Timing Childhoods: The Alternative Reading of Childhood Development

• In Event: 14.032 - Childhood and Time: Rethinking Notions of Temporality in Early Childhood Education

Abstract

This paper interrogates childhood by rethinking time and temporality through the lens of the new materialist turn. It challenges and unsettles the binaries between the discursive and material, and the subject and object, as embedded in childhood and early years settings. The paper argues that an alternative, resistant reading of childhood and child development emerges through new materialist and discursive entanglements, and by utilising philosophy as a method. The problem of ‘childhood and time’ is that the time of childhood is invented as both a ‘duration’ and an ‘occasion’: childhood is measured, tweaked and adjusted, and timed.
The new materialist turn is relevant to childhoods and early years settings. Bennett’s (2010) thinking about the inorganic, non-human illustrates this in its rejection of the subject/matter (subject/object) binary. Bennett describes vibrant matter as things, non-human objects, that have agency. Such inorganic matter has vibrancy, and these ‘things’ can be ignored by subjects, or used. All things and subjects are interconnected, as they share a common world (Taylor, 2013). Such experiences of power and force can be traced in early childhood centres, with toys and ‘things’, and stories that children listen to and share. Stories such as Pinocchio or Peter Pan embody the notions of vibrant matter, relational practice and connectedness between looking after ‘things’, and the subjectivities of matter. The characters in these stories perform the vibrancy of matter, the agency of the inorganic, how ‘matter’ impacts upon ‘matter’ and ‘subjects’ alike. No longer is it clear who is ‘matter’ and what is a ‘subject’, and vice versa. In Peter Pan time and temporality becomes the elusive element. He does not grow, nor develop: there is a denial of development in Neverland, and time is only a far-far away concept, and yet every ‘child’ and living being is reminded about time by the constant ticking of the clock swallowed by the crocodile’s body. These stories are legitimated in discourses that function within a certain space/place. Pinocchio and Peter Pan perform the ideas of vibrancy, thing-hood, subjectivity and plasticity of matter.
The temporality of ‘timing childhoods’ transforms childhoods into a ticking clock. Childhoods operate within binaries of a Cartesian heritage, and adults, and subsequent policies, are concerned with the notions of measurement, ‘the next step’, and ‘correct’ and ‘right’ timing. This paper offers an alternative, new materialist, reading of child development. This new scholarship challenges established ways of thinking of/about childhood and development, which perpetuate inequalities, homogenize children, and create spaces for essentializing childhoods. Using philosophy as a method to challenge ‘timing childhood’ foregrounds epistemological, ontological, ethical and political notions to re-think how childhoods are conceptualised and dissected, distinguished and ‘timed’. As popular culture texts tell stories of the temporality of childhood, this paper theorises childhood and time, and temporality, in the urban place/space, using ‘philosophy as a method’.

Author

• Marek Tesar, The University of Auckland