Policing Childhood: An Interview with Karen M. Smith

Karen M. Smith is Assistant Professor at the University College Dublin School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice. Her research interests lie in the area of childhood inequality and the government of childhood/government of child-adult relations. Her recent book, The Government of Childhood: Discourse, Power and Inequality was published by PalgraveMacmillan in 2014.

Jess Spear: Your work focuses on the development of child policy, particularly during the neoliberal era when women in advanced capitalist countries were increasingly joining the labour force and aspects of social reproduction they would have done for free — childcare in particular — were becoming privatised and regulated. Do you think there is any crossover between social reproduction theory and your Foucauldian framework?

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Karen Smith: Foucault’s work and the work of Nikolas Rose have been really important in terms of my thinking on childhood. Foucauldian theory in relation to disciplinary power, the exercise of power over individuals by a political power, the exercise of power over the population as a whole and the governing of the self and others, is really centred on the production of “governable subjects”. How we come to be constituted as productive workers is obviously a very important part of that. 

The role of families and educational institutions in producing governable subjects has been a key focus of social policy, with the gradual emergence of “welfare states”. We can see a much greater concern with social reproduction and the regulation of family life and the regulation of child rearing. Families and women in particular were burdened with greater responsibility in relation to social reproduction, as the standards they had to reach were continually getting higher. There’s now an army of professionals giving them advice on how to raise children, setting standards that have to be reached in relation to it. 

This can lead to a kind of intense regulation of working class and minority families because they're the focus of child welfare and protection policies that have emerged since the 19th century. It was just assumed that middle class families would carry out the social reproduction tasks as they apply to children effectively. Whereas there’s been much more suspicion that the rest of society won't carry out these functions effectively.

Consider the emergence of mass compulsory schooling. You know, on the one hand it could be seen as a way of freeing parents up a little bit from some of the tasks of social reproduction. But it actually brings all of these new obligations, new responsibilities in terms of having to have your children kitted out for school in a certain way and parents having to police their children's education in quite an intense way.

I've been very interested in the production of governable child subjects. And the governable child subject is someone who will eventually be able to exercise power over themselves in a way that's socially approved. For example they'll want to work. they’ll want to succeed in the education system, which means they’ll want to compete in the education system and within the labour market.

There is that responsibility on the parents to instill these values that are aligned with the values of the school. And that's very overt. So, you know, we have all of this concern that certain types of families and certain types of children don't have the ‘right values’ or the ‘right attitude’, that aren't going to succeed on that basis. It’s not there isn’t any need for support or guidance, but the danger is that ‘reforming’ families gets prioritised over addressing systemic inequalities.

Consider the burden that that imposes then on working class and minority families — who are obviously the primary focus of law and policy in this area —  and on mothers who in many families still have the primary responsibility for caring for young children and supporting schooling of older children. 

Additionally is the social reproduction work that children themselves carry out. Even the very youngest children are carrying out enormous amounts of labour in order to meet the demands of the capitalist labour markets when they mature. Years and years children spend within educational institutions, particularly secondary. Consider the pressure that is imposed on young people, the opportunities that they miss just in terms of having fun, engaging with nature or developing their own interests. I'm certainly not anti-education but the ability to be able to develop your own educational interests is something I think we don't foster enough. One of the key concerns of social reproduction theory here is shining a light on work that's not valued as work, that's not seen as labour.

From the schoolwork to the extracurricular activities, there is increasing pressure on young people to stand out because the competition is becoming more and more intense. Children and young people also carry out domestic tasks that support the labour of their parents in various ways, such as caring for younger siblings or caring for parents with illnesses you know, kind of carrying out different tasks.

Society demands of young people that a huge amount of their time is devoted to work and actually imposes that as a legal obligation. The bargain is that they will get well paid work in the future, but we know that that's not a bargain that society is living up to. Wendy Brown talks about the sacrificial citizen within neoliberal kinds of forms of governmentality. We are expecting enormous sacrifices from children, and from parents as well.

JS: This reminds me of my older sister who often tells me about the stress caused by new information detailing how she should best raise her children, what food they should eat, how much screentime, no screentime, and so on. 

KS: I can relate to that. As a young mother myself I felt this pressure to do it perfectly, kind of trying to produce this perfect human being. There are strong social pressures to live up to some completely unrealistic standard of how to parent. (Parenting itself is a relatively new kind of concept.)  The financial pressure, the emotional pressure, obviously that's something that's intensified so much in the context of the current [pandemic] crisis. We're hearing so much about the homeschooling pressure that parents are under, worried about their children being left behind. That speaks volumes about how we see education, particularly the competitive nature of the education system. We're constantly worried about children falling behind or just not keeping up with their peers. A more meaningful conception of education wouldn't be comparing children to anything other than themselves. 

I really resent the pressure placed on children and parents, and the stresses that it creates for family life. I have to say when my own daughter left school, I just felt this enormous liberation. You know, in some ways you don't want your children to grow up. But when she had finished, I felt like I'd left school. I didn't have to police her anymore. You’re not explicitly told to police your child, but at the same time there is an expectation there that you will ensure your child studies and does homework.

JS: What child policy would you advocate today?

KS: It’s really hard to separate a child policy from other policy areas. You know, on the one hand, it's been kind of heartening to see, you know, the development of the Department of Children and Youth Affairs. But I always worry that when something gets ‘child’ stuck in front of it, it becomes very siloed. You know, it only then deals with certain issues, whereas every single area of economic and social policy should have a child focus; and to be honest, I think a ‘child focus’ is not really that different from a ‘people focus’.

If we organize our societies around what would help people to flourish, that would benefit everybody, not just children. However, children flourish when the adults around them are flourishing and when they live in a society that's designed on the basis of that.

I would think it is useful to have a ministry for children, but one which has a greater focus on children's interests beyond those traditional areas of childcare, education, youth, and justice. In general, we need to have stronger child and people focus throughout. 

But, some really urgent issues to be addressed are child poverty and child homelessness. These obviously relate to much broader policy issues such as de-commodifying the housing system. If we really want to improve children's lives and ensure that there's a right to adequate housing. This would benefit all children, not just children who are homeless or who are living in overcrowded or inadequate accommodation. Just consider the children in the many, many families in Ireland whose incomes are constrained or where parents are working longer hours than they would choose to because their rent or their mortgage payments are too high.

In relation to child poverty, we can’t really deal with it without reforming the economic system and how we value work. In the short term, ensuring a living wage for all workers and ensuring social protection rates are sufficient to allow people to live in dignity, including maintaining the Covid 19 payments of 350 euro per week. 

We also need to do away with means testing. We know that means testing traps people in poverty. It's an ideological attachment that successive governments have had to means testing. It doesn't make any practical sense as a policy measure. We've such an overcomplicated social protection system in this country, which is injurious to people's dignity and sense of self, which is constantly being lauded as very effective in reducing poverty. But that's in the context of us having one of the most unequal distributions of labour market income in the industrialised world. 

The effectiveness of our social protection system has to be seen in that context. It shouldn’t just be whether it lifts people just over the poverty line, which is how the effectiveness of it is measured now. We need to be thinking in terms of whether it’s effective in supporting people to have a decent quality of life. Is it effective in supporting people in realizing the goals that they want to reach for themselves? Because if it's just effective in ensuring that they can just about pay rent and maybe kind of have an adequate diet for their families, but never be able to make any choices beyond that, well, then that's not effective. In many ways, child neglect is a symptom of state neglect to family as well.

Whether it's through universal basic income or some other approach to universal benefits, we need a root and branch reform of our social protection system. Of course we also need a comprehensive national health system. All of these are anti-poverty measures as well. 

We also need a learner-centred education system that imposes no cost on families. All children should receive nutritious meals if they go to school. No families should be having to pay out for school books and school expenses. 

Additionally, if we want to address child poverty, we can't do that without addressing racism and other forms of discrimination in Irish society. The groups with the highest risk of poverty such as members of the Roma community and Mincéir communities, people exiting Direct Provision, and undocumented migrants is in large part related to structural and institutional racism in this country. So we need to abolish the Direct Provision system and move towards an open border policy.

Environmental issues as well are fundamental to children's well-being and quality of life For example, reducing our reliance on cars. I grew up never knowing a different kind of freedom because the car was ubiquitous at that point. But the corralling of children into designated spaces is because of the motor car. As well, emissions from cars as we know are contributing to climate change, and air pollution obviously impacts children, particularly young children. 

I'm constantly dreaming of a local neighborhood that isn't dominated by cars, where people can play, where they breathe clean air, where there's public spaces that children and people can gather. Swapping out diesel and petrol cars for electric cars is not going to deliver that.

JS: I would assume childcare, how it’s managed and organised is also a big issue?

KS: Yes, and seeing this huge commodification of children's services in recent years without any debate or discussion. I'm not a fan of that centralized kind of state child care services. I think we need community-led cooperative models of childcare, ensuring that parents are freed up to actually be able to contribute and be actively involved in the governance and administration of them. 

There are serious issues in terms of promoting and protecting child welfare in institutional settings, whether those institutional settings are for profit or whether they're state-led. We've a huge amount of examples and I've written about this because I think regulation can only go so far. You know, we can't be continually policing them. So I think it's about having a different model that is grounded in the community and grounded in what parents — who I think are the most appropriate people to be making the decisions in terms of the kinds of support they need — think is best. It’s not that there isn't a role for the state but that the supportive role of the state needs to prioritize the role of parents and communities.

As you know, there's also issues around physical and sexual violence against children. Unfortunately, we still have far to go in combating cultural acceptability of violence and adopting robust measures to challenge the commodification and sexualization of childhood within the media and advertising industries. Capitalism benefits from the sexualization of childhood. It's not helpful to think only in terms of there being sick monsters out there when our culture as a whole is informed by how even quite young children are positioned and addressed within media discourses. So regulation of the online space and socialization of the online space would be important.

What we have allowed to happen in terms of tech firms controlling what should be a commons. It's been corrupted and it's in many contexts so destructive of our democracy.

JS: The last bit you said there about social media. It touches on how social media distorts childhood and development of the self, of your personality and interests. You and I grew up without social media dominating how we thought about ourselves. I can't even imagine what it is to be a young person today with TikTok, Instagram and Twitter, and this overriding concern about how many views and likes you get. The performative aspect of just being yourself and doing the things you like to do, but it being seen as ‘developing your brand’, I can't even imagine how distorting it is for young people. It's distorting for me as an adult. Like, at a concert everybody holds up their iPhone, recording the concert in order to show that you went to the concert. Or we might take dozens of photos when we’re out on a nature walk and you might not even post them, but your thought process is, I want other people to know I did this, I saw this, I care about this.

KS: Oh, I know. I don't engage very much on social media, even though it's useful. I don't find it very helpful in terms of nuance, debate or discussion of ideas.

But your question reminds me of what Foucault talks about with the idea that neoliberalism exhorts us to become entrepreneurs of the self. So the entrepreneur, unlike the worker, receives a return on investment and must invest in their own human capital and social capital in order to do so. 

Since Foucault wrote about this we've seen an erosion of workers’ rights. We've seen a rise in what's sometimes referred to as the precariat. We're in this kind of hyper competitive environment for young people in terms of access to economic opportunities, and the importance of individual investments in human and social capital — and I hate those terms — has really intensified. 

So I fully agree with you that developing your ‘brand’ linked in to that idea of governing yourself as a micro-enterprise, we're all affected by it a little bit. Even in academia, you see it in having to market your work, market yourself, and market your courses. The university has become so neoliberalised. But that’s nothing compared to what young people starting out have to deal with. 

This idea of yourself as a brand, yourself as a little enterprise that you're investing in constantly and advertising and marketing to the outside world. The idea of “the flexible self” is also a really important concept within the literature on neoliberal governmentality and resonates with the kind of branding of the self (and continual reinvention of the self) we are talking about here.

You're talking a huge amount of mental emotional labour that's going into developing yourself, both in terms of how you look and how you relate to other people, how you relate to yourself. Huge amounts of the labour that goes into kind of performing in a way that is appealing to the market. That burden of flexibility and that adaptability falls really heavily on those with the least economic resources as there are  demands of time, a certain amount of money and a lot of energy in order to develop and market yourself in this way.

How to challenge it then is the huge conundrum.

JS: I think it's a mixed bag for young people because I think they can feel the destructive and distorting nature of social media. But then the desire to be a part of society, to be a part of what's ‘normal’, to be part of the trend. 

Marx talks about the alienation of humans from their labour under capitalism, and deeper than that, our alienation from nature, because we've been forced off of the land and the commons were closed. There are both physical and mental impacts of those kinds of alienation. But with social media, it feels like there’s been a further extension of alienation under capitalism, an alienation from yourself. Foucault’s ideas about how you kind of govern yourself based on what society tells you is normal, is one side of it. But it's now channeled in this really weird and commodified way that I just find so, tragic I guess. I know young people that feel they have to participate in it, but they also don't like it. And I think therein lies the space to end it. 

KS: On a very basic, very human level, it's always distressed me that we live in one of the richest countries in the world and yet, levels of dissatisfaction and mental health issues are just so prevalent. The gap between what capitalism purports to offer and the reality, a life of striving and dissatisfaction.

The challenge then for those of us on the left is being able to kind of put forward a vision of an eco socialist society that can obviously offer a more fulfilling way of life, that it's not just about giving things up, it’s about embracing a different way of being. Those discourses are certainly out there, but how much traction they have beyond the, you know, the already converted I’m not too sure. Change is scary.

I think capitalist cultural institutions have done a really good job of limiting our horizons in terms of what's actually possible. That's a huge tragedy. 

I do feel somewhat hopeful that most people, and as you say, young people with their experiences on the social media front, do realize that our source of joy is not rooted in consumption. 

There’s definitely seeds of possibility out there.