0:00 [Music] hello and welcome to the your parenting mojo podcast today we're going to take a dive into a topic that cuts across many of the ideas that we discuss here in the podcast we're going to take a critical look at the topic of developmental psychology as a whole and what we can learn about it when we raise our eyes up off the specific topics like theory of mind and language development and attachment that we often spend a lot of

0:32 time delving into and consider the topics that these sit within my guest for the conversation is professor erica berman professor berman is professor of education at the university of manchester associate fellow of the british psychological society and a united kingdom council of psychotherapists registered group analyst she trained as a developmental psychologist and is well known as a critical developmental psychologist specializing in innovative and activist qualitative research her research has focused on critical developmental and educational psychology

1:02 feminist and post-colonial theory childhood studies on critical mental health practice particularly around gender and cultural issues much of her work addresses the connections between emotions mental health and individual and social change she's a past chair of the psychology of women's section of the british psychological society and in 2016 she was awarded an honorary lifetime fellowship of the british psychological society in recognition of her contribution to psychology she is associate editor of the stage encyclopedia of childhood and childhood

1:32 studies and the author of a number of books most significantly deconstructing developmental psychology and since it seems as though friends of the book have the right to call it ddp we're going to go ahead and do that here too ddp is now in its third edition and was honored with a special edition of the journal feminism and psychology discussing the impact of the book on the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the book which really

1:55 critiques mainstream theories and research methods to help us understand whether research on child development tells us more about the child the researchers or the social environment that both of these exist within so whether you're expecting a child or you're a new parent perhaps you're newer to my work or whether you already have a child who's getting on in years and you've been a listener for a while you're going to find something new in this conversation that helps you step

2:18 outside these usual topics and ask well how did we get here and where are we going and even is this where we want to go welcome professor berman it's such an honor to have you here thank you thank you for inviting me so maybe we can start with a little topic at the beginning of all of this the study of child development how did we start studying children how did all this come about well yes it's uh not a small question

2:45 and um i guess there are different ways of telling that story of how child development came about and the kind of the conventional story that you will read about in child development textbooks usually talks about the emergence of the child study movement um that uh principally in fact monied men of a certain kind of class background um started to take an interest in their

3:17 in their own children um and uh and started um studying them in some detail so the first studies about children and childhood that are of a sort of semi-formal kind are observational studies by the men not by the fathers not the mothers who were deemed to be uh too partial and anyway otherwise occupied and not intellectual enough to engage in this esteemed

3:47 new area of study and they they so their diary studies and indeed that that methodological approach remains a very important one for the study of early childhood in general especially um very early childhood and language development and so on um so the child study movement um in a sense launches or occurs at the same time as both uh the the beginning of of the study of psychology

4:20 but also um psychiatry and in a way like child psychology and psychiatry really were elaborated alongside each other almost indistinguishable um and you know the the questions that were motivating those first studies um and inquiries uh it's fair to say i think we're not really specifically about children it was you it was an interest in the study of the child as a way to explore much more general

4:52 philosophical questions um questions about nature and nurture uh questions um that themselves are sort of laid on to older questions about original sin or free will etc etc um and and uh so and we continue to live with those big big philosophical questions that people tend to look to the study of childhood to solve and i have to admit that in a way that's what

5:23 kind of brought me to uh study developmental psychology it wasn't that i was interested in in children particularly i was i just sort of felt like a true modern rationalist uh that this was a way to sort of uh engage in you know very general interests i had um as as also uh was the case for piaget who who um uh who was motivated to study and but it wasn't just him but uh the the origins

5:53 of knowledge and how it developed through the study of the child so so there were these kind of philosophical questions and they were and people were sort of starting to explore them alongside a set of political concerns um that were of the time and of the political structures of the time with the rise of the nation state and so on um about um the state of the population

6:25 um about molding um and in a sense uh sort of knowing about and also controlling the future uh workforce um uh future citizens etc now all of that is i think um sort of one version of um the story of the origins of child development that that is generally quite widely accepted i think there's another uh another

6:56 narrative that one i would want to add in there second one which i've already alluded to about the right the rise of the nation state um that all of this was happening um alongside uh you know imperial imperialist wars going on i mean these these gentlemen who were studying children were also the gentlemen who were going off and studying the flora and fauna of exhaust what were to them exotic places and bringing them back you know

7:27 if you come and look around the english countryside it's full of full of plants that were brought uh from all over the world that that these gentlemen tried to recreate in their you know in their land that they owned um so that you know britain's full of rhododendron but that's the national plant of the himalayas no nepal i think it is um so so what was happening was uh uh these you know that that in a way um

7:56 children the study of children quite late uh emerged quite late in the scene you know because really the yeah the flora and fauna were more interest for quite a long time and it was only when these other kind of political agendas started to surface about managing populations including colonized populations that children became a good route by which to think about that and the management of of of parenting

8:26 um but all of this of course was happening it's not just about psychology or child psychology it was happening alongside uh the rise of other social science sciences you could say like sociology social policy and i think it's also worth bearing in mind that you know i i said that you know these child studies in a sense seem to kick it off so that's the sort of second narrative i think that's important and there's

8:57 there's a third one um that i think is important uh in thinking about how and how and when why childhood came to be seen as a distinct category and i mean that's where we need to sort of think more broadly historically and culturally and think about how the the invention of childhood because we i mean you know we know that that that there is a history of childhood of um and what that means from philly parriers

9:28 uh onwards that the the invention of the idea of childhood as a distinct social category rather than something that was integrated in daily life cohen that that coincided um with with emerging ideas within european culture within and from european culture about the the idea of the individual and that that individual has a sort of interiority of self um now that is really something that

10:01 in terms of our ideas about ourselves and our con awareness of ourselves really kind of starts from the mid-18th century onwards um and so these ideas about childhood uh we're emerging alongside the idea of the individual and alongside the idea that that individual has an interiority has some you know some sense of awareness of itself um can reflect on separately uh from others and and that was emerging

10:33 alongside other disciplines like i did well the great growth in the ideas of um uh associated with with what we would now recognize to be biology and equally at the same time um psychoanalysis the ideas that then eventually were to be sort of named by freud as psychoanalysis so ideas about nature that is and ideas about history and this is where i mean i'm very convinced by the account that carolyn

11:05 stephen um wrote a long time ago about um it's called strange dislocations childhood and the idea of human interiority and um i think it's sort of 18 something to 19 something because historians always do that um so you have to situate the rise of child the interest in childhood alongside these other sort of developments in in people's ideas about about uh

11:36 the course of development or the course of history having it having a course having a going somewhere and having consequences and i think um all that invites you know several other kinds of questions uh which include well i suppose the first one is you know can we only study when we study children are we only studying children i mean it's one of the claims i make in deconstructing developmental psychology

12:06 that the idea of the child you know that the child always involves constituting positions for others around that child whether it's the proximal positions of the caregivers and you know the gender positions of all of that or family or professionals or uh all the state uh or whatever so so so really when we we can't abstract the child from other sets of relationships and you can see i'm a psychotherapist as

12:37 well here our fantasies of our lost selves or our better selves um something or our true selves something like that that gets always played out in people's hopes and fears and fantasies about childhood and that's all been going for quite a long time since you know i think the from the mid-18th century onwards because if you look at that history of you know of that um sally shuttleworth writes about in and

13:07 other other historians of childhood um of european childhood there were always sort of crises about child labour about um hot house children and them being you know sort of uh cramming and and being forced to learn things they didn't want to uh there's always been moral panics you might say about children's sexuality that's always been a difficult area etcetera etcetera um so the in the sense that his start with that wider

13:39 historical view is useful to see that generally speaking the the sort of hot issues that we we encounter in our day are not all are not new but are just a new take on a very long-standing set of themes but also i think that there are consequences for thinking about that the ways our fantasies about ourselves get tied up with what we think about uh and and want for children that typically get in the way

14:12 in my opinion of our engagement with the the you know the the actual involvement of specific children in front of us and i think i say this quite a lot in the book but and overall you know the third issue uh that arises is is that i think there's genuine confusion given that so much going on in the study of the child there's genuine confusion about what the unit of development is uh and as well as you know the temp what

14:40 model of time if you like i mean are we talking about individual development are we talking about child development are we talking about national development um because um because all of these get concerns get or international development they all get wrapped up into the study of the child in a way that i think becomes remarkably inattentive to particular children

15:11 yeah i've been doing a lot of uh research on resilience over the last few days and i think it really comes out there that many of the the criteria that we use to judge children's resilience are related to things like um their executive function capabilities their grades their employment their criminality or lack thereof and it's pretty clear that the state has a very vested interest in a particular outcome here and and to the extent that they can

15:36 support development in the younger years and have it be cost-effective later on then yeah we're we're talking about the development of the state as we're talking about how to support individual children and of course on the international stage it plays out in similar statistics and league tables of standardized test results i guess would be the most obvious one that comes to mind yeah absolutely yeah yeah um yeah so there so clearly there's this this huge framework that it all sits within

16:02 that we're not just looking at the child this has so many connections to how we think of ourselves and our place within society as well and we just we we sort of reduce it back and think okay if we can go back to the source we'll make it easier to understand when actually maybe it introduces a whole bunch of other concerns um so i'm i'm wondering if it's possible to uh to briefly trace how our understanding of children's development

16:30 has shifted um particularly since the the 60s i guess when behaviorism was sort of the in way of seeing things i don't know if you want to go any further back than that but um i think there have been a few really key shifts that have happened since then i'd love to get your perspective on them well um yeah i suppose i would want to go a bit further back i thought you might because before before behaviorism i mean

16:56 you know the there was a a very psychoanalytically oriented study of the child uh or it was before well in anglophone in anglophone context there's quite now quite a strict division between psychology and psychoanalysis although in other parts of the world a lot of psychology is very psychoanalytic um so one has to be careful about the claims here um uh but those yeah so those early child

17:26 studies were really as interested in emote well emotions and you know all kinds and you can see that in piaget you know he was heir to that um that whole sort of uh tranche work although he was a bit later you know he he he wasn't in you know he wasn't interested in testing children he was interested in trying to formulate the um the whole structure of children's thought and and and thinking and i don't think he did it sufficiently

17:57 relationally but i think he was certainly doing some very interesting things um and in a way i'm a sort of lapsed piagetian yeah i mean i did do piaget and a piagetian uh sort of if you like clinical or critical uh study myself at some point as well as some you know engaging in a lot of the the critiques um so yes i mean i so before behaviorism there was this if you like a very uh

18:25 sort of psychodynamically oriented um understanding of children i mean and it's also worth saying in relation to psychiatry too we think of psychiatry as being um you know very very medical and uh and peer assisted behavioral but actually the first uh dsm um was very psychoanalytically informed so it's important not not to forget that that sort of psychoanalytic history partly because people kick back against

18:57 it and don't want to remember it but but it has its traces in in various ways um that i think um we do need to be aware of uh in positive and negative ways social work also used to be incredibly psychoanalytic both in the united states you know in north america and in britain and now it's very hard um to to find traces of that but you know it's important to remember that there have been different models

19:26 um so so yeah there was um um but i i just again i'd like to just having made that point step back once again and say um we need to sort of i mean there's one version of that story that you could say um that there that um in a way the study of children's development mirrors uh changing times all the time

19:57 especially check mirrors uh developing and emerging technologies as well as social preoccupations so you know gazelle was there at the beginnings of photography absolutely perfect example you know um and then you know in the 19 the 1960s and tombows studies on you know these infants doing incredible things that was all with video you know all these kind of you know fear responses of collision of objects and

20:28 whatever amazing experiments uh in 60s 70s onwards um and now we've got digital and um technologies obviously and sort of you know you know fmri scanners and neuro stuff um so in a way the the shifting topics kind of reflect our available technologies and you can you can i'm sure people who study the history of ideas can trace that through being refracted through

21:01 particular topics in in developmental psychology but alongside that we also i think need to ask where and how psychology appears and disappears in our ideas about child development or development in general i mean you know so often people talk about child development and they assume it's the equivalent to all the same as or aligned with psychology but actually that's that's something that

21:32 we're just sort of assuming and filling in here um because there are ways of studying development and child development have nothing to do with psychology you know it could be a physic the development of a particular uh physiological mechanism um or or something in social policy so it's it's quite an interesting point to reflect on in its own right really of of why and how psychology has come to assume this status this assumed

22:03 status i think uh within the within um the study of and debates about child development and in a way you know it's it's important to attend to that because um you know well as as with any kind of normalized uh inter-absence sort of assumption um and i think what that reflects again with the sort of concerns about the rise of the individual and individualism and so on that's particularly relevant in these

22:33 neo-liberal times is is the the sort of whole way in which some psychology has emerged uh um or and functions not only psychology but you know among other sorts of ideas um as a key way for people to uh think about themselves reflect on themselves um including i suppose you know the whole idea of your parenting mojo you know you know it assumes that you know not not just

23:05 parenting you know that being a parent just happens um but that's something about being a parent that requires some special effort or interest or skills or dispositions um that it i i think is very much of our you know our of our time and place and you know the the focus on parenting as a as a question of something that you work at or you know should should you know always a lifestyle

23:37 uh and and and various um sociologists um uh have have have and social policy sort of feminist sociologists and social policy critics have talked about the mandate that parents parenting should be enjoyable and how uh sort of uh coercive or oppressive that can be or you know um how hard for parents you know so that you know if you lose your mojo you want

24:07 you know something you know you've got to try and get it back um i mean that's the way that the sort of the discourse works isn't it which reminds me of you know there's a key study that was done in um [Music] uh in britain by valerie walkerdine and helen lucy who were sort of psychologists and educationalists um that's called democracy in the kitchen and what they did was they reinterpreted a kind of classic study that was done

24:39 um by martin hughes and somebody else about how children talked differently um or how they talked at home and at school in you know classrooms and at school um and they were interested as feminists in um the position of of um the parents especially the mothers uh and as as uh feminists very interested in in class and the way class stretches parenting

25:10 identities um mother's identities because so much as psychology has been about the regulation of mothers um is uh it is that the the sort of official mandates from the the sort of parenting textbooks and including the sort of technical psychology technic textbooks about sensitive mothering and reasoning with your child and democratic parenting which all all of this emerged in the post-second world war um era of

25:43 the idea that you could uh um encourage you know that the family was the place of authoritarianism uh all anti-authoritarianism and that's why how you brought up your children was really important i mean there were these huge multi-disciplinary conferences um that uh that took place um uh uh bringing together margaret mead and piaget and lots you know lots of um lots of eminent eminent experts to talk

26:16 about how you know how we can build a world that will not um succumb to fascism again and they they they saw it's a you know this is a big this is a big burden for parents to carry i mean they they saw the pos the possibility of of of uh creating that through democratic parenting and um what valerie walkertown and helen

26:46 lucy in their book that came out in i think 1990 i mean it's of its time and 1989 um they they kind of show how um the the working-class mothers at that time are the ones who do what the bad kind of parenting of telling their children off of uh you know being a bit arbitrary about their commands um not giving reasons for why they're telling them to do what they're doing etc so they look like bad mothers

27:17 uh and and so they get you know described as such you know by the literature uh and the middle class but the middle class mothers are doing all this work as sensitive parents um of reasoning with their children and instead of just you know the working-class mother saying do this help me with this um you know household chores errands etc these middle-class mothers were um doing the thing that the developmental

27:48 psychology textbooks were saying they should of turning household labor uh into an educational and playful experience with the with the children um to to and and and this was um you know this this is something that is what's supposed to happen and is a sign of a good parent but actually what they were doing um walker diane and lucy arguing was was um um you know doubling their own workload in

28:20 a sense and um making their own labor at the same time less visible by converting their household labor into play and entertainment for their children and so both working class and middle class mothers in this study they argued were being were both being oppressed but in different class specific ways by these mandates of what of how parenting should work in the one case they got it wrong so they were bad

28:50 the other they were in a sense more subject to those imperatives um and you know therefore regulating themselves and and and having to work even harder mm-hmm you see what i mean yeah absolutely and perhaps i should have predicted we would get to this point and and i definitely see the irony of myself with you know two related degrees and somewhat the expert i'm doing air quotes for those of you who are just listening

29:20 on on this topic um partly by virtue of this education partly by virtue of reading these papers that are written mostly by white researchers studying white children um at the same time i well i guess we weren't so successful at preventing the rise of fascism again were we and secondly i i guess i'm like i'm curious about your thoughts about where that leaves us so so if we it seems like the the working-class women in this this study weren't winning

29:51 like they weren't they weren't happy they weren't fulfilled the the the middle class women weren't winning either um if we recognized that the way that we were brought up has left us with a whole slew of problems in terms of the way we interact with the world uh in our personal relationships in our in in the societal problems that we face more broadly um and and developmental researchers are critiquing both of those two ways of

30:21 parenting um i guess the the struggle i have with this field is okay yes it's easy to critique both of these ways of doing it but that doesn't actually help us to understand what we do want to be doing what is actually going to help us what are your thoughts on that well i think it's at least at the very least i think it it should help relieve some pressure on parents you know to think actually it's it's it's

30:48 it's a mistake and it's really unfair to um suggest that we can prevent fascism by bringing your children upright i mean you know it takes a lot of other things happening which unfortunately probably are still carrying on happening um to create uh authoritarian um uh political regimes and um and okay so you know and individual autonomous

31:20 uh um people from uh who've grown up as as autonomous children uh free thinking or whatever you know the democratic thinker um it is only part of that story uh and can't be a guarantor of it and so you know it's it's it's really important that i think that parents don't feel they have to solve all the problems of the world and and governments and social policy makers

31:51 forever uh trying to imply that uh and intervene into children's and families lives as if that's the only way um and it isn't uh and it can't be and i suppose what i i bang on about endlessly in the book and elsewhere um is that that that the ways they do that you know in the name of early intervention to prevent something later they're actually failing to attend to and failing to engage with all the other conditions and

32:23 situations that uh that promote or facilitate and you know unhelpful ways of living and unhelpful conditions of people's lives but it's a lot cheaper to to install a parenting program or tell people how to uh you know bring up their children better than it is to you know and child poverty and family poverty isn't it yep for example yeah for example yes

32:54 absolutely okay yes and yeah no i i i completely accept that um that the parenting should not be positioned as the only way that these that we address these challenges for sure yeah and and at the same time so a lot of the time it's the same because the same people right the policymakers are also parents um and and so it it just in a way it kind of blows my mind that we are we're still struggling with this we're

33:21 still trying to figure out how do we make sure that every family has what they need and can live in a fulfilled way um because of the structures that we have put in place in our society that somehow seems so hard to shift even though we were the very ones who created the policies in the first place it's it's it's it's very i i can see why people would would go down this rabbit hole of um you know

33:51 let's change uh some little thing let's give out a free book at a well child visit is one of the resilience interventions to promote reading between parents and children and and look for some measurable impact in in 15 years on this child's resilience levels um so yeah i mean it's ridiculous isn't it i mean you know it's well intentioned but it's it's just it's just wrong but but and i think you know so many people approach

34:19 uh the the norm you know the ideas about parenting with very well-founded suspicion because what what isn't evident uh is the ways in which um because of this sort of illusion or confounding between child development individual development uh and national and international development actually the the you know through the sort of quantitative and statistical technologies um the the sort of

34:51 the norm is is is an abstraction that doesn't actually correspond to any specific individual it's that's what that's what statistical norms do they're abstractions um and that that norm is generated from uh studies that are of sort of the you know the the rich parts of the world and privileged people in it um and so it's not surprising that it doesn't fit the lives of

35:22 minoritized marginalized people but they're the ones who are always deemed to be deficient or pathological and in need of intervention and yeah exactly so it becomes very a sort of self-confirming legitimation strategy of pathologizing the poor and minority populations uh etc etc and you know but but actually we need to think critically about the the knowledge base and you

35:53 know unfortunately people are generating very different kind of uh studies designs knowledges now to amplify that you know the the base on from which you know around the cultural norms the gendered norms of class based norms and so on yeah but it's still very hard to budge you know even if the psychological studies are are getting much more sensitive around these questions there's still the the the delay into the

36:24 sort of social policy um at national and international levels is is really quite amazing and you see it again and again in something like um people talk a lot about bronfenbrenner's model i don't know if you talked about that yeah to your listeners so um you know you look at you look at textbooks and you see these concentric circles um and you look at international policy documents on on child development and you see again the

36:56 concentric circles well bronfenbrenner apparently never made this diagram and um uh because he he you know because it's actually quite static and structuralist and he was talking about moment by moment reconfigurations um and uh also that interestingly as a reflection i think of the dominant individualist ideology or you know a sense of assumption so you look at those models and very often it's not the child and

37:27 the and and it's caregiving system that's in that's in the middle it's the child alone yeah that actually is a complete you know completely wrong representation of bronf and brenner's ideas yeah i think that uh that's elucidated in the book um as in in the the examples that you walk through on the visual cliff studies um and and i'd love to kind of walk through that to help listeners see how this

37:59 actually happens in the research um and i think that i i i wasn't familiar with these studies before i started reading about it so i looked it up and i guess it's a set of studies by eleanor gibson and richard walk in the 60s on what's called this visual cliff and it's a table with two sides and one of them has a checkerboard pattern on it and the other one is made of the other side is

38:17 made of glass and the checkerboard pattern kind of disappears on the floor underneath and so if you put a baby on the checkerboard side and they can appear over the edge to the glass side it looks as though they're going to fall off because the the checkerboard seems to disappear um and so i'm curious about uh what kinds of things you see coming up in these studies that maybe we we don't usually explore when we do that

38:40 when we're when we're looking at this kind of work ah well it's a while since i've looked at all that material but um you know it is it is a great example i mean it's so it's a study it you know the intention was to try and document that the emerging skill of depth perception right isn't it yeah um and um but you know there are a lot of things going on there that are not about depth

39:07 perception because the child is being enticed to cross what is might be a chasm um uh uh by by it's you know it's mother so it's about trust and relationship at least as much um and um and and and you know you can and and it's an absurd and bizarre situation [Laughter] it is you know so at so many levels you can

39:39 see the stripping away of everyday social context in these efforts to try and experimentally isolate you know is it is it this kind of shading of these kinds of squares etc which there were endless permutations at the time when you know um when i when i was studying uh developmental psychology and cognitive studies i mean you know there was it there was i think i still got the book there was this this special issue of scientific american with these classic

40:08 classic key studies in including uh gibson a walk and um and uh as well as harry hollow get on to those i suppose perhaps um but there are you know so so actually you know there are so many issues aren't there so many babies are carried all the time that you know and don't crawl around you know the conditions of children of babies lives are so different in different cultural contexts

40:40 that the you know in a sense you can read these classic kind of uh experiments as a as a as a particular enactment of of ideas about uh in well certainly about autonomous individualism the child on its own you know making its journey um across this dangerous territory so um yeah so i guess the just to sort of pull out a particular nugget from what you said um what i want to really emphasize to to listeners is that

41:10 this looks like a study of how children develop depth perception but actually we're we're looking at a certain specific set of children who happen to be available at 10 a.m on tuesdays with their mothers and can drive to a campus that's probably not in the middle of town not accessible by public transit and uh we can put them in this very strange situation and assume that they're going to reproduce behaviors that they would otherwise that they would do naturally

41:39 at home in very different contexts with different people around and that the mother we're going to just say it's the mother because it probably was um standing on the other side of the table in the early studies they didn't take into account whether the mother was making afraid looking faces or excited looking faces and later on they started to do that but um the the child is seen as the entire unit of study and what the child does is

42:06 the only thing worth examining when actually in real life the child is functioning within a a dynamic system of people and objects and everything around it um and and so that if we can say that x ability is present at x age in a lab does that actually help us to understand anything useful about a child's experience possibly not exactly exactly okay so i wonder if we can shift gears a little bit and talk about how mothers

42:35 show up in research on children because we we alluded to this a little bit in the studies of the the visual cliff but they they they show up in very strange ways in studies sometimes it seems yeah well um so mothers mothers appear as the sort of a presumed natural environment to children and you know historically i think we you know nowadays um people are rather more sensitive to these questions than they were

43:07 um but um you know i i did in in in my book kind of i i was fortunate to sort of have all these um i think i put an acknowledgement to the library my college you know um for for sort of they basically wanted to get rid of load of old books and a lot of them were old old actually classic textbooks but they they kind of they're full of littered with all these very derogatory

43:32 comments about about about mothers about women as researchers about you know and no woman could possibly study her child etc etc um so so mothers are presumed to be uh the people who look after children and all too often that remains true actually um or women caregivers but of course it's a very um it's a it's a very particular model of parenting that is being um uh presumed

44:04 here that generally doesn't acknowledge shared parenting contexts or cross-generational uh um you know grandmothers and aunts and as well as mothers looking after children or multi you know multi-generational households and joint households etc that actually um reflect the ways in which people live outside europe and north america um and even you know increasingly within

44:34 it so um so i suppose you know how the question of and this is the question that always sort of um i i learnt very rapidly from my days in teaching gender and women's studies you know you have to think about which women so which mothers um and the norms inscribing the developmental models are those of the middle class um white families with the

45:04 with the sort of um [Music] the the the bourgeois division of labor where the father is the sort of breadwinner and the mother is the looking after the children etc uh and all too often the you know there's also an assumption that there's only one child in each of the studies rather than loads of children and probably siblings helping to bring up the children um so it's a very peculiar model of of uh uh parenting in there um

45:37 and that's i think one very important point the other is that um again if you go back and this is where i would want to alert readers to a most fantastic book a classic book by ann mcclintock that's called imperial leather race gender and sexuality in the colonial contest and just to clarify for non-english listeners imperial leather is a brand of soap yes exactly yes it's it's a it's it's still going

46:09 unbelievably um and um and she writes about how um i i can't reproduce the exact quote but i think it's it's really important basically she's she's writing a history of colonial agenda history of colonialism the model of the family that came to be dominant this model of the bourgeois nuclear family that we think of as arising through a particular moment of the development of

46:39 capitalism the division between public and private etc um and the division between productive work and social reproductive work of caring the social reproduction of the bearing and caring of of children but all of that was happening alongside colonization of the global south and um in the english case you know apart from ireland which was of course england's first colony and those

47:11 legacies really really carry on there's the um you know we're talking about africa and and india and uh um and so the the point that anne mcclintock makes um so clearly and lots of other studies do but it's ann clintock's account is very uh um well known uh is that that model of the bourgeois nuclear family kind of not only emerged alongside that colonizing process but

47:42 there was a relationship between the two things you know one relation one relationship is that the colonized people were deemed to be like like children yeah in need of the the colonial parent i know and i've been working on fanon and things he does lots of things with these metaphors um and the the other is that you know the the within the family the family the bourgeois nuclear family was sort of seen as a microcosm

48:14 of those relationships so what you have is the benign father ruling over his children which is the mother and the children you know that and their his property um and that these that's that configuration was was in a sense part of what legitimate of the colonial authority and the other way around the two work in relation to each other so i think what that the the contribution of that feminist work and

48:46 that post-colonial work has a study of the colonial archive if you like has been to show how race and gender um are you know uh enter in really deep ways in the in intimate everyday family relations so so yes which you know mothers mothers have been pivotal in all social policies and the regulation of women's sexuality dress

49:17 uh you know whether they have children when they have them and what political in what what relate kind of sanctioned relationships are okay or not etc etc you know it it's always been a very unfair uh but huge object um of of concern uh for um full governments uh as well as international policy makers um

49:47 and will continue to be and um and doubtless the regulation i mean you know now now that we have other sort of configurations of ways of having children and um and and bringing up children um uh that those concerns will really generalize from the intense scrutiny and regulation of and surveillance of of of women as mothers to anybody else involved with children yeah and and this this

50:18 ideal of the nuclear family with a mother and a father and one to maybe three children at the most i mean there are not that many families in the world that look like that anymore um i know that the in the book it says the majority of the world's children are born to women under the age of 20 which uh is in our culture are seen as something that's completely irresponsible um the number of babies born to single

50:44 mothers was uh 40 across the eu in 2012 over 50 in several countries and yet we still see this nuclear family as uh the center of all the policy making we do is around how to make more families like this nuclear family what's going on with that and i guess i'm i'm thinking about how to to make this really concrete because we've talked a fair bit about the interaction between families in the state um and you've also talked about

51:15 how women and mothers are surveilled monitored um and uh controlled in a way um and and i'm i'm thinking back to an interview that i did pretty recently with dr andrew grogan kayla on spanking and whether spanking should be banned and he's of the opinion that's banking should be banned um and i'm thinking okay well i i agree that i don't want children to be spanked but i don't know if spanking if banning spanking is the right way to go

51:46 about doing that because it introduces more monitoring of families and more monitoring of certain kinds of families um and and and so to bring it back to your argument about tracking children's welfare and tracking mother's ability to do their job as it were of raising your child um where would you come down on a specific topic like that that that really makes concrete this idea of monitoring women monitoring families and and having them perform in a certain way

52:17 well um i do remember a long long time ago there's a british comedian ben elton who stand up observational comic who used to say um you know why do women why do women take their children to supermarkets to hit them um you know but the point he was making was that the supermarket is laid out in a way that entices you know you know there there's children you know there's tweets so by the checkout and the

52:48 child's going to say i want this i want this please you know mommy whatever and you know it it puts it puts parents in an impossible situation and so it's not it it's the it's the environment that elicits and solicits particular kinds of actions that and and social geographers have done an amazing job at thinking thinking through the ways environments and inhibit certain behaviors in their in their their um

53:20 policies that they put forward to planners about you know betting shops and gamble you know how to limit gambling and things like that you know and very you know you change the organization of space um and the environment uh and you you enable a ra a different range of behaviors so if you you know if we supported parents better in various ways materially and in better gave them better context for children to

53:51 live in they wouldn't you know the poor working-class minoritized parents and would would not be the ones you know who were continuously being castigated for hitting their children so i think i'm all with you you know so i don't think it's helpful i don't like like you know violence against anyone especially children um uh and there are many kinds of violence but um i don't think criminalizing spanking is necessarily the way to do it

54:24 i mean and again it's the easy way blame the individual uh not take responsibility for how that context came about yeah i'll give you an example from research that i did um more recently on the impact of um well the study was about the impact of so-called welfare reforms which means cuts in welfare support um to children and families it had a particular emphasis on education because you know i joined an education department um and it was a joint project

54:56 with psychologists counseling psychologists and and uh um others and uh the so we interviewed parents and it was about a particular welfare reform which means a cut in the allowance that children are the the the families which means parents get extra money um uh according to um the size of their household and and particularly

55:27 um uh if they had us deemed were deemed to have a spare room then um then that money was was docked was reduced um and it has to be said that britain has one of the smallest space allocations for houses in in europe and the so-called developed world um so people live in very small spaces actually which has been just terrible for people during lockdown obviously

55:57 um so you know we we were conducting this study and um all kinds of interesting things were thrown up you know um including how um it actually uh this this this cut in welfare support um was making it much more difficult for parents with shared custody arrangements who had a spare room some of the time for their child to come and live with them and it's taken a decade to try and sort that

56:30 out actually because it's now well nearly a decade and and and quite a lot of court cases um and it actually drove one father to instigate custody proceedings against mother that threatened you know seemed like such a stupid move because he was going to lose all custody rights if he did this because he was so desperate about the loss of money and that he wanted the child to come and live with him full time you know these terribly sad

56:58 very specific situations and one and um i didn't conduct the interviews directly with parents but we had a one of our counselling psychology trainees interviewed did some of the interviews and she interviewed um this woman who was talking about you know having the choice between heating her house and eating herself or feeding her child and feeding herself because that you know the money was so short and this is in a rich country um supposedly a welfare state

57:30 um and she a propo of nothing said to said said to the researcher tell your professor we are good mothers yeah so you know she said that and we weren't asking about mothering we were asking about coping strategies we were asking about what you know what concerns about children's education but so closely is everything to do with how children are tied up with with parents and especially women's

58:01 identities of themselves and needing to be seen as good mothers not just good enough mothers as winnicott would put it but yeah good mothers that you know it was such a telling kind of comment um and i mean you know in a sense it i i felt heartened to hear it because she was speaking back it wasn't tell your professor i'm a good mother it was we are good mothers there was a sense of uh um knowing that she was part of a class

58:31 of women as mothers or families who were going to be negatively viewed by many many scrutineers um and and that she had a view on that yeah and she was asserting there are other ways of looking at this yeah and and i love how that came out i think i read that in the paper and it reminded me of an ethnographic study that i read some time ago and i cannot for the life of me find it again since

58:58 that was about um working-class mothers who smoke and uh they you know have very little money and the the conventional wisdom says why are they wasting their money on cigarettes on something that is bad for them on something that is bad for their child we should tell them how bad it is for them and how bad it is for their child and they will stop and this researcher went in and spent time with these families and found that

59:22 the mothers are smoking because the nicotine is an appetite suppressant and they don't have enough money to put food on the table for everybody and it's cheaper to buy a pack of cigarettes for yourself so you're not so hungry than it is to put food on the table for everybody and so when you come in with this prescription of this is how you're going to fix your terrible parenting your terrible mothering you miss all that context yeah absolutely yeah and

59:46 i'm curious about your view of where are we going in our understanding of children in our understanding of families um and uh in a way i think it it's deconstructing developmental psychology you know is meant to be in like an alternative textbook uh in the sense that it speaks to the dominant discourses it it destabilizes it unsettles you know this is what derrida in deconstructing is is inviting us to do and you know uh attending to

60:19 the the the dominant assumptions and their associated norms or axes of power and if you kind of unsettle them then you're loosening things up to be able being able to say um things could be different and um and so you know to in a sense to my surprise uh deconstructing developmental psychology you know i was asked to do various revisions and the second edition and third edition and i

60:50 don't think i'm going to do a fourth really but you know and and i can see how um you know that the fact that what it's still needed is is a is a matter of concern for me because i i i would have hoped that some of these well some of these arguments are now being uh more widely um and understood and accepted but you know if you look through the different editions as i suppose some

61:19 some biographer might want to do sometime actually you know it's the attachment chapter that gets bigger and bigger every because because because you know the industry of work around detachment uh i think it speaks to something about the social concerns and the way the wider political concerns get all the time miniaturized into the regulation of parenting even if it you know it then gets miniaturized even more to something digital or you know neuropsychological so that some people actually argue that

61:52 you know psychology is over it's all it's all neuroscience now you know it's very paradoxical that you know we have a a psych a whole regime of psychology that has no psychology in it uh i don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad thing but you know i think it's quite jan devos makes this argument it's a very important one but for me personally what i then did was i i wrote another book um that that that

62:22 that sort of moved from deconstructing to pluralizing developments so not taking apart not reconstructing because i mean the there's a philosophical issue here about reconstructing uh that if you if you know if you reconstruct you already are tied to a particular normative understanding of what it is reconstructing um so that wouldn't that that doesn't work with that

62:53 approach philosophically um but but i moved to sort of thinking about developments in a much more plural way so both acknowledging and then sort of disrupting attempting to disrupt the the the alignments that i was i identified and deconstructing developmental psychology between the individual the child national development transnational development etc all these different developments

63:24 and try to sort of explore what we can do to sort of rub them off against each other rather than use them to sort of pile on pile the pressure on the individual child and family and parents etc uh and that that's now uh that came out last year as a second the name for people so it's called developments and the subtitle is child image nation uh although you know now in the second edition

63:54 uh there's more about transnational relations as well yeah and you're revealing me as an unprepared researcher because normally i would read every book that somebody writes in my interview but there there was so much to dig into just in ddp that i got stuck down that rabbit hole and didn't go into this one no well i mean i guess i guess ddp is is you know the more direct um sort of relevant i mean developments the book

64:19 developments is interdisciplinary yeah um it's you know it has it has as much cultural studies and you know it's me trying you know trying to uh act actually doing what i you know what i'm i'm talking about in terms of bring you know attending to culture and philosophy and different theoretical resources some geographies psychoanalysis to think uh differently about children and and childhoods and

64:51 and everything else that children and childhoods gets used to think about i'm very excited by um uh sort of found uh written a paper called found childhood so analyzing photographs of mater bits of material culture around children that i that seem to be unique to um over developed contexts like mine you see all these uh sort of children's gloves boots toys littered about but in other parts of the world you don't see anything like that no

65:20 yeah and and yeah i saw a set of photographs in one book of um i think it was victorian era women uh who were uh props to hold their baby for a photograph and then there was a sheet like a black sheet draped behind them you could see where it was hung up and and the sheet comes over the mother's face over her entire body and all you see is this set of hands that are protruding through

65:46 the sheet that are holding the baby on the on her lap well amazing she's posing for its photograph it was i thought it was a beautiful metaphor for you know how we see our role in at mother's roles in these psychological studies so but yeah so i in a way i'm glad i didn't go deeper because we couldn't possibly have done any more breadth justice in the time that we had so thank you so much for for talking through all this

66:10 with us for for sharing what's in the book as well as what's so far beyond the book and i'm really grateful for your time okay thank you very much and i hope i hope this is of interest honestness oh yes i'm sure it will be and so references for all of the studies that you have heard about today including the long list of ones that i have yet to track down as well as the references to dr berman's books

66:34 themselves can be found at your parentingmojo.com forward slash ddp [Music] you