The I Am Your Child campaign in 1997 introduced the public to early brain development and shaped public understanding of the developing brain. In its design and impact, it illustrates “campaign journalism” that mobilizes public engagement through a large-scale communications strategy that weds science and advocacy and creates media momentum. This approach bypasses traditional science journalism and foreshadowed the current era of advocacy through viral social media messaging. This chapter documents the events leading up to the campaign, its planning and central themes, the events, its impact on parents, and the reactions of commentators. The chapter profiles how developmental scientists responded both critically and constructively, and describes the report of a federal blue-ribbon committee formed in response, From Neurons to Neighborhoods: The Science of Early Childhood Development. In assessing the campaign and its impact, the chapter shows how the messaging integrated neuroimaging studies with research on children’s behavioral development in ways that were both helpful and misleading to public understanding; how cultural frames shaped how the messaging was received and accepted; and the problems deriving from the selectivity of the campaign’s messaging, including insufficient attention to prenatal development, brain growth after early childhood, and the effects of poverty.

This introductory chapter previews the major themes of the book. The chapter discusses how brain development has become incorporated into parents’ thinking about early child development, educators’ concerns with early childhood education, legislators’ initiatives supporting young children and their families, businesses’ marketing of commercial products for young children, and other features of the climate of early child development for the past twenty years. It discusses how ideas from philosophy and later psychological science have historically created images and metaphors to convey new understanding of the developing child, and how brain development has become the most recent and influential of these scientific accounts because of its novelty, its technological sophistication, and a concerted public engagement campaign in 1997 to promote public understanding of the developing brain. The view that “science does not speak for itself” highlights that scientists are trusted sources but not trusted communicators. This raises the problem of how best to convey this scientific account to an interested public, and alternative ways of translating developmental research findings into “usable knowledge” for parents and practitioners are considered. The chapter concludes with an outline of the chapters and the issues they discuss.