsible, and caring, yet have less protection against unforeseen events. A relatively small crisis may destabilise the entire household.

This point is crucial: the research must never be used to moralise about families with limited means. Nor should it be used to portray affluent families as morally superior. Parents do not create their life conditions alone. Labour markets, housing policy, educational opportunities, health, discrimination, and systems of social protection all shape the family’s room for action.

When parental stress affects children, this does not necessarily mean that parents have failed.

It may mean that society has transferred too much responsibility to a family that is already carrying more than it has the capacity to bear.

From Individual Explanation to Contextual Understanding

We live in a time that is inclined to explain difficulties at the level of the individual. The child lacks concentration. The child has behavioural problems. The child refuses school. The child lacks motivation. The child cannot regulate its emotions.

Such descriptions may be accurate, but they remain incomplete when detached from the child’s lifeworld.

The individual child must, of course, be assessed and supported. Diagnoses can provide understanding, rights, and access to necessary services. Yet a danger arises when the diagnosis becomes the entire explanation. A social problem may then be transformed into an individual abnormality.

A child may have both a neurodevelopmental vulnerability and difficult social living conditions. These perspectives do not exclude each other. On the contrary, such vulnerability may make the child even more dependent on predictability, stable relationships, and appropriate accommodation.

The question should therefore not only be: “What is wrong with the child?”

We must also ask:

What has the child experienced?

What demands are being imposed by the environment?

What is the child attempting to protect itself from?

What resources are present in the family and neighbourhood?

What can we change around the child so that the child does not have to carry the entire responsibility for changing itself?

This is a practical-philosophical perspective because it connects understanding with action. We do not merely seek to explain the child’s behaviour. We ask what responsibility our knowledge places upon us.

A Brain Is Not a Destiny

Neuroscientific findings can easily be interpreted deterministically. When we hear that poverty or stress “changes the brain,” we may imagine permanent damage that determines the child’s future.

That conclusion is not justified.

Sisk and Satterthwaite emphasise that the study concerns group-level patterns. It cannot be used to predict the developmental trajectory of a particular child. Although the effect sizes were large by the standards of this field, 84 per cent or more of the variation in brain measures was not explained by socioeconomic status. Many children from low-income families have brain patterns similar to those found among children from more affluent backgrounds, and the reverse is also true.

Nor is development complete at the age of ten. The brain retains substantial experience-dependent plasticity throughout adolescence and adulthood. Early sensitive periods are important, but they are not always irreversibly closed. New relationships, safer living conditions, learning, and treatment may contribute to new developmental pathways.

There are therefore two forms of injustice that must be avoided.

The first is to disregard the significance of adverse childhood conditions and pretend that all children begin life from the same point.

The second is to reduce the child to adversity and regard the child as permanently damaged.

The child is always more than what has happened to it.

A human being is shaped by history but not exhausted by it. Between the past and the future there remains a space for experience, relationship, action, and change. For some children, this space is narrow—far too narrow. Yet it does not necessarily disappear.

That is precisely why help matters.

Resilience Without Romanticisation

Children can demonstrate an extraordinary capacity for adaptation and resilience. They may develop creativity, social understanding, humour, endurance, and a particular sensitivity to the vulnerability of others. Children who grow up under difficult conditions are not merely bearers of risk. They may also develop context-specific strengths that are not always recognised by standardised tests or by the narrow expectations of schools.

Yet we must be careful in how we speak about resilience.

Resilience must not become a new demand placed upon the child: not only must you endure injustice, you must also grow through it.

When a child thrives despite difficult conditions, there is reason for respect and hope. Yet the child’s resilience does not absolve adults or society of responsibility. The fact that some children survive neglect, poverty, or violence without apparent long-term difficulties does not make the adversity less unjust.

We would never justify an unsafe bridge by pointing out that some people are strong swimmers.

In the same way, we cannot justify unsafe childhood conditions by referring to children’s capacity to adapt.

Resilience rarely emerges in a social vacuum. There is often a person, a place, or a community that has made resilience possible: a grandmother, teacher, coach, neighbour, sibling, or social worker who saw the child and provided an experience of the world as potentially different.

Resilience is therefore not only something the child possesses.

It may also be something we create together with the child.

The Adult Gaze

Knowledge about brain development should change not only what we know but also how we see children.

A teacher encounters a pupil who repeatedly looks out of the window. It is easy to interpret this as lack of interest. Yet perhaps the child slept poorly because there was conflict at home. Perhaps the body is still listening for danger. Perhaps the classroom is not primarily experienced as a place of learning, but as yet another room in which the child must remain vigilant.

A social worker meets a mother who forgets appointments. This may be interpreted as unwillingness to cooperate. Yet perhaps she works irregular shifts, has several children, limited income, and no one to relieve her. Perhaps her apparent irresponsibility is an expression of a life in which demands have long exceeded available resources.

A physician meets a child with headaches and abdominal pain. Medical examinations show no disease. Yet the body may still be telling the truth. Pain may express a burden that the child is not yet able to articulate.

This does not mean that every difficulty should be explained by poverty, stress, or the childhood environment. Such reductionism would be as problematic as ignoring context altogether.

It means that we must keep several possibilities open.

A professional gaze is not one that determines as quickly as possible what the child is. It is a gaze capable of asking what the child’s expressions might mean.

Here neuroscience meets hermeneutics. Brain imaging provides data, but it does not provide the child’s story. A scan may show a pattern of connectivity. It cannot show what it felt like to arrive at school without lunch, to hear parents arguing about money, or to be the only pupil unable to attend the school camp.

The brain can be imaged.

Suffering must still be interpreted.

The child must still be heard.

When Knowledge Creates Obligations

Practical philosophy does not begin solely with the question of what we can know, and it cannot end there. It asks what knowledge requires us to do.

If children’s living environments are associated with brain development even before adolescence, interventions cannot be directed only towards the child after problems have emerged. Attention must also be directed towards the conditions surrounding the child.

This involves support for families, but it also involves politics.

It concerns income security, housing, schools, early childhood education, healthcare, access to leisure activities, and protection from violence. It concerns providing assistance before adversity has grown so severe that the family collapses. It concerns reducing the administrative humiliation that occurs when people must repeatedly prove their need to systems that approach them with suspicion.

Sisk and Satterthwaite refer to experimental evidence indicating that children’s outcomes can change markedly when environmental conditions improve. This reinforces the conclusion that early circumstances are not destiny and that public policy can make a meaningful difference. The authors therefore argue that socioeconomic differences already present in brain development before adolescence strengthen the case for policies that support families early.

Such policies must not be justified by claiming that poor children have “poor brains.” That would be both scientifically inaccurate and morally degrading.

The justification is that all children are entitled to conditions that provide genuine opportunities for development.

Justice does not require all children to become alike. It requires that differences in parental income should not determine how much safety, learning, rest, and participation a child can access.

From Opportunity to Substantive Freedom

In her capabilities approach, Martha Nussbaum emphasises that justice is not only concerned with formal rights or the distribution of goods. It is concerned with what human beings are actually able to do and to be.

Two children may have the same formal right to education but profoundly different real opportunities to learn.

One child arrives at school after a peaceful night, having eaten breakfast and supported by adults with time to help. The other arrives tired, hungry, and already emotionally exhausted after trying to maintain calm at home.

On paper, they receive the same education.

In lived reality, they do not possess the same freedom.

Contemporary neuroscience makes this even clearer. Inequality exists not only in external provision but also in the bodily conditions the child brings into the situation. The child enters the classroom with an organism that has already lived in the world for nine or ten years.

Just accommodation cannot therefore mean treating every child in precisely the same way. Equal treatment of people with unequal starting points may reproduce inequality.

Some children need more time.

Some need food before teaching begins.

Some need fewer demands and greater predictability.

Some need an adult who can help the body return to a state of calm before words, numbers, and tasks become accessible.

This is not a matter of lowering expectations. It is a matter of creating conditions that enable the child to meet expectations without first having to overcome its own state of alarm.

The Child as Subject

There is a danger that neuroscience may turn the child into an object. The child becomes a brain to be measured, compared, and corrected. Brain images possess a particular authority in contemporary culture. They can create the impression that we have finally discovered the true reality of the human being.

Yet the child is not identical with an image of its brain.

Brain imaging reveals one dimension of the child’s embodied life. It does not reveal the child’s hopes, friendships, imagination, experiences, or self-understanding. It does not show what a teacher meant to the child, why the child loves drawing, or what the child feels while walking home alone.

A child is not merely something that develops.

A child is someone who experiences its own development.

This distinction is decisive. If we regard the child only as the product of genes and environment, we risk losing the encounter with the child as a person. Practical philosophy insists that the child should not merely be explained but recognised.

To recognise the child is to say:

You are not the problem we are investigating.

You are a human being attempting to live within the conditions you have been given.

We will try to understand how these conditions affect you. But we will not reduce you to them. Nor will we leave the entire burden of overcoming them to you alone.

Help Before Words

Many children cannot tell us what they need. Some lack the language. Others lack confidence that speaking will help. Some have learned that truth creates trouble and that silence is safer.

Help must therefore sometimes begin before words.

It may begin with a meal, a quiet room, a predictable week, or an adult who returns as promised. It may begin when the teacher lowers their voice. When the social worker does not interpret a cancelled appointment as rejection. When the child is allowed to sit near the door. When the family no longer has to repeat the same painful story to five different services.

Such help may appear modest. It may never be visible on a brain scan.

Yet it can give the child a new experience:

The world may be safer than I thought.

Adults may be trustworthy.

I do not have to remain vigilant all the time.

I can learn.

I can play.

I can be a child.

Neuroscience can help us understand why such experiences matter so deeply. But it cannot assume responsibility for creating them.

That responsibility belongs to us.

The Brain as an Ethical Document

Brain research does not merely show how the child has developed. It may also be read as a document of the world in which the child has been required to develop.

If socioeconomic conditions are among the strongest measurable correlates of children’s brain organisation, the brain becomes, in a sense, a witness. Not a witness to the child’s value, but to society’s distribution of safety and adversity.

This witness must be interpreted carefully. We must not biologise poverty or transform social inequality into an attribute of poor people. Yet neither can we pretend that injustice is merely symbolic. It enters everyday life, the body, and the conditions of development.

Social inequality therefore cannot be reduced to resentment that some people possess more than others.

It concerns unequal exposure to stress.

Unequal access to rest.

Unequal opportunities for learning and participation.

Unequal permission to be carefree.

Unequal freedom to imagine a life larger than the problems of the present.

When such differences arise early and are associated with patterns of brain development, social policy becomes child policy, health policy, and future policy.

What is at stake is not only the private life of families.

It is the society we are in the process of creating.

Where the Child Is

The secret of the art of helping, as Kierkegaard observed, is to find the other person where that person is and to begin there. This also applies when we meet children shaped by difficult circumstances.

We cannot begin with the child as we wish the child had been.

We must begin with the child standing before us: tired, vigilant, angry, silent, curious, rejecting, trusting, or afraid. We must attempt to understand what the child has had to learn in order to arrive here.

Yet beginning where the child is does not mean leaving the child there.

It means walking with the child towards a place where more possibilities can open.

Sometimes this requires treatment. At other times, it requires educational accommodation, financial support, or protection from violence. It often requires services to act together rather than passing the child from one institution to another.

And it almost always requires time.

A brain that has learned that the world is unpredictable does not become secure because an adult says, “You are safe here.” Safety must be experienced. It must be repeated. It must survive misunderstandings, conflict, and difficult days.

Only then can the body gradually begin to believe what the words are saying.

What the Child Carries Also Belongs to Us

The article in Science communicates a clear scientific message: childhood environments shape the brain, and socioeconomic conditions appear to be particularly strongly associated with children’s brain function and structure.

Yet the article’s most important significance may not lie in what it tells us about the brain.

It lies in what it tells us about responsibility.

Children do not choose the families into which they are born. They do not choose their parents’ income, their neighbourhood, their school, or the degree of safety surrounding them. They do not choose whether the adults in their lives have emotional resources or whether the family lives from one crisis to the next.

Yet it is the child who carries these experiences in the body.

This is one of childhood’s most fundamental injustices: the child is shaped by conditions it did not create and has no power to change.

We cannot therefore make the child solely responsible for the outcome.

When a child struggles with attention, sleep, learning, or emotional regulation, we must help the child. At the same time, we must be willing to turn our gaze outwards—towards the family, the neighbourhood, institutions, and the political decisions that distribute safety and insecurity.

The brain develops in relationships.

It develops in homes and schoolyards.

It develops within society’s economic and moral landscape.

And precisely because it is shaped by the world, the world can also be changed.

Early conditions are not destiny. But they are real. They must be addressed before they become invisible, before the child’s understandable responses are defined as personal deficiencies, and before responsibility for social inequality is placed inside the child.

A child should not have to prove resilience in order to deserve safety.

A child should be given safety because it is a child.

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