S1 E1: Displacing Child Development
Hello. I am Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw, and this is Rethinking Childhoods. This is the first episode of Rethinking Childhoods, and today I want to talk about displacing child development.
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I want to think about What if childhood as an idea? What if childhood is a discourse? Just a concept? I want to begin to trouble this romantic notion of childhood that we have. The idea that childhood is an innocent stage that needs to be completely protected from the world.
The variability of conceptions of childhood is vividly expressed by the myriad disciplines that study childhood. What is emphasized about childhood differs slightly across disciplines and theoretical frameworks. We might think about childhood sociologically and study their role in society. We don’t all understand childhoods in the same way.
We might think about childhood sociologically and study children’s role in society. Or we might study it anthropologically and focus on how children in different cultures and contexts live their daily lives. We might even think about childhood from a historical perspective, and ask questions such as: When has the idea of childhood being created? How have children been thought of throughout various time periods? What bodies of knowledge have contributed to the construction of the idea of childhood? Geographers also tell us about the complex relationships between place and childhood. And I can keep going…. Architecture, Archaeology, Gender Studies are all disciplines that have contributed to the study of childhood. We also have the field of childhood studies that emerged in the 1980s…
How childhood is understood affects children’s daily lives by influencing, for example, child-rearing norms, schooling, a wide range of scientific “truths” that have been created around children, and the role that children play in society. Even if you think about it, it affects children’s physical capacity to attend school. It also affects how we organize education, their daily activities, and even what they are allowed to do to learn and to think.
The meaning of the concept of childhood constantly shifts based on time, space, beliefs, and social needs. For example, right now in the pandemic we have been thinking about how to rethink our conception of childhoods. Childhood is also experienced and thought of differently across categories of race, ethnicity, religion, social class, gender, and sexuality. What the stage of childhood encompasses is highly debated in practice and scholarly circles. Childhood might denote innocence, vulnerability, and purity, but it also might serve to highlight the notion that children are political subjects with agency who actively participate in making worlds.
You might then think, why is it that in early childhood education we don’t think too much about this conception of childhood. We all have already an understand of what childhood it. We all come into early childhood education thinking that we know the child, what children need. What if we don’t know? What if what we do know about early childhood education is that it has been dominated by developmental psychology? That our understandings of childhoods have been simply defined by developmental psychology? I am referring to the idea of childhood as a stage of life and different in nature from adults and therefore requiring careful scrutiny. Education in Western society – to be more precise in North America – has inherited ‘the developmental child’.
Think about the many developmental ideas of childhood that early education supports: the normal child, the school ready child, the healthy child, the self-regulated child, the well-adjusted child, the autonomous child, and even the always happy child. We pride ourselves of knowing a child developmentally. We call ourselves child development experts. We ‘educate’ families how to become ‘good’ parents by supporting children’s development. We constantly tell ourselves and others about the importance of a child’s first years without even thinking about how this idea has been constructed.
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My proposal today is that we thinking about these questions and we begin to recognize the dominance of developmental psychology in early childhood education. And to do that, let’s talk a little bit about the work that psychologist Erica Burman has done.
She wrote the first edition of Deconstructing Developmental Psychology in 1994, and this edition was then followed by the 2008 edition and then by a 2017 edition. And I always wonder how could it be that with all this work that has been done around destructing developmental psychology that early childhood education has paid so little attention to this work. And although I do not want to simplify the answer to his question, I want to invite all of you to think about why is it that developmental psychology has such a strong grip on what we do in early childhood education. And perhaps begin to think about the implication of early childhood education in the process of nation building. The very close relationship between early childhood education and developmental psychology needs to be understood within the project of government. Psychological discourses in general have provided the knowledge and techniques to produce individuals whose behaviors confirm with political objectives, as Erica Burman tells us. Young children became the instruments through which the creation of, for example, self-regulated independent autonomous individuals could be realized. And early childhood education is the space where all of these processes can take place. Early childhood education is the space where children become objects to be known and administered. Young children’s appetites, emotions and attitudes are conceptualized and distinguished in accordance with scientific rules. Procedures of government have been invented which ordered young children’s social and physical spaces in early childhood education with the purpose of creating individuals able to govern themselves. Perhaps we need to consider the invitation of Erica Burman to think of early childhood education where the rational organization of childhood takes place.
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Let’s spend a bit of time thinking about how child development has emerged within the context of Canada. And I want to think here with the work of Canadian historians such as Donna Varga who has written about the child study movement that began around 1920s in Canada. And she calls this period the rationalization of child development. Varga says that interest in child development emerged from the results of medical and psychological testing during the First World War. And these tests showed that many young men were psychologically maladjusted, like she writes. And one of the conclusions drawn from the results of the testing was that the existing child-rearing practices were inappropriate for creating well-adjusted individuals. Of course this concentration on child-rearing practices is not surprising given that environmental explanations of social problems emphasized prevention in the area of mental health as an important element of psychological discourse. What I want to emphasize here is that it is at this moment in time that children became an important element of psychological discourses in Canada.
The child study movement of the 1920s was mainly promoted through private funds, one of which was the wealthy and instrumental Laura Spelman-Rockefeller Memorial. The Memorial was established to provide funding for child welfare projects that, as Varga tells us, were designed to have an immediate as well as a long-term impact on the lives of children. The Memorial was instrumental in combining the research in child development and parent education. These funds were directed towards the development of model child study institutions that included nursery schools. In the 1920s several of these institutions were created such as the Iowa Research Station, the Yale Psych Clinic, that was under the direction of Arnold Gesell the Institute of Child Welfare Research at Teachers’ College Columbia University. And what is relevant for us here is the St. George’s School of Child Study at the University of Toronto and the McGill University Nursery School and Child Laboratory. The St. George’s School of Child Study at the University of Toronto was organized as a section of the department of psychology in 1925. And Dr William Blatz, a medical doctor and psychologist, that was educated in Toronto and Chicago was named director of the Institute.
In 1938 the Institute was formally established as an independent department within the University of Toronto and its name was changed to the Institute of Child Study. This Institute was comprised of two divisions: the nursery school and the parent education department. They worked in a complimentary way to each other, int hat the practices of the nursery school were expected to be adopted by the parents of the children attending the program. The nursery school was organized so that children’s behaviors could be observed through the controlled and manipulated environment, and the parent education division was created so that the Institute could understand children’s behaviors in home situations and to provide parents with current child development information. Now I’m sure that all of this is becoming very familiar right now as to how early childhood education institutions are ran today within the context of Canada. The nursery schools were described at that point as “appropriate” for the psychological development of young children. And these nursery schools became extremely popular among professionals in the areas of psychology, social work, and medicine.
I encourage you to read a little bit more about the work that the Institute has done within Canada. Historians have documented the practices of the Institute through the analysis of its curriculum and organization of children’s routines. They have documented the role of the Institute in shaping childcare views in Canada during the 20th century. Skepticism among some parents and professionals around the practices advocated by the Institute have also been recorded, particularly its role in shaping the lives of Dionne quintuplets after the 1930s.
And I encourage you to read about the Institute of Child Development at the University of Toronto and about the lives of the Dionne quintuplets not necessarily to inform ourselves about the history and think about these ideas as if they happened in the past and now we are better off, or now we have progressed to a better understanding of childhood. Instead, I encourage you to read and view this information to think about how our present conditions have been created. It is not by chance that today we think about the child in the ways in which we think about children. It is not by chance that today child development is the main body of knowledge of early childhood education. All of our current ways of thinking about childhood have been created in a particular way throughout history and for particular reasons. Read these texts and view these films as a way of doing a history of the present. H ow is it that child development has become such an important body of knowledge in early childhood education? What actually happened so that today early childhood educators can only think about childhood from a developmental perspective?
Keep in mind that psychological discourses normalized and regulated the practices of day nurseries as they positioned children in need of intervention. Young children attending day nurseries were placed in a marginalized position as they were perceived in need of regulations that would ensure their normal mental health through appropriate behavior guidance approaches. It is this unequal positioning and the idea that [educators of] young children within the childcare system needs psychological expertise to run a developmentally appropriate program that define today the otherness of young children within the childcare field in relation to psychology.
Also keep in mind that the otherness of young children was made possible through psychological discourses, that strove for the administration and control of young children and their families. Psychological discourses were associated with the construction of self-disciplined individuals able to govern themselves in a changing society. Through the ordering of young children’s social and physical spaces, these goals could be accomplished. And finally keep in mind that when we claim child development expertise, we are holding on to eugenics discourses, as Erica Burman reminds us, we’re holding on to racialized, classed, gendered ideas.
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To end this episode, I want to leave you with two important ideas from Erica Berman’s first chapter. And here’s the first idea that she writes (pg.25):
While hailed by some as the forum in which to resolve age-old philosophical questions about what knowledge is innate and what acquired, the emergence of modern developmental psychology was also prompted by other more pragmatic concerns to classify, measure and regulate, in particular, those populations deemed a social threat to the prevailing order.
And here is the second quote (pg.27):
..the drive towards rationality in models of development may have been a reflection of the rationalisation of capitalist processes taking place at the level of individual psyche, rather than only industrial development. The norms and milestones that have structured developmental psychology present a picture of orderly, progressive graduation through stages to ever greater competence and maturity. We can see here the modelling of an ideal-typical citizen-subject who is knowable, known, docile and productive.
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Notes from this episode are at available on our website http://3.96.195.250. You can follow me on Twitter at @/vpacinik and you also welcome to post a review of this episode.
Thank you so much for joining me this week!
This episode was recorded on the traditional lands of the Anishinaabek, Haudenosaunee, Lūnaapéewak and Attawandaron peoples, where I am grateful to live and work.
This has been Rethinking Childhoods. Enjoy the readings, and see you next week!
Readings suggestions that I mentioned in this episode:
Burman, E. (2017). Deconstructing developmental psychology (Third Edition). London: Routledge. Introduction & Chapter 1
Burman, E. (2020). Developments: Child, image, nation (Second Edition). London: Routledge. Chapter 1
Varga, D. (1997) Constructing the Child: a history of Canadian day care. Toronto: James Lorimer.
Created By: Veronica Pacini-Ketchabaw
Edited and Produced By: Jacob Ketchabaw