ABSTRACT
During the development of typical children, the culturally and historically formed requirements are usually in accordance with the biological maturation of the child. Organic development of the brain, of the body and of the speech apparatus supports the social and cognitive development. One example of this is that a child usually begins school at a time when it is cognitively and motivationally ready for the challenges offered by the school. At the same time, the requirements at school are fitted to the particular age of the children; shorter days and easier tasks at younger ages, longer school days and more difficult tasks later on. In the normal child one only sees one line of development, because the two lines of development – biological and social – coincide and merge one into the other (Vygotsky, 1993). But this might not be the case for the child with a neurobiologically based developmental disorder, because the physical world and the social institutions are first and foremost intended for children with normal neurobiological constitutions. What is seen is an incongruence between biologically based abilities and the structure of the social institutions, an incongruence which completely reorganises the development of the child (Vygotsky, 1993). Still, the presence of a congenital brain lesion does not need to be regarded as an invariant determinant of the child’s activities and actions, even though this conception is often found in the literature on children with brain lesions. Through the concept of neurobiological constraints, I will unfold an understanding of how children with lesions to their brains change and develop actively in and with the changing demands and possibilities in the social settings similar to the way normal children do, even though their conditions for doing so are different. The aim of this chapter is to present an understanding of how the childhood of a particular child, typical or atypical, is constructed from the dialectic relations between neurobiological constraints and local cultural-historical institutional practices. As such it is an integration of theories of neurobiological development in a cultural-historical framework of understanding children and child development.
