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Childhood

DOI: 10.1177/0907568206059977 2006; 13; 127 Childhood

Michel Vandenbroeck and Maria Bouverne-De Bie Children’s Agency and Educational Norms: A tensed negotiation

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Introduction and theoretical framings

In recent decades, many scholars have focused on children’s agency. Theyplead to view children as competent social actors (e.g. James and Prout,1997; James et al., 1998; Wyness, 2000) and to reconsider social researchfrom this perspective (e.g. Christensen and Prout, 2002; Mayall, 2002). Inaddition, this vein of academic work, sometimes labelled a ‘new sociologyof childhood’, has inspired political action through the children’s rightsmovement, action research and policy research in the field of education, aswell as pedagogical action and even parental advice internationally, as wellas in Belgium (Verhellen, 1994). In many respects, this paradigm shift canbe viewed as a ‘step forward’, giving voices and visibility to a group in soci-ety that for centuries has been silenced, only on the basis of age as a discrim-inatory classification. However, the way concepts of children as actors andof children’s rights are implemented in the educational field has recentlybecome the subject of critical articles. In the Norwegian case, Kjørholt

127

CHILDREN’S AGENCY AND EDUCATIONALNORMS

A tensed negotiation

MICHEL VANDENBROECK ANDMARIA BOUVERNE-DE BIE

Ghent University

Key words:Belgium, child participation, children’s

agency, discourse, late modernity

Mailing address:Michel Vandenbroeck

Department of Social Welfare Studies,Ghent University, Dunantlaan 2, B-9000

Gent, Belgium.[email:

Michel.Vandenbroeck@UGent.be]

Childhood Copyright © 2006SAGE Publications. London, Thousand Oaks

and New Delhi, Vol 13(1): 127–143.www.sagepublications.com

10.1177/0907568206059977

‘Children as social actors’ and ‘children’s

participation’ are key concepts in present-day

discourse and form a significant paradigm shift for

the educational sciences, inspired by sociology of

childhood. Some critical comments can however be

made on how these concepts are transcribed into

practice. A historical perspective, connecting the

micro and the macro level, investigates how the

new paradigm may be linked to discursive fields

related to neoliberalism and its specific shifts in

governmentality. These critical comments are

inspired by a historical research into 150 years of

governing children and families in Belgium. The

discussion is necessary in order to evaluate whether

and how the inclusive discourse on children can in

turn exclude specific groups of children and adults

in late modernity.

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(2002), for instance, documents the interrelatedness between constructionsof childhood and the discourse on sustainable local communities in Norwayin the 1990s. Jans (2004) in turn links the concept of active citizenship togeneral shifts such as globalization and the risk society, however somewhatneglecting the political and socioeconomic aspects of the welfare state. It isnecessary to look critically at the new paradigm, since it risks being imple-mented as a new ‘doxa’ (Bourdieu, 2001) for pedagogy. This could implythat the initial ethical standpoint, wishing to give a voice to children, is atrisk, since the new pedagogy of participation may very well be silencingspecific groups of children and their parents. This article wishes to con-tribute to this recent critical discussion by examining how the concepts ofchildren’s participation, children’s rights and ‘agency’ may be troubled asdiscursive regimes. As Wyness (1999) explains, recent work within thesocial sciences has tried to conceptualize children’s social relations in termsof the notion of agency. Certain abilities and competencies are attributed tochildren in such a way that they are recognized as influential participantswithin a variety of social contexts. We can, according to him, distinguishtwo broad theoretical approaches to the childhood-as-agent theme: thosewho identify agency by positioning children in their own contexts and lookat the micro level of peer interactions; and those who locate children withinthe broader (macro) social structure and are more interested in the systematicdenial of this agency. The emphasis of the former is on identifying agencythrough the analysis of small-scale interactions and settings which act likemicro-societies, what is labelled by Wyness (1996, 2000) as the Tribal Child.The latter reconciles the notion of agency with theories of power and socialinequality. In this view, children are positioned as an exploited and inferiorsocial group. Some authors see children as a separate social class exploitedby a superior adult class (Oldman, 1994, cited in Wyness, 1999); some usegeneration in this vein as a concept close to gender in feminist critical work(Mayall, 2002), expressing how the construction of generation entails a spe-cific ‘Othering the other’. In some of this research, the concern with thesocial status of childhood (macro) is enacted precisely in micro-studies (e.g.Mayall, 2002). In this context, the concept of agency can be linked to theconcept of subpolitics elaborated by Lash (1994), as opposed to ‘structure’.His reflexive modernization thesis assumes the progressive freeing ofagency from structure. We should be careful with such a ‘progressive’ con-clusion, because, as Wyness (1996) argues, it may not simply be a questionof greater or lesser state intervention or, for that matter, more or less autono-my. In our view it seems necessary to integrate both ‘macro’ and ‘micro’approaches and examine the possibilities of how they may be interconnect-ed. This approach makes it necessary to integrate both an objectivist and per-spectivist or subjectivist vision, as Bourdieu (1984) states. The objectivistvision looks at society as social physics, i.e. as a social structure that can beobserved from outside, that can be measured and mapped out. The pitfall of

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this vision obviously is that the map is often mistaken for reality. The struc-tures constructed by the researcher may in that case be represented as if theywere reality, capable of acting instead of historical actors. To avoid thisreductionism, one needs to also take into account the perspective of theactors as being fully part of the social world. The subjectivist vision looks atthe objectivity of the second degree and therefore considers the social realityas a fragile and continuous realization of competent actors constructing theirsocial world (Bourdieu, 1984, 2001; Wacquant, 1992). This perspective canbe seen as a plea to research how discourse is transcribed into practice, or toput it in a Foucauldian way: to look at both discourses and techniques.

History of the present

The critical comments proposed are informed by a history-of-the-presentresearch on childcare in Belgium, recently conducted as a PhD research. Theresearch is a textual analysis of a vast corpus of texts from the first daycarecentres in 1845 to the present, looking at constructions of childhood, parent-hood and childcare and with a particular focus on the relations between thestate and families, and thus on the ‘governing’ of children. The researchlooked not only into the field of childcare, but also into adjacent fieldsincluding political and socioeconomic discourse (the macro level) and at sci-entific discourses, because education needs to be understood in its social andpolitical context (Cunningham, 1995) with its local, as well as global influ-ences (Popkewitz, 2000). Science in this respect is a central theme. Thequestion, however, is not whether a particular corpus of scientific workreveals truth about children or whether it can or should be falsified. It is, onthe contrary, how this corpus of scientific work influences dominant dis-courses; how it is influenced by them; and how the discourse – with the sta-tus and power of science – becomes dominant, or remains marginal. Sciencethus is always viewed in the context of power. As Popkewitz (1996) claims,the technology of power is a dimension of pedagogy, linking political ratio-nalities to autonomous self-examination, self-reflection and self-care of theindividual. As a result, the focus lies not on what leading scientists (such asBowlby, Bronfenbrenner or James) have said and written, nor in a textualanalysis of their documents. It is more interesting to look at how they areread, understood and rewritten; how their work – through its vulgarization,rather than through the original research – has influenced ideas and practicesof childcare. This does exclude any appreciation of the original work, letalone of the intention of the scholars quoted. The interest is merely on theeffect of their work, the ‘power by effect’, following the guidelines ofBourdieu, whose economy of practices is never meant as a description ofintentions, nor is utilitarian. He is quite opposed to the obsession with finali-ties of those who think that human behaviour is to be reduced to the volun-tary choices of the individual (Wacquant, 1992). The corpus of texts that

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informed the research consequently includes policy and administration texts,popular dissemination texts for early childhood teachers, internal regula-tions, local research in Flanders, etc. Furthermore, the study had a specialinterest in how international scientific research was vulgarized and trans-formed into popular texts and ‘folk pedagogy’ in a given historical, social,cultural, economical and eminently political context. This is of particularinterest since ‘changes in emphasis in the advice books may be a symptomand a reflection of changes in practice’, as Cunningham (1995: 3) has stated.In short, the research looked at global and local sociological aspects as wellas at how they are interconnected to the intimacy of the daily life of childrenand families, with a particular attention to the childcare field as an exampleof an institutional meeting place of the public and the private domains.

In this article, we look at how the ‘new paradigm’ of children’s agencyis transcribed into practice from a family point of view. This article can beread as a plea to recontextualize constructions of childhood in relation todevelopments in the societal context. We argue that the dichotomist thinkingon power relations between children and adults masks forms of exclusionamong children and adults, as both may be embedded in regimes of truththat favour white, middle-class educational practices. We finally argue thatthis is leading to a new regime of truth since the 1970s that may run parallelwith changes in discourses on the macro level, regarding globalization ingeneral and neoliberalism in particular. We analyse this in the case ofBelgium, but also connect it with similar work by international scholars. Wewish to contribute in this way to an important discussion, while believingthat historicizing educational problems can open a window of possibilities.We believe these discussions are critical if we wish the academic discourseto contribute to the emancipation and participation of silenced groups from asocial justice point of view. Indeed, as Foucault (1984) said, the role of theintellectual, hence of the academic debate, is to cast doubts on the taken-for-granted assumptions to broaden the repertoire of the possible.

The dustbin of history

James et al. (1998: 9) use the term ‘presociological child’ to signify a spa-cious category containing ‘the dustbin of history’. It summarizes differentconstructions of childhood in previous centuries, silencing children as asocial group. In general terms, this enumeration corresponds with analysisby Hendrick (1997) or Cunningham (1995). My own historical researchleads to similar conclusions. In the 19th century, children were predominant-ly perceived as fragile and in need of protection, in a context of industrial-ization and urbanization, poverty, child mortality and the abolition of childlabour. Science, it was generally believed, would contribute to save the childand the nation through the child, in a eugenic context and legitimized bywhat Bourdieu (2001) has called the ‘mathématisation’ of science. Since the

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clearly residual function of the Belgian state in the late 19th and early 20thcenturies – a very liberal concept of the welfare state, according to the typol-ogy of Esping-Andersen (1990) – a leading role was taken up by private,philanthropic organizations, very much in line with the findings ofCunningham (1995) in other countries. The construction of the Fragile Child(the child at risk) was closely interconnected with the construction of theResponsible Mother with a dual responsibility: towards her child, as well astowards society. While the mother was idealized and the ‘monomatric’ fami-ly became the norm, labour-class mothers were subject to a declining confi-dence by the bourgeois philanthropic institutions, as well as by the state. Inofficial reports, child mortality in early 20th-century Belgium was neverexplained by the social context or the precarious living conditions, but ratherattributed to the neglect and the ignorance of labour-class mothers. It is aclear example of how discourses on the macro level are connected to theintimacy of daily life. First a social phenomenon (i.e. child mortality) isdepicted as a social ‘problem’, in the economic context of industrializationthat enhances the value of physical health (Foucault, 1975). Subsequently,the social problem is transformed into an educational problem and thus indi-vidualized. Consequently the parent (i.e. the mother) is constructed as inade-quate and finally this constructs the child as an object of intervention, bring-ing about a comprehensive ‘machine’ (Deleuze, 1986) for the civilization ofthe family (infant consultations and childcare centres). It is to be noticed thatthe official labelling of the childcare centre in early 20th-century Belgium asa ‘necessary evil’ for a specific target group (labour-class mothers) is signifi-cant for this approach. This decontextualization of children and the subse-quent responsibilization of their families bear striking resemblances withpresent-day discourses from the World Bank of the South, as analysed byPenn (2002).

The context of childrearing and the living conditions of childrenchanged dramatically after the Second World War. Better life conditions andthe subsequent drop of child mortality jeopardized the legitimacy of the pre-viously described interventions of the state in family life. The rise of psycho-logical science in general, and of attachment and developmental psychologyin particular, provided a renewed legitimacy to these actions that wouldensure the salvation of working-class children, by informing their (ignorant)mothers of the new scientific insights (Burman, 1994; Canella, 1997).Further developments in quantitative psychology (i.e. the evolution of devel-opmental tests) not only reinforced the construction of the fragile child atrisk and the responsible mother, but moulded this fragile child into a pre-dictable and public child. The discussion in the 1970s on the failing resultsof compensation programmes in the late 1960s (such as Head Start and HighScope) followed a similar path to the discussion on child mortality half acentury ago. The social problem defined (i.e. the failure of labour-class chil-dren in school) is spoken of as an educational problem, that reinforces the

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monomatric model of the family and enacted a re-culpabilization of themother (McGurck et al., 1993; Singer, 1993). Another continuity is the mod-ernistic belief in (vulgarized) science as core to the salvation of children andits contribution to the disenchantment (from Weber ’s concept ofEntzauberung) of children (Dekker, 2002). Examples in the Belgian case arethe introduction of developmental observation instruments in childcare,leading to a construction of the preschool teacher as a technician; the large-scale in-service training and consequent transformation of infant consulta-tion staff in order to enable them to ‘educate’ the labour-class mothers withthe new insights on developmental stages; or the subsequent labelling ofnewly arrived ethnic minority parents as responsible for the ‘mental retarda-tion’ of their children (Vandenbroeck, 2004).

As many scholars have pointed out, the discursive regimes describedhave silenced children in research as well as in policy. To some, this is exact-ly why this image of the vulnerable child is so appealing politically(Stephens, 1997). It is also clear, however, how these discursive regimeshave silenced specific groups of adults as parents. Constructions of child-hood are indeed closely interconnected with constructions of parenthood, butnot in a simple antagonistic way and one should be extremely careful whenopposing children and parents from a power relations point of view on themacro level. Historical research shows that power relations are much morediffuse and ‘diagonal’, as Foucault (1990) and Deleuze (1986) claimed.Antagonistic power relations between children and parents are, after all, alsopart of a specific discursive regime with similar decontextualizing and natu-ralizing aspects. My historical research shows how this antagonism was pre-cisely constructed in the early 20th century, and functioned as a legitimacyfor the state to take over parental responsibilities for the sake of the child(Vandenbroeck, 2003). Analysis and research from Burman (1994), Canella(1997) and others show that parents as well as children are marginalizedalong the lines of class and gender, and that power is constructed over themby expert knowledge in the field of education.

Late modernity and the autonomous child

Many researchers have documented the profound societal changes that markthe turn of the century and which are labelled as globalization (Beck,1997a), the post-traditional society (Giddens, 1994) or late modernity (Beck,1994; Lash, 1994). Globalization opens nation-states and societies to manyinfluences that originate beyond their borders. These changes affect theeveryday context in which children grow up and some of the impacts ofglobalization on children are therefore normative (Rizzini and Bush, 2002).In this context, the prevalence of economics in the political discourse(including employment as a top priority) occurs at the same time that nation-states have less impact on their national economies. As a result of this per-

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ceived loss of control, economic aspects tend to dominate all other aspectsof policy, including the social agenda. This trend is sometimes labelled themarketization of the social field (Masschelein and Simons, 2002). A secondnote is on the anthropological shock, as described by Beck (1997b), usingthe Chernobyl disaster as a significant example, resulting in ecologicalissues ranking high in the public and political debate at the same time –again – that nation-states are less capable of controlling these human-maderisks. Both trends have contributed to a plea for a smaller state. A tendencytowards a neoliberal policy has been documented in the educational field indifferent countries. To name but a few examples: in Central Europe, interna-tional organizations such as the World Bank and the EU have influenced adiscourse on ‘professional mothering’ and ‘freedom of choice’ that hasunderpinned a policy of privatization and reduction of public services foryoung children (Bloch and Blessing, 2000). In Sweden, the traditionalFolkhemmet (‘people’s home’) have been reorganized towards a more mar-ket-oriented provision (Dahlberg, 2000). Neoliberal policy has emphasizededucational outcomes such as autonomy rather than interdependence (Moss,2003) and contributed to a ‘pedagogicalization’ of parents (Popkewitz,2003a). In short, globalization/regionalization has led to a neoliberal policyregarding children and families, including aspects such as privatization,deregulation/‘responsabilization’ and decentralization. However there is nosuch thing as a global influence of globalization, since the effects may be avery local ‘hybridization’ according to the specific historical, social, culturaland economical context (Bloch, 2003). In the case of Flanders (Belgium),globalization was contingent with a far-reaching privatization of childcareservices and with significant changes in the quality discourse favouring self-assessment of social services and managerial concepts such as customer sat-isfaction (Vandenbroeck, in press).

On actual society, Cunningham (1995: 3) notes:

Adults portray the world external to the home as full of danger, and seek corre-spondingly to protect their children by denying them autonomy. At the sametime, their confidence in their own authority has been weakened by a variety offactors – commercial, legal, psychological – which make it difficult to carry outthat protection as they would wish to. The result is that, to a much greater extentthan in previous centuries, child-rearing has become a matter of negotiationbetween parents and child, with the state and other agencies monitoring andinspecting the process. In this process, ideas about childhood exist in the publicdomain act as a framework, within which adults and children work out ways ofliving. (Cunningham, 1995: 190)

With him, many scholars have documented the shift towards negotia-tion as the dominant culture within the family (Beck and Beck, 1995; Beck,1997c; Bouverne-De Bie, 1997; Du Bois-Raymond, 2001; Du Bois-Raymond et al., 1992). Negotiation has become the norm for relationshipsbetween partners as well as between parents and children. Since biographiesare removed from the traditional precepts and certainties, from external con-

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trol and general moral laws, they become more open and dependent on deci-sion-making and are assigned as a task for each individual (Beck and Beck,1995). This also alters the relations between adults and children. Children, insome respects then, are less likely to be differentiated from adults, asWyness (1996) explains. For some, this social flux produces an anxietyabout the erosion of childhood. For others, the social flux means greateropportunities for adults and children as they become less constrained bywhat are seen to be arbitrary boundaries such as class, gender and genera-tion. Adults and children still maintain a need for attachments and moral ref-erence points, but these have become more fluid and negotiable. Therefore,some scholars in the educational field have attempted to replace this imageof the weak child by a new one, such as Dahlberg et al. (1999), when theyquote the influential Loris Malaguzzi claiming an image of the child that isrich in potential, strong, powerful, competent and, most of all, connected toadults and other children. A shallow reading of this vein of work may lead tothe statement that a page in history is turned, that postmodernism has forgeda breach, eventually making place for the right of self-determination of chil-dren (e.g. van den Bergh, 2003), for the ‘liberation of childhood’ (Hengst,2001, cited in Jans, 2004), or the often quoted and misquoted ‘disappearanceof childhood’ (Postman, 1982). This could indeed lead to a most modernisticlecture of (postmodern) history. It may, however, be fruitful to look at theautonomous child or the child as competent social actor as just another his-torical construction of childhood, inextricably tied up with new emergingconstructions of parenthood, as well as with the specific economic, sociocul-tural and political context. Let us therefore look more closely at possiblerelations between the more global structures and this ‘agency’. Such a per-spective enables us to look at changes as well as continuities, for instancethe continuity in the way children and parents are decontextualized andpower relations in the field of education are operating.

The autonomous child and the entrepreneurial parent

Poststructuralist researchers such as Tobin (1995) and Canella (1997) haveclaimed that the pedagogical focus on the autonomous child and its attentionto self-expression are typically linked to the liberal, free market orientedsociety in need of autonomous, entrepreneurial individuals. Self-expressionand individuality ranking higher on the educational agenda than solidarity israther a social and historical construction than a universal, given hierarchy,as cross-cultural ethnographic research in early childhood education shows(Tobin et al., 1989). Follow-up studies to his famous ‘preschool in three cul-tures’ research show that changes in economy and politics indeed affect con-structions of childhood and that these changes go in the direction ofautonomous individuals to the detriment of educational values such as inter-connectedness (Hsueh and Tobin, 2003; Tobin et al., 2004). Burman (1997)

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shows that the attention on the autonomous child is to be linked with therational, unitary subject that is so central in psychology because it is the self-regulating, responsible citizen in late industrialized society. Rose (2000)agrees by stating that the language of self-realization is that of a therapeuticindividualism. He sees a trend to individualize social phenomena inGiddens’s Third Way, linked to neoliberalism in international economy and anaive enthusiasm for the mantras of managerial gurus.

The history of modernity cannot simply be written in terms of growingautonomy for children or for any individual. One could, quite to the contrary,investigate whether the ‘autonomous, entrepreneurial individual’ may be theanswer that is construed in reaction to the weakened nation-states in the eraof globalization and therefore rather a change in how a specific mode ofthought and governing creates a specific form of freedom, rather than creat-ing more freedom for the child or the adult. The relationship between thestate and the individual is evolving towards a partnership built on mutualityand reciprocity, with a common sense feeling of ‘no rights without responsi-bilities’. Social services (e.g. allowances) in this context are no longer sim-ple entitlements, but entail personal responsibility and self-sufficiency on thepart of the individual. The individual is supposed to commit him or herselfto lifelong learning; and he or she is in this (Third) way partly responsiblefor the – individualized – risk of unemployment. In this vein, the positionthat Jans (2004) takes may be troubled. Jans states that lifelong and life-spread learning signify the end of schooling as the domain of the school or adomain restricted to the youth phase and he suggests that this entails grow-ing freedom. Also, his statement that ‘as long as education does not acquirethe same socio-economic status as paid labor, children as actors will fall out-side the scope of the discourse of the active welfare state’ (Jans, 2004: 31)seems to be a matter of perspective. Finally, his plea for active citizenshipcould do with some critical comments. As Popkewitz (2003a) argues, life-long learning can be seen as embodying a pattern of governing that relates tocollective rationalities and the self-governing of the active subject; and bearssimilitude with older salvation themes. Policies about the new child aremade in the name of democracy and liberty in a global world. He states thatthe redemptive language of modern pedagogy is to help children becomegood citizens, better adjusted people and active learners (Popkewitz, 2003a:37). Also, Masschelein and Simons (2002), having studied the discourse onadult education in the EU, draw the conclusion that the entrepreneurial self,as they call it, is expected to take his or her future into his or her own hands.The reverse side of the new freedom that is supposed to be created is theobligation to inform oneself of different possibilities, to balance them in acost-effect analysis and to take the rational decisions about the best possibleinvestment (in children, in education, etc.) for the future. In this sense, thediscourse on autonomy of adults and children constructs a responsible citi-zen, including individual responsibility over his or her lifelong learning

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course, his or her own employment and social integration. In short, the con-struction of the autonomous child/adult may be another example of how asocial problem (unemployment) is reinscribed as an educational problemand subsequently individualized.

We can understand this shift of governmentality, making use ofFoucault’s work on pastoral power and the hermeneutics of the self. Pastoralpower, he explains, is a power exerted by pastoral kindness, close to devot-edness. Everything the shepherd does is geared to the good of his flock; hissheep are his constant concern. Foucault (1990, 2001) argues that the suc-cessful role of the pastor necessitates that he knows what goes on in eachindividual’s mind. Therefore, his flock needs to engage in introspection, aswell as public ‘confession’ of this introspection. In other words, explanationof oneself/one’s self, revelation of what one is. These are necessary condi-tions for the pastor to ‘govern’, and for the individual to achieve ‘redemp-tion’. In this sense, it would be naive to think in terms of abolition of powerrelations or of growth of freedom, and we would rather consider evolutionsin how power relations occur. Indeed, as Foucault (1993) stated: governingpeople is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it isalways a versatile equilibrium, with complementarities and conflictsbetween techniques assuring coercion and processes through which the selfis constructed or modified by the self. Active citizenship can be seen as anempowering concept giving a voice to children, but it can also be consideredas a technique assuring coercion or as a strategy that governs at a distancethrough the art of self-examination. It can, finally, be seen as an example ofan inclusive policy that excludes.

Negotiation as the educational norm

Earlier in this article, Cunningham was quoted where he explains that nego-tiation between parents and children is becoming the new norm, with thestate and other agencies monitoring the process. Wyness (1996) also claimsthat parents are now more subject to external scrutiny of their childrearingobligations. As a matter of fact, research commissioned by governmentsclosely monitors negotiation within families. In the early 1990s, for instance,Du Bois-Raymond et al. (1992) studied negotiation in families under theauthority of a Dutch governmental organization. Similar ethnographicresearch was undertaken in the same period in several Scandinavian coun-tries, also in close connection with government (Langsted and Haavind,1993). In 1999, the Flemish (Belgian) governmental organization responsi-ble for children and families produced a large survey of families on thistopic, concluding that negotiation is generally accepted as the norm for edu-cation. The vast majority of children live in families where the parents saythat they favour the child’s autonomy and that decisions are primarily takenin consultation with them (Kind en Gezin, 2002). It is not so much our inter-

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est here to know whether the majority of Flemish families do indeed negoti-ate with their children, but to note that they perceive negotiation as the edu-cational norm for them as parents. Recently, the Flemish children’s rightscommissioner ordered a large-scale study on negotiation within the family,interviewing children as well as their parents. The research looks at the‘Tribal Family’, to paraphrase Wyness. In the popular dissemination of thisresearch, the commissioner clearly depicts negotiation within the family asthe desirable norm that needs to be stimulated, as it is embedded in theUnited Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (Vandekerkhove,2003). The research findings seem to show that parents more often report tonegotiate with their children (on subjects such as holidays, television, cloth-ing, leisure time, etc.), than their children do. The researchers assume thatthe difference in opinion is due to an overestimation by the parents and notby an underestimation on the part of the children (De Rijcke, 2003),although no field observations have been carried out to sustain this assump-tion. They conclude that parents have certain problems and hesitations abouttheir education in the family and that they are in need of parent support pro-grammes (De Rijcke, 2003).

So what?

In many of the publications around this issue, negotiation is depicted as theultimate ‘good’. Often this is explicit by the use of typologies of parenting,using labels such as authoritarian (which bears clearly negative connota-tions) and the more positive sounding ‘authoritative’ label for negotiatingparents (Du Bois-Raymond et al., 1992). The normative aspect is also madeexplicit by linking negotiation to the child’s development (Du Bois-Raymond et al., 1992; De Rijcke, 2003) and even to explicit developmentaloutcomes in adulthood such as well-being and autonomy (De Rijcke, 2003).Negotiation is desirable for the experts and this is the case, regardless of thesocial, cultural, economic and other context of the family. Negotiation as aneducational norm, however, places children in a normative system favouringindividuality, as well as verbal competences to manifest this individuality.Cross-cultural research has shown that other forms of interaction, forinstance verbalizing feelings less explicitly but expressing them throughvariations in intonation and the use of swearing, can be more accurate andfunctional in specific sociocultural contexts (Tobin, 1995). This and otherresearch, including on how children deal with peer conflicts (Göncü andCanella, 1996), indicate that dominant ideas about negotiation as the educa-tional norm are cultural constructions. We should be aware of the fact thatthe focus on negotiation, self-expression and verbalization of the self are awhite, western, middle-class norm. It is a discourse taught in middle-classeducational settings that is more familiar and attractive to some childrenthan to others. This makes Tobin (1995) conclude that the pedagogy of self-

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expression works to privilege an already privileged group of children. In thissense, there may be a continuity in the history of childhood, namely thatmiddle-class values and norms are decontextualized and naturalized, andconsequently perceived to be universally ‘good for children’.

‘The identification of childhood as an area for state policy was accom-panied and to some extent caused by a declining confidence in the family’(Cunningham (1995: 152). Cunningham wrote this sentence when dis-cussing policy in the 19th century. Yet, when looking at how negotiation inthe families is closely monitored and present-day adults are suspected to failon behalf of respect for the child’s autonomy, we can only but observe aremarkable continuity. As far back as the 1970s, there was a growing num-ber of publications advocating an interest-based negotiation between parentsand children and yet, at the same time, suspecting parents to fail in this task.One of the most widespread examples are the books in which ThomasGordon vulgarized his Parents’ Effectiveness Training. The Dutch languageversion of his Listening to Children, for instance, was first published in1976. By 1980, it was already in its sixth edition; it was re-edited for the20th time in 1998 and today is still the object of many lectures and parentaltrainings (Wubs, 2004). On its back cover it states that parents unavoidablymake mistakes. Thanks to Dr Thomas Gordon we can now prevent thesemistakes from growing problematically into severe disturbances ofparent–child relationships, teenage rebellion, juvenile delinquency, etc. Thekey to salvation is – according to the back cover – our willingness to learnfrom our mistakes (Gordon, 1976). We could view this discourse as a newformat for a much older paradigm, namely ‘governing development and thenormal children and families’ (Bloch, 2003: 225). Necessary conditions tobe a good negotiator are openness and honesty, as Beck and Beck (1995)point out; and therefore self-decipherment will be our destiny. This self-examination of the lay person (parent) calls for a dialogue with the expert,similar to a public confession, construing a specific (pastoral) power relationbetween parents and children marked by reciprocity in their mutual depen-dency.

In the introduction, we expressed the interest in possible connectionsof constructions of childhood and parenthood with the wider political andsocial structures. In subsequent paragraphs, it was explained how the focuson children’s (psychological) agency and negotiation as the educationalnorm may be intertwined with globalization, neoliberalization and newlyemerging concepts of the welfare state in which social problems tend to beeducationalized and individualized. Interest-based negotiation is perceivedto be a preparation for the adult’s life in modern democracy, as the Flemishchildren’s rights commissioner’s research explicitly states (De Rijcke, 2003),favouring individual autonomy over interdependency. We can thereforeagree with Jans’s (2004) conclusions that children-sized citizenship needssome reconstruction, but it seems to be necessary to do so in a contextual-

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ized way, taking into account intercultural differences in meaning-making aswell as political and socioeconomic contexts.

Discussion

Sharon Stephens (1995) stated that the construction of the participating childseems to be embedded in complex economic and cultural changes in latemodern societies. Kjørholt (2004) examines this in contemporary Norwayand shows how the discourse on children as active participants is related todiscourses on sustainable local communities. Jans, in turn, looks at relationswith formal education, schooling and lifelong learning. Scholars in this fieldagree upon the need for emancipatory pedagogy where children’s voices aretaken seriously. However, some evolutions in discourse and practice showthat this vein of research and of research-related practice may also be silenc-ing specific groups. In much of this research (including the Flemish researchquoted) children are constructed as a separate but homogeneous category,masking age, gender, ethnic or cultural dimensions or inequalities, andassuming all children would benefit from the ‘authoritative’ approach, whichstill remains to be proven.

It seems to be fruitful not to study constructions of childhood withoutlooking at their mirror image: constructions of parenthood. It also seemsnecessary to look at micro-interactions in connection to the social, economicand political embeddings of these interactions. In doing so, we can becomeaware of the risks of decontextualization, marginalizing specific groups ofchildren and parents, reducing them to objects of intervention, rather thanseeing them as meaning-makers in the educational debate. Indeed,adult–child negotiation as a practice is not problematic at all, but as a decon-textualized norm, it may become just another civilizing process. It may, inthat case, just add a new strophe to the old song saying that ‘If they becamemore like us, that would be better for them and for us’. Recontextualizingchildren’s agency may include looking at inequalities in the conditions fornegotiation; as well as acknowledging that agency may take different formsin different contexts. After all, social changes, such as modernization, cantake very different and concurrent forms in families, as Hareven (2000)showed in her historical research.

It is also clear that taking children’s agency into account does not auto-matically enable us to escape from what Kjørholt (2004) calls the socializa-tion paradigm. We have focused on this paradigm in the context of theneoliberal late modern society in need of autonomous, independent andentrepreneurial individuals for the welfare state of the Third Way. However,we should be careful in connecting the educational work with the politicalfield in an overly simple way. Education cannot be reduced to politics. Weshould indeed be careful, as Bourdieu (cited in Wacquant, 1992) explains,not to view power as a conspiracy between science and the state. It would

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lead to short-circuiting if we tried to directly connect such distant conceptsas cultural products and the economic, social and political conditions of thatmoment or of the social class by which or for which the cultural products areproduced. It would thus be too simplistic to explain children’s agency as aconcept merely by drawing a straight line from globalization and neoliberalpolicy to sociological research. Nevertheless, we can conclude that these‘new’ constructions of childhood and parenthood as well as the constructionof education are contingent on certain conditions and assumptions and con-stituted in a particular sociopolitical context (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005).

It seems, therefore, wise to study the autonomous child not as a breachin history or as a page turned, but, on the contrary, as another historical con-struction and a dominant discursive regime that expands the repertoire of thepossible as much as it narrows it down. The analysis may also indicate thatlooking at children as a separate category – in contrast to adults – may leadto a better understanding and recognition for children, but may at the sametime mask some communalities in how specific groups of children and theirparents are marginalized. As Grover (2004) rightly points out, power rela-tions are indeed a central focus point. We should be aware that researchingconstructions of childhood and parenthood as inextricably bound togetheralso allows us to show that power relations are not to be merely reduced to achild–adult dichotomy. On the contrary, the analysis of agency on the psy-chological level may benefit from a structural point of view, just as the struc-tural analysis needs to take the personal agency into account. This can beunderstood as a plea for reflexivity in the sense Bourdieu endorsed and thatcan be applied to any science, including the sociology of childhood. Thisreflexivity seems to be crucial since ‘the best interest of the child’ is tooimportant a matter to be dominated by taken for granted assumptions.

Note

A special thanks goes to the Bernard Van Leer Foundation for supporting the research.

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