Primal Prevention:
Breaking off our greed-governed world helps you forge a freedom your children will make viral.
The facts
It has long been recognized that the qualities of a strong personality are on show at an early age [1]. We now discover that self-confidence and social skills – like health and resilience [60] – are elaborated from conception on [29]. The outcome of epigenetic processes responsible for such developments during the primal period is optimum when, within maternal whomb and beyond, the humoral-tactile-affective environment of the new being hasn't been disturbed. When it has, e.g. when its genitors or caregivers have undergone chronic stress during this period, it will suffer handicaps [2, 3, 4, 5] (a burden also for relatives and the community). Comparable ill effects of genitors' stress have been observed in other primates and mammals [6, 7, 8, 9, 10].
A challenge
Primal prevention consists in future parents taking measures that'll help them keep out of societal stress (and the subtle violences it generates [65]) during their coming child's primal period. Such a health promotion par excellence will provide their offspring with optimum conditions to build a serene personality, lifelong resilience, psychic and somatic healths, and to become a good parent in its future adulthood.
Nowadays, however, even convinced young adults may alas find it difficult to escape chronic, attention-devouring stress and its various consequences for the child they're about to conceive. Most of these new parents might indeed contemplate calling on third-type kin caregiving to meet the challenge. Above all, however, it's time for all of us, citizens and public servants, to act and fill the void of adequate societal measures.
As a matter of fact, it's hard to understand how public-health professionals and economic partakers – who largely determine the decisions of politicians – may still behave in our developed countries as if they ignored the distant early warning arising from our new understanding of life sciences [64]. Or is it ? even so this new understanding will prove much more decisive, for our future, than the rather naïve, traditional one which considers for example the so-called personalysed medicine a solution [72] more than a deadlock.
Nowadays, however, even convinced young adults may alas find it difficult to escape chronic, attention-devouring stress and its various consequences for the child they're about to conceive. Most of these new parents might indeed contemplate calling on third-type kin caregiving to meet the challenge. Above all, however, it's time for all of us, citizens and public servants, to act and fill the void of adequate societal measures.
As a matter of fact, it's hard to understand how public-health professionals and economic partakers – who largely determine the decisions of politicians – may still behave in our developed countries as if they ignored the distant early warning arising from our new understanding of life sciences [64]. Or is it ? even so this new understanding will prove much more decisive, for our future, than the rather naïve, traditional one which considers for example the so-called personalysed medicine a solution [72] more than a deadlock.
What will change
Disquieting results of social-epidemiology observations in developed countries [16] will have to be interpreted as reflecting the overall effects of societal stress via its early epigenetic impacts on all of us during our primal life. Privileged young people already allowed to take a career break during their child’s primal period may be the first sign that a major cultural blind spot is about to be cured [11]. Sooner or later primal prevention will become common practice because eveyone will have not only the desire, but also the undefiled possibility to devote their sustained attention to their coming child in an affectively secure environment. As recently stated by Thomas Sowell [69] : "The amount of parental attention a child gets makes a huge difference in the future".