Children's Emotions in Policy and Practice

Mapping and Making Spaces of Childhood

Matej Blazek, Peter Kraftl, Peter Kraftl

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137415608
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

This volume examines children's and young people's emotions in policy-making and professional practice. It seeks both to inform readers about up-to-date research and to provoke debate, encouraging and enabling critical reflections upon emotions in policy and practice, relevant to readers' own context.

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Introduction: Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice

Matej Blazek and Peter Kraftl

This edited collection focuses on children’s and young people’s (aged 0–25) emotions in policy-making and professional practice. It explores diverse kinds of policy and practice: from governmental policies to informal education, from psychotherapy to volunteering schemes. It covers multiple substantive issues: from youth offending to nature, and from military recruitment to suicide. Critically, however, given a surge in interest in emotion, affect and feeling across several social-scientific disciplines over the past decade, the book examines the many ways in which emotions matter within these diverse contexts and forms of intervention. The chapters explore diverse forms of emotion and emotion work, including: emotions experienced during the course of professional interventions; emotions underpinning and evident (or overlooked and absent) in policy-making for children; management of young people’s emotions as part of professional practice; and the use of emotion to justify particular moral or political imperatives.

Each chapter draws principally upon research by academics, taken from various international contexts and academic disciplines. Grounded in and developing recent theorisations of emotion and affect, the chapters draw upon rich, original empirical materials. The chapters also tease out ways in which emotions ‘make space’ – how emotions constitute, and are constituted by, a range of scales, places, geographical contexts, mobilities and boundaries. Finally, each chapter ends with a short bulleted list indicating key implications for policy-makers and professionals working with children and young people. They are not intended to serve as ‘recommendations’ but, rather, as pointers to critical themes for consideration by those working or engaging with children and young people.

This book examines children’s and young people’s emotions in policy-making and professional practice with children and young people. The book seeks both to inform readers about up-to-date research and to provoke debate, encouraging and enabling critical reflections upon emotions in policy/professional practices relevant to readers’ own context. It combines theoretical and empirical rigour with a clear focus on policy and/or practice relevance; most of the academics whose work is presented work (and some of them write) together with practitioners. The primary aims of the book are as follows:

• to outline and critically analyse how emotions, affects and feelings matter in policy and professional practice with children;

• to consider emotions within the diversity of forms of policy/professional practice with children and young people across several international contexts;

• to disseminate new findings and original understandings of children’s and young people’s emotions in the everyday contexts of diverse policy landscapes and professional practices;

• to develop existing theorisations of emotions in policy/professional practice contexts, drawing upon rich empirical studies of interventions aimed at children;

• to constitute an engaging resource for students and academics, as well as (trainee) professionals who work with or on behalf of children.

Institutionalising children’s emotions?

In March 2014, the British newspaper The Guardian reported on an app designed to help children aged from three to nine deal with stress (The Guardian, 2014). The app, which takes the form of a virtual world, enables children to play games and asks them to reflect upon how they are feeling. The app’s designer argues that for a variety of reasons parents are unable to communicate with their children, and that this – with a whole host of other factors, from schoolwork to the influence of social media – has led to a rising incidence of stress among even very young children. The app is intended as a ‘resilience tool’ (The Guardian, 2014, unpaginated): rather than a cure for the apparent ills of contemporary childhood, it offers strategies for dealing with stress as well as acting as a prompt for parents and children to discuss such matters together.

The app raises a number of questions about the management and institutionalisation of children’s emotions, all of which are pertinent to this book. First, it works as a reminder of long-standing concerns for childhood that are overtly emotional in nature, and which have for decades been the focus of critical scholarship by childhood studies and youth scholars. Whether expressed as a ‘crisis’ (Scraton, 2004) or in terms of the fears that adults have for children (Valentine, 1996), the app acts as a rather more contemporary reminder of the ways in which debates about childhood quickly become emotive in nature. Indeed, childhood is mobilised as a kind of ‘affect’ (Kraftl, 2008; Evans, 2010), a harbinger of society’s deepest fears for the future, and thus acts as both a prompt and a justification for a wide variety of interventions. In this case, those interventions are technological and based on fears about rising levels of stress among young children; but, as the chapters in this book demonstrate, such solutions may take the form of government policies, professionalised practices, media reportage and more. The contributors to this book do not necessarily argue that there is anything fundamentally wrong with constituting policies or practices on the basis of (often powerful) emotions and affects. Rather, they offer critical analyses that attempt to expose the multiple mobilisations of emotion that – on occasion – remain hidden or unspoken within policies and professional practices for children.

Second, the status of the app – developed by a mother as a business proposition – raises questions about who, exactly, could or should intervene in the emotional lives of children. On the basis of the almost universally accepted proposition that children are both physically and emotionally vulnerable, a variety of actors could claim the proper authority to – in this case – offer ways to deal with children’s emotional stress. In recent years, as the tenets of neoliberalism have been accompanied by the logics of ‘austerity’, countries like the UK have witnessed what Conroy (2010, p. 326) terms a ‘schizophrenic’ approach to policy and professional practice for children. On the one hand, he notes that the state has increasingly compelled individuals to take responsibility for themselves, rather than rely on state support. In this context, it is not surprising to see (if in this case implicitly) parents being blamed for not being able to talk to their children in the ‘right’ way to help them manage their emotions. On the other hand, Conroy notes that the state has sought to intervene in the intimate details of children’s lives as never before, especially in schools: from diet (in the name of pervasive fears about obesity), to toilet use, to their neurological functioning (Pykett, 2012; Gagen, 2015). If ‘schizophrenia’ is too strong a word, then the combination of a contradictory approach to the governance of childhood, alongside the withdrawal of the state from a wide range of services for children and families, has certainly created a significant schism. Both by accident and by design, that schism has left an opening for a wide variety of actors and organisations – some new, some not – to provide services and support for children. Those actors include the diverse and growing voluntary sector, private businesses and social enterprise, and new, often complex forms of subcontracting between the public sector and their voluntary or private partners. Once again, based on the assumption that something must be done about today’s children (in the case of the app, about their emotions), two important questions are raised, which this book begins to broach. In contemporary contexts – and not just in the UK – who are the actors and organisations that claim the authority and the expertise to intervene in children’s lives, and, especially, their emotions? And: are we witnessing, in diverse forms, the deinstitutionalisation of childhood or the re-institutionalisation of childhood in complex, contradictory ways?

Third, the app – and the questions raised above – also presages important debates about both when and where adults should intervene in the emotional lives of children. As Ecclestone and Hayes (2008), among others, note, there has been a therapeutic turn in several professional fields in the past decade that has seen some practitioners categorising and dealing with children on the basis of children’s emotional literacy, competency or behaviour. Again, the argument is not that working with or talking about emotions is inappropriate – far from it. Rather, it is that, most often, the very same children who were in the past deemed to be educationally or socially deficient (for instance, teenage boys from socio-economically disadvantaged circumstances) are rebranded as emotionally deficient – and in terms that those children are perhaps even less likely to understand. On the one hand, these critiques open out questions as to the timing of interventions in individuals’ emotional lives. The logic – for instance of Children’s Centres, which work with disadvantaged families in the UK – has been one of early intervention; of catching and dealing with problems early, with the attendant logic that to wait until the teenage or adult years is ‘too late’ (Horton and Kraftl, 2009a; Hartas, 2014). Thus, there is a logic of futurity inherent here: that dealing with problems now will prevent those problems from manifesting in more serious ways later down the line – for instance, in the explosion of an obesity ‘time-bomb’ (Evans, 2010). The chapters in this book cover the full range of childhood and youth – from age 0 to 25, and in some cases beyond. Each offers a series of critical perspectives on policies and practices aimed at different age groups, and, whether in terms of smoking, orphan care, music or volunteering, each chapter provides a different perspective on the logics of futurity that undergird much policy and practice around children’s emotions.

On the other hand, the app reported in The Guardian article prompts reflection upon where interventions in children’s lives take place. In the case of the app, its designer makes an initial distinction between digital and physical spaces, wherein the former are being viewed as both a cause and a panacea for the emergence of emotional, social and behavioural problems in the latter. In fact, the app seeks to bridge this apparent divide between the digital and physical worlds, recognising that the two are, in fact, mutually and inextricably interwoven (Madge and O’Connor, 2006). This example – as well as the discussion of institutionalisation above – serves to illustrate the importance of space and place to the mapping and making of children’s emotions in policy and practice. Nowhere have these debates been more prominent than in the vibrant, interdisciplinary field of children’s geographies. In that scholarship, researchers have made several pertinent observations, which are carried through many of the chapters in this volume:

• that childhood is not merely a social construction but a spatial one, premised on, for instance, powerful emotions (usually fear) about children in public spaces (Holloway and Valentine, 2000);

• that images or constructions of childhood prevalent in the Minority Global North maybe irrelevant to, offensive to, or even harmful for children in the Majority Global South – from decontextualised images of poverty-stricken children, deliberately photographed without their parents/carers to elicit shame or guilt among potential charity donors (Ruddick, 2003), to global discourses of children’s rights that seek a universal ban on child labour when in some cases, and with clearer legislation, it could be appropriate (Bromley and Mackie, 2009);

• that the changing forms of the institutionalisation of childhood are shot through with various ‘geographies’ (Philo and Parr, 2000): from the material construction of schools to evoke particular kinds of atmospheres (such as homeliness) for the benefit of children (Kraftl, 2006), to the management of school dining halls by lunchtime supervisors in ways that control children’s behaviours (Pike, 2008), to the ways in which children negotiate and feel about bullying in school corridors (Valentine, 2000);

• that emotions are relational, constituting experiences of place at various geographical scales (Blazek and Windram-Geddes, 2013): from the ways in which children’s ‘sense of place’ is developed in an iterative relationship between their emotional development and their sensing of physical spaces (Bartos, 2013), to the ways in which interactions between adults and children may not simply constitute fleeting, micro-scale interactions, but have effects that matter over larger scales and time periods (Kraftl, 2013a, b).

Therefore, a key aim of this book is to tease out the manifold, often contradictory ways in which policies and practices for children map and make spaces for children, from the local to the global scale. The notes above offer some signposts, but the following chapters flesh out these and several other critical and theoretical discussions as they subject specific policies and professional practices to detailed scrutiny.

Emotions, policy and practice

Over the last 15 years, policies around the globe focused on children and youth have flourished at both national and local scales (Kraftl et al., 2012; Youth Policy, 2015), establishing childhood as a principal interest of governments and a subject of governance. Policies are indisputably important elements in the making of spaces of childhood, with their complexities evoking what Foucault (1980) called a dispositif, ‘a thoroughly heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions’ (p. 194). However, as such, they also offer an opportunity to map these spaces – and indeed childhood itself – in the sense of ‘finding a way’ (Pile and Thrift, 1995) for adults, professionals or not, to approach children in complex landscapes of ethics and politics. A scrutiny of the role and implications of emotions in such a process of ‘way-finding’ raises three themes that constitute the core of this book’s contribution.

First, policies are usually declared and vindicated as rationally grounded frameworks providing a guideline for action. Yet, policy-making itself is, paradoxically, often emotionally driven and charged, as are the embodied acts of advocating, promoting and disseminating policy. Evans (2010) and Brown (2012), for instance, demonstrate how policies related to children are propelled by emotions and they target emotions at the same time. Fischer (2010) shows that, while emotions are seen as a ‘barrier to reasoned judgment’ (p. 407) in policy-making, they are instrumental in policy deliberation, while emotions associated with policies in media representation usually have a stronger effect on the reception of policies than any substantive coverage (Gross and Brewer, 2007). Emotional media representations of childhood are, in turn, used to influence and negotiate policies (Khan, 2010), as are other representations of emotions (Cass and Walker, 2009; Whittier, 2009; Coe and Schnabel, 2011). The very implementation of policies is an emotional process (Horton and Kraftl, 2009b), and it invokes emotional responses from those affected, including children and their parents (Duncan et al., 2004). Yet, in order to justify po...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• Highlights for Policy and Practice
• 1. Introduction: Children’s Emotions in Policy and Practice
• Part I: Spaces of Care, Home and Family
• Part II: Spaces of the Public Realm, Community and Peer Relationships
• Part III: Spaces of Informal Education, Youth Work and Outreach
• Part IV: Spaces of School, Formal Education and Citizenship
• Index