Producing children in the 21st century: A critical discourse analysis of the science and techniques of monitoring early child development

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to identify the implications of commonly held ideologies within theories of child development. Despite critiques to doing so, developmental theory assumes that children's bodies are unitary, natural and material. The recent explosion of neuroscience illustrates the significance of historical, social and cultural contexts to portrayals of brain development, offering the opportunity for a critical departure in thinking. Instead, this neuroscience research has been taken up in ways that align with biomedical traditions and neoliberal values. This article uses a critical discursive approach, supported by Haraway's ideas of technoscience, to analyse a population-based early child development research initiative. This initiative organises a large-scale surveillance of children's development, operating from the premise that risks to development are best captured early to optimise children's potential. The analysis in this article shows an intermingling of health and economic discourses and clarifies how the child is a figure of significant contemporary social and political interests. In a poignant example of technobiopolitics, the collusion between health research, technologies and the state enrols health professionals to participate in the production of children as subjects of social value, figured as human capital, investments in the future, or alternatively, as waste. The analysis shows how practices that participate in what has become a developmental enterprise also participate in the marginalisation of the very children they intend to serve. Hence, there is the need to rethink practices critically and move towards innovative conceptualisations of child development that hold possibilities to resist these figurations.

Image, measure, figure: a critical discourse analysis of nursing practices that develop children

“…Practices are limited by but also able to challenge social structures and meanings, which are continuously made and remade. As we describe elsewhere, Haraway's conceptualizations of figurations and technoscience align with the approach of critical discourse analysis and support a detailed analysis of how technologies of developmental science participate in the building and dismantling of ideologies of the developing child (Einboden et al ., ). The figure of the developing child is the effect of semiotic and material practices, whereby figuration describes the process by which a concept or entity is given particular form through ‘knowledge, practice, and power’ (Haraway, , p. 11).…”

Epigenetics and Politics in the Colonial Present

“…Indigenous Peoples have unceasingly refused settler-colonial dispossessions, including by demanding full control over their children as part of reclaiming lands and pushing back against territorial encroachments (Hunter, 2018;Jacobs 1992 It is in this settler-colonial milieu that we find, beginning in the early 1990s, the epigenetic style of thought coming to touch an expanse of policies and programs under the rubric of early childhood development, including by the new millennium through EDI mediations. And yet, very few critical studies have recognized the centrality of the epigenetic style of thought or considered the EDI's political and governmental import (Einboden et al 2013;Peers 2011). Apparently, with one exception (Murray 2015), almost nothing has been said about the EDI as it relates to the colonial present.…”

Can child injury prevention include healthy risk promotion?

“…Sociologists have illustrated how perceptions of childhood have transitioned over time such that children in modern society are positioned as precious and needing the highest possible degree of parents’ attention and caregiving. 22 23 These trends coincide with a move towards neoliberal political structures that shift a greater portion of the burden of responsibility for ensuring personal well-being from the state onto individuals. 24 The result is a push towards ‘intensive parenting’ where parents (primarily mothers) are encouraged to become experts on optimal parenting strategies, and child health and development so as to ensure that their children achieve their full potential.…”