The Unfinished Brain

The Critical Window of Neurodevelopment

Note before you begin: This article is a hill that I would die on. And I know it will stir and rouse feelings in people. I know that people will project privlige onto me. It doesn’t change my stance and opinion. And it is okay for your reality to be different to my own.

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I lost my business the month before my daughter was born.

Everything I had built — the income, the savings, the professional identity I had stitched together over years — gone.

The business sale that was meant to set me up to have maternity leave? The woman liquidated the business post sale and never paid me.

I was a single mother. No pension from the government. No way of making income at the time— unless I was to start another business, in my third trimester, right before I gave birth (which is what I ended up doing).

It would have been easier to have put her in Day Care or some kind of Facility, so that I could work predictable hours and have safety and stability to provide for myself from a resourced place.

But that was never an option for me, and I want to explain why.

And yes, I used the word Facility. Because I believe that we have softened it — we call them centres, rooms, nurseries — but a facility is what it is: a building staffed by rotating strangers where infants and toddlers are left, for eight to ten hours a day, in the most neurologically critical window of their entire lives.

I made it work to stay at home for the first three years of my daughters life, even though it was a fucking struggle. It cost me 20 kilograms, my health, years of recovery I am still inside of. And I would do every bit of it again.

Because what I understood — bone-deep — was that those first years were not a phase to be managed. They were the construction of a nervous system, an attachment system, a sense of self that would either hold my daughter or fail her for the rest of her life.

I chose to hold her myself.

What the Science Says: The Unfinished Brain & The Critical Window

The neuroscience here is not ambiguous, even if the cultural conversation pretends it is.

The human infant is born with the most underdeveloped brain of any mammal relative to adult brain size. This is not a design flaw — it is a design feature. The infant brain is meant to be completed in relationship. Specifically, in relationship with a primary caregiver who is attuned, consistent, and physically present.

Allan Schore, whose research on right-brain development and early attachment has spent thirty years documenting this, is unequivocal: the first two years of life represent a critical period for the development of the orbitofrontal cortex — the region responsible for emotional regulation, stress response, empathy, and the capacity for intimacy. This development does not happen in a vacuum. It happens through thousands of daily micromoments of attunement — a gaze held, a cry responded to, a nervous system co-regulated by another nervous system that is calm, known, and safe.

Ed Tronick’s still-face experiments made this visible in a way that is almost unbearable to watch. In the experiment, a mother who has been warmly responsive to her infant is asked, for just two minutes, to become still and expressionless. Within seconds, the baby begins to try to re-engage her — smiling, vocalising, pointing. When she does not respond, the infant escalates. Then withdraws. Then collapses into distress. The nervous system of an infant, encountering the unresponsive face of a caregiver, registers this as a threat equivalent to abandonment.

Two minutes.

Now consider what we ask of infants who spend eight hours a day with rotating staff in an under-resourced room with inadequate ratios, whose faces are not always calm, whose attention is divided, who will leave at the end of the month and be replaced by someone new.

The research on cortisol — the body’s primary stress hormone — is damning. Multiple studies, including the landmark NICHD Study of Early Child Care, have found elevated cortisol levels in infants and toddlers in group care settings, even in high-quality centres, particularly during the first two years. The developing stress response system, under chronic low-grade activation, does not self-correct. It calibrates. It builds a nervous system that is permanently tilted toward threat.

This is, I believe, the core tension we are seeing inside of Humanity right now — infantsalised adults — or, babies in adult bodies, constantly dysregulated and stressed, living lives that are braced and urgent.

The Empowerment Trap

Here is the story we have been told: women returning to work is liberation. The facility is the infrastructure of female freedom. To question it is to be regressive, anti-feminist, nostalgic for a patriarchal past in which women were trapped.

Women’s economic independence is not trivial. The ability to participate in professional life is something I am passionate about — it really matters. The structural conditions of capitalism — the absence of meaningful parental leave, the atomisation of family units, the erosion of the extended kin networks that once made maternal presence possible without maternal isolation — these underpin a woman’s ability to stay at home with their child in their first few years.

But somewhere in the translation, we made a catastrophic error of conflation. We confused women being free with infants being fine in facilities. These are not the same claim. One is about adult autonomy. The other is about infant neurobiology.

What I see, again and again, is that many women do not want to leave their infants. They grieve it. They spend the first weeks back at work suppressing the biological pull — the cortisol spikes in their own bodies when they cannot respond to their child’s cries, the milk that lets down at the sound of a baby crying on the train. Their bodies are telling them something that their politics will not allow them to hear.

The real failure here is not individual. It is systemic. We built an economic system that cannot accommodate the biological reality of human infancy, and then we told women the solution was to stop insisting on that reality.

What I Want to Say to Mothers

I am not here to punish anyone. I am not writing this to add to the enormous weight of guilt that mothers already carry in every direction. Most women who use early childcare are not doing so out of preference — they are doing so out of necessity. The economic coercion is real. The absence of support is real. I know what it costs to do otherwise. I paid it.

But I am tired of the silence.

I am tired of a culture that calls itself feminist and cannot have an honest conversation about what group care does to infants’ developing nervous systems. I am tired of the research being suppressed in polite company because it is inconvenient. I am tired of women who stayed home — who sacrificed careers, income, health, social capital — being made to feel that their choice was retrograde rather than what it actually was: a profound act of biological and relational intelligence.

And I want to name something that I observe in the mothers who did go back early and who did use facilities through those first years: the guilt is always there. Not always conscious. Sometimes it surfaces as a particular kind of compensatory permissiveness — an inability to hold limits with children who are acting out an unmet need for regulation. Sometimes it surfaces as resentment, at the child, at the choice, at the conditions that made the choice feel impossible.

The Communities Who Already Know

There is an irony in all of this that I cannot ignore.

The communities that have maintained infant-and-child-centred practices through modernisation — that have resisted the facility model, that have kept infants close and in arms and within extended family networks — are often the communities we in the West would classify as least resourced.

They are not least resourced in the ways that matter most.

And I share on this, because so often, people come to me and call me “privliged” for being able to stay at home to raise my daughter. And yet — it is the least privliged that are often raising their children in community, with very little resources.

They know something we have forgotten, or perhaps were never permitted to value: that the labour of being present with a small child is not the absence of contribution. It is the most consequential contribution a human being can make to the fabric of a future. It is the work of building people who will be capable of love, of attunement, of genuine relationship — not because they were optimally stimulated by a facility’s learning program, but because someone who knew them and loved them was there, day after day, to catch them when they collapsed, to meet their eyes when they looked up, to let their nervous system borrow from a regulated one until it could regulate itself.

The Hill

I will keep dying on this hill.

Not because I want to label the mothers who made different choices are bad mothers. Not because I am unaware of the structural forces that make this choice impossible for many. Not because I want to return to a world where women are economically dependent and socially confined.

But because I believe that the willingness to feel the density of the challenge — the fourth trimester, the first year, the second year, the grinding unglamorous work of being physically and emotionally available to a small person who needs you beyond what any job description has prepared you for — is not something to be optimised away. It is the most important role on the planet, and it needs to be named and treated as such.

And because I believe that what we have done, in the name of modernity and liberation, is ask infants to pay the price for a systemic issue that we are not willing to look at and address.

The infant cannot advocate for her/his self. They cannot tell you they is drowning in cortisol, that the rotating faces are disorienting her developing sense of self, that she needs you and not a facility.

They tell you with her body. In the way they cannot settle. With the rages and the clingy nights and the difficulties that arrive later, at school, in relationships, in her own body’s capacity to regulate.

I chose to listen before she had to speak.

I stayed.

And whilst it was the hardest thing I have ever done — I am proud of myself for enduring the challenge.

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If this is a topic you are interested or passionate about, I dive into topics like these in my latest release, The MotherWild Revolution: Cultural Change through Generational Activism.