Discursive tensions: Outcomes and rights in educators’ accounts of children’s relaxation

Abstract

In early childhood education and care policy, there are two dominant discourses: ‘investment and outcomes’ and ‘children’s rights’. There is little research on how these discourses play out in educators’ accounts. In this article, the authors examine the case of discourse pertaining to children’s relaxation in early childhood education and care. They demonstrate that Australian relaxation policy for children in early childhood education and care constructs children as passive and incompetent subjects. Some educators reproduce early childhood education and care policy tensions by vacillating between investment-outcomes and children’s rights discourse in their accounts, while other educators deviate from the policy constructions and adopt children’s rights discourse.

Introduction

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) discourses shape educators’ beliefs and understandings of children, and impact educators’ professional identities and pedagogical practices (Cook et al., 2013). Discourses are ways of talking about and understanding the world (Jorgensen and Phillips, 2002), and a ‘dominant discourse’ is a ‘regime of truth’ that conditions how we view the world and what we consider to be ‘true’ (Moss, 2017). Two dominant ECEC discourses are ‘investment and outcomes’, which treats children as ‘becomings’ (future adults) and ECEC as an investment in future citizens, and ‘children’s rights’, which frames children as ‘beings’ in the ‘here and now’ (Cooke et al., 2018; Uprichard, 2008). The latter discourse emerged as a counter to the former; however, both discourses are concurrently dominant. ECEC policy embeds a struggle between these two discourses, and previous research has identified that this duality infuses ECEC policy with contradictory principles and assumptions, which in turn produce inconsistencies in guidelines for pedagogy and care practices. To date, little is known about how these policy tensions affect, and are negotiated by, front-line educators.

This study investigated the impact of these discursive tensions on educators’ modes of relating to children and their practices. It did this by examining the discourses that ECEC educators produce and reproduce by drawing on interviews with educators that asked about the meaning and experiences of relaxation for children. Specifically, we examined the process of educator ‘subjection’ (Bonham and Bacchi, 2017) – that is, we examined how educators construct children’s subject positions (e.g. competent or incompetent subjects), given that how educators conceptualise children directly informs pedagogical and care practices. This article begins by introducing the two dominant ECEC discourses and explaining our focus on children’s relaxation. We outline our research findings, which show that investment-outcomes and children’s rights discourses are reproduced and in tension with one another in Australian ECEC relaxation policy and educators’ accounts of children’s relaxation. Our findings have implications not just for relaxation practices, but also for ECEC practices more broadly, as we identify how ongoing tensions between these influential policy discourses infuse educators’ practices and relations with children.

Investment outcomes and children’s rights: tensions in ECEC discourses

The literature on ECEC discourses describes two dominant approaches to conceptualising children and, although researchers use different terms for these discourses, in this article we refer to them as ‘investment outcomes’ and ‘children’s rights’. We acknowledge that there are many different ECEC discourses and various pedagogical approaches that align, to varying degrees, within and across these two dominant discourses. In this review of the literature, we present the ‘metanarratives’ of these dominant ECEC discourses. There is a large body of literature that focuses on describing and critiquing the dominant investment-outcomes discourse in ECEC and a smaller, but recently growing, literature on the children’s rights discourse in ECEC.

The investment-outcomes discourse frames childhood and ECEC as being important primarily in promoting children’s development into adult citizens. ‘Valuable’ outcomes include children advancing through a developmental trajectory (e.g. socio-emotional, cognitive) that positions them to be productive adults (Fenech, 2011; Jenks, 1983). This discourse gained status from its association with concepts from developmental psychology and economics, and the sense of ‘scientific rationality’ imbued in them (Moss, 2017; Moss et al., 2016). Developmental psychology research into early childhood was considered as foundational to the establishment of a legitimising discourse for the professionalism of women working in ECEC in the 20th century, where historically their work had been undervalued as merely ‘motherly’ duties (Ailwood, 2007). The quantification of developmental outcomes linked to ECEC attendance, combined with the rise of neo-liberalism in the late 20th century, created ideal conditions for the emergence of a metanarrative of ‘quality and high returns’ (Moss, 2017: 14). The investment-outcomes discourse continues to be dominant in ECEC, as governments’ policy agendas are guided by principles of investing in high-quality ECEC to gain the economic and human capital returns measured through children’s developmental outcomes, particularly regarding school readiness (Fenech, 2011; Wood and Hedges, 2016).

Scholars critique the investment-outcomes discourse for its homogenous and ableist conceptualisations of childhood, and problematic rationales for investing in ECEC. Researchers have argued that a singular and homogenous image of ‘the child’ as an irrational and immature ‘human becoming’ fails to reflect the diversity of children’s experiences and capabilities, and the unique value of early childhood separate to its impact on adulthood (James and Prout, 2003). Furthermore, framing early childhood as a homogenous and linear process of development can result in children who do not develop in ‘typical’ ways being labelled as ‘problematic’ (Otterstad and Braathe, 2016). Developmental outcomes are established by a select group of adults positioning children without a voice in the setting of such outcomes (Moss, 2017). Such critiques have provided the foundation for a children’s rights ECEC discourse to emerge.

Children’s rights discourse has emerged, primarily, from critiques of how investment-outcomes discourse generally implies that children are ‘vulnerable objects’ that require adult-led development, and instead foregrounds children’s agency, competency and subjective experiences of the ‘here and now’ in their childhood (Farini, 2019; James and Prout, 2003; Uprichard, 2008). How children’s rights influence policies and curricula is a key focus in the literature. For instance, a recent study by Engdahl (2019) examines how the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has shaped international ECEC policies and curricula. The Australian Early Years Learning Framework (EYLF), for example, is aligned with the Convention’s principles and asserts that children have the right to play and actively participate in their lives (Engdahl, 2019). Such studies adopt the position that children’s rights discourse is widely accepted, but there remains debate around how children’s rights can be best enacted in practice.

The tensions between the two dominant discourses or ‘agendas’ present in ECEC policy have been previously raised (Farini, 2019; Te One, 2004). One of the few studies in which children’s rights in ECEC are labelled as a ‘discourse’ is Te One’s (2004) study, which examines New Zealand’s early childhood policies and documents. Te One (2004) found that despite the strong focus on children’s rights in New Zealand’s early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki, there were also evident tensions with investment-outcomes discourse. Analysis of Te Whāriki identified a lack of clarity as to whether aspirations for children to be competent learners, active participants and contributors to society are valued within the context of ECEC itself, or only insofar as such activity prepares children to become adult citizens in the New Zealand democracy (Te One, 2004). In a similar but more recent study, Farini (2019) analyses England’s Early Years Foundation Stage curriculum and policy documents related to the statutory-required learning outcome ‘Fundamental British Values’. He found that children are paradoxically constructed as both agents in their own education and objects of cultivation for adulthood. Specifically, policy documents frame Fundamental British Values as valuable learning that educators ‘pass down’ to children through adult-led activities, despite such a didactic pedagogical style being at odds with the Early Years Foundation Stage’s focus on supporting children to be critical thinkers and independent learners (Farini, 2019).

Research has also highlighted contradictions in educators’ accounts of children’s rights in ECEC (Kozikoğlu, 2019; Te One, 2011). A study of Turkish preschool teachers’ perspectives on children’s rights found that teachers considered children expressing their views and participating in decision-making processes as key to their rights. However, the teachers in this study described families’ traditional attitudes and children’s developmental characteristics as barriers to their participation in such rights (Kozikoğlu, 2019). Similarly, a New Zealand study of teachers’ perceptions of children’s rights in early childhood settings found that teachers expressed difficulties in balancing the need for routines that supported children’s right to a sense of security (e.g. regular mealtimes) with the need to support children’s right to exercise their agency and make choices (e.g. continue playing instead of eating) (Te One, 2011). These studies illustrate that there can be ideological and practical barriers to supporting children’s rights in ECEC.

In contrast, Giamminuti and See (2017) argue that educators can readily adopt children’s-rights-informed practice. This ethnographic study found that educators adopted resistance-based professionalism by challenging prescriptive elements of the curriculum (the ‘dominant discourse’) and prioritising pedagogical approaches informed by children’s rights. The children’s rights approach was found to shape the educators’ pedagogy of place and space, and design of learning environments to support children’s agency. Whilst this single example shows evidence of how educators’ views of child’s rights impacted their curriculum and learning-environment choices, little is currently known about how conflicting ECEC discourses may be underpinning educators’ accounts of their everyday practices.

Discursive tension in ECEC practice: the case of relaxation provision

This article explores discursive tensions at the level of educators’ accounts of their practice, taking the example of children’s relaxation. In Australia, ECEC services are assessed and rated against the National Quality Standard, which consists of seven quality areas. Quality Area 2: Children’s Health and Safety, Element 2.1.1: ‘Wellbeing and comfort’ requires that ‘each child’s wellbeing and comfort is provided for, including appropriate opportunities to meet each child’s need for sleep, rest and relaxation’ (Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority, 2017: 139; our emphasis). While relaxation is identified as a child need in this policy, there is no definition or guidance on how this need should be supported in practice – a point that we return to in our policy analysis findings. Internationally, children’s relaxation is typically researched through a biomedical lens and conceptualised as a treatment for stress, although, informed by the establishment of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNICEF, 1989) and the sociology of childhood paradigm, recently qualitative studies have investigated children’s perspectives on their experiences (for an overview, see Cooke et al., 2020). The only study that focuses specifically on children’s experiences of relaxation (Cooke et al., 2020) found that there was a discrepancy between the overarching medicalising discourse that governs educators’ practices to support children’s relaxation and children’s accounts of their sensory-rich experiences of relaxation in ECEC. Therefore, we argue that our focus on educators’ accounts of children’s relaxation is important, first, due to the dearth of research on the topic and, second, because the empirical evidence has indicated that children’s relaxation is a site of contention. We therefore unpack educator accounts to examine the discourses on which they draw.

Methodology

Our findings utilise data collected from the study Choosing Rest: Finding Effective Alternatives to Mandatory Rest-Times, which received ethics approval from The University of Queensland [Ethics Approval Number: 2017001866]. This broader study focused on testing the feasibility of implementing an educator professional development program regarding sleep, rest and relaxation in ECEC. One aim of the study was to investigate educators’ experiences and perspectives of (1) rest time, (2) what relaxation means to them, and (3) what relaxation means to children and what children do to relax. We recruited six ECEC services in Brisbane, Australia, including four long day care and two family day care services. Long day care operates in a childcare centre setting while family day care takes place in a registered educator’s home with a small group of children (Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority, 2020). The services were in suburban areas, opened between 6.30 a.m. and 6 p.m., and provided for children aged from birth to five. All of the services implemented a mandatory rest time, which is typical practice for rest provision in ECEC services in Australia (Staton et al., 2017).

In the current study, we draw on seven individual interviews with educators who, at the time of the interviews, had not yet participated in the professional development program. Four of the educators held a Bachelor of Early Childhood Education qualification, a four-year full-time university degree, in line with Australian requirements for early childhood teachers. Three of the educators held a Certificate III in ECEC, a 12- to 18-month full-time technical and further education qualification. Their years of experience working in the sector ranged from 5–10 (n = 4) to 20–30 (n = 2) and over 40 (n = 1).

Informed consent was gained from all of the participants. To protect the participants’ confidentiality, the interviews took place in a space at the ECEC services where the interview could not be overheard by children or other educators. The interviews were semi-structured, lasted between 20 and 46 minutes, and were recorded, transcribed verbatim and de-identified. This article draws on data from the third section of the interviews, where we asked the educators what they thought relaxation means to children and what children do to relax.

Originally, we sought to investigate the key themes that emerged from the educators’ accounts of children’s relaxation via a thematic analysis. There was consensus in the educators’ accounts that they conceptualised children’s relaxation as the absence of stress and provision of support for children’s bodily and behavioural functioning, resonating with physiological and psychological definitions of relaxation (Benson, 1983; Cooke et al., 2020; Lehrer et al., 2007). However, there were conflicting accounts of whether children were ‘active and competent’ or ‘passive and incompetent’ in their ability to relax – and therefore required adult-led intervention to achieve relaxation.

Through rereading the transcripts, another finding emerged, which was not directly aligned with our initial research question. We noticed that the educators were drawing on broader ECEC discourses in their accounts of children’s relaxation. To investigate this, we operationalised Bonham and Bacchi’s (2017) post-structuralist interview analysis (PIA) and, accordingly, adopted the position that interviews are discursive practices. Conducting PIA, the aim is not to ‘discover’ participants’ ‘true’ experiences or perspectives, but rather to reveal how their experiences and perspectives are structured and produced through prevailing discourses – that is, the structured sets of practices through which people know and speak about their worlds.

In our PIA we focused on ‘what is said’ in the interviews, and interrogated what knowledge-making practices make it possible for something to be said (Bonham and Bacchi, 2017). Taking a Foucauldian approach, ‘practices’ encompass what is said and done, governing rules and taken-for-granted assumptions (Bacchi, 2012). Our analysis focuses on a particular dimension of these practices: the process of ‘subjection’, wherein particular understandings of the subjectivities of those individuals about whom a discourse speaks – in our case, children and educators – are produced and reproduced (Bonham and Bacchi, 2017). We saw a focus on subjection as important because educators’ views of children’s subjectivity and their understanding of their own professional identities directly inform educators’ pedagogy and care practices (Cook et al., 2013).

In Australia, ECEC services are required to comply with the National Quality Framework, which encompasses ‘the National Law and National Regulations; the National Quality Standard; an assessment and quality rating process; national approved learning frameworks; a regulatory authority in each state and territory . . . ; a national body – ACECQA’ (Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority, 2017: 8). The national approved learning framework for children aged birth to five is entitled Belonging, Being & Becoming: The Early Years Learning Framework for Australia (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009). We contextualise our PIA with a post-structural discourse analysis of relaxation policy. ‘Relaxation’ is not mentioned in the EYLF, but there are seven references to relaxation in sections pertaining to well-being and comfort in the Guide to the National Quality Framework (Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority, 2017). The Guide supports ECEC services, authorised officers and other regulatory authority staff to understand the National Quality Framework requirements. Drawing on Bacchi and Goodwin’s (2016) work on policy analysis, we examined how relaxation is problematised in the Guide, and how subjects are constructed and agency is assigned therein. In our findings section, we begin with the policy analysis, even though it was a secondary step in our methodology, because it contextualises the subsequent PIA of the educators’ accounts.

Findings

Policy analysis

The influence of both investment-outcomes and children’s rights discourses is evident in the EYLF. It begins with a ‘vision for children’s learning’ in which ‘all children experience learning that is engaging and builds success for life’ (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009: 7). The EYLF posits that ‘belonging’, ‘being’ and ‘becoming’ (the framework’s namesake) are key characteristics of children’s lives. The influence of children’s rights discourse is evident in the definition of ‘being’: the ‘significance of the here and now in children’s lives’. However, tensions with investment-outcomes discourse also arise in the ‘being’ statement: ‘The early childhood years are not solely preparation for the future but also about the present’. Investment-outcomes discourse is apparent in the ‘becoming’ statement: ‘Becoming reflects this process of rapid and significant change that occurs in the early years as young children learn and grow. It emphasises learning to participate fully and actively in society’ (Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations, 2009: 7).

We analysed the sections of the Guide where relaxation is referenced. In contrast to the EYLF where both investment-outcomes and children’s rights discourses are at play, policy pertaining to relaxation in the Guide strongly aligns with an investment-outcomes discourse. Here, child subjects are constructed as requiring intervention from educators in order to experience relaxation. A deep-seated presupposition of this problem representation is that educators are best suited to provide children with relaxation and, furthermore, are knowledgeable subjects of children’s relaxation. The documentation does not elaborate on how educators should ‘provide’ children with relaxation, other than that ‘a range of active and restful experiences throughout the day support children’s individual requirements for health, nutrition, sleep, rest and relaxation’ (Australian Children’s Education & Care Quality Authority, 2017: 143). The counterdiscourse of children’s rights has disrupted the investment-outcomes discourse in the ECEC research literature, practice and policy (e.g. the EYLF), yet it is conspicuously absent in the sections of policy pertaining to children’s relaxation in the Guide.

Post-structuralist interview analysis

Our PIA found that educators were drawing on conflicting discourses in their accounts of children’s subjectivity and their practices of provision for children’s relaxation in ECEC. Recognising that ‘practices’ constitute educators and children as particular kinds of ‘subjects’ (Bacchi, 2012), we argue that educators’ practices of ‘teaching’ children how to relax through educator-led and mandated rest times constitute educators as ‘expert’ subjects and children as ‘incompetent’ subjects.

Vacillating discourse

Below, we present three vignettes that illustrate how the educators vacillated in their subjection of children, from passive and incompetent subjects to active and competent subjects. We have selected the form of vignettes as they show how the educators did not ‘reconcile’ the competing discourses – that is, the educators did not appear to reconcile the incompetent child subject position (situated within an investment-outcomes discourse) and the competent child subject position (situated within a children’s rights discourse) with children having a limited degree of competency. Rather, in the educators’ accounts, we identified ‘back and forth’ patterns of subjection where the educators described children as being incompetent, then competent, then incompetent. This meant that the educators would make a statement that would directly contradict their previous statement. Unlike the subjection of children, which vacillated, the educators’ constructions of their own subject position were more stable, as they consistently described themselves as actively and knowledgably ‘providing’ children with relaxation.

When asked about her service’s philosophy, Stephanie stated that ‘We like to give [children] a lot of choice, so that they sort of own their own play’, indicating an aspiration for children’s-rights-informed practice. Yet when she was asked about children’s relaxation, she shifted into an investment-outcomes discourse as she framed children as passive and incompetent subjects who were ‘given’ relaxation through educator-led rest-time practices: ‘They probably think what we have been giving them [at rest time] is relaxation. Like we put on the quieter music and they lie down on their beds. That’s probably what they think relaxation is’.

Stephanie’s description of children being ‘given’ relaxation resonates with Farini’s (2019) policy analysis findings of children being portrayed as being ‘given’ Fundamental British Values by competent and knowledgeable adults. However, Stephanie later went on to describe how children take an active role in initiating their own relaxation experiences, without prompting from educators:

But sometimes I think at other times in the day the children do need to relax. Like they will grab a book and be on the sofa looking at a book if they’re a bit tired . . . You even see it a bit in the afternoon when it’s nearly their going-home time. Some of them will sit at the fence, looking at the traffic, waiting for their parents to come.

This account of children demonstrating initiative and competency in their ability to relax was again contradicted when Stephanie shifted back to the initial investment-outcomes discourse following a discussion of educator-led rest times that require children to lie down: ‘I believe in – children have very busy, busy lives. It’s actually good for them to learn to relax, just to slow down for a bit’.

Kelsey defined her service’s philosophy as ‘child-centred’ and ‘family-focused’. The ‘back and forth’ between the passive-incompetent and active-competent child subject positions that was present in Stephanie’s accounts was also echoed in Kelsey’s. Kelsey initially described children as incompetent in their ability to understand what relaxation means, and as having difficulty in achieving relaxation through stillness:

I’m not sure that all of them really understand that term ‘relaxation’ . . . Having that quiet time and calm, I think they can grasp those notions. You know, rest time, they know that it’s a time to rest, which is either resting your body or resting your mind. But it’s not necessarily being still, okay? Because that’s what they find hard.

However, later in the interview, Kelsey referred to an active-competent child positionality and recognised children’s heterogeneity (James and Prout, 2003) when she stated that different children can experience relaxation in different ways. Yet she then shifted back to a somewhat ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach when she asserted that children should ‘learn’ to relax by being still and alone. This account is contrary to research (Cooke et al., 2020) which finds that some children associate relaxation with active play with others:

[Relaxation] could be on their beds reading a book. You know, even colouring and that kind of thing, drawing can be really relaxing too . . . I honestly think that looks different for every child, and it might not be being still. But I think it’s being okay to be happy in your own – I guess just in your own company . . . I think learning to be calm and to relax is just being able to be still in your own self and your own mind and not have to have those interactions constantly with others.

Near the end of the interview, Kelsey proposed an active-competent – and learning-collaborator – child subject position, contrasting again with her earlier accounts:

That would be my biggest thing, is to get some feedback from [the children] and to discuss and talk about what they would really like to see and value about what we do [for relaxation] . . . It’s that brainstorming, sharing the ideas, and then working out how we could implement and put some things in place if they did have some different suggestions.

Similar to the findings of Kozikoğlu’s (2019) Turkish study on preschool teachers’ views of children’s rights, there is a tension throughout Kelsey’s account of wanting children to have a say on matters that affect them while being constrained by children’s developmental characteristics.

Kim described her service’s philosophy as focused on creating a ‘welcoming’ and ‘community-based’ environment. Kim’s initial response to being asked about children’s relaxation indicated that she thought that children lack awareness of their own relaxation. In this account, children are incompetent and ‘vulnerable’ in their lack of bodily awareness, but they may ‘become’ competent through adult instruction (Uprichard, 2008):

I think obviously they associate sleep or rest time with relaxation . . . I don’t know if they’re aware really of their body being relaxed, so maybe they – we have to make – I think maybe activities where they were made to acknowledge their body being relaxed would help them understand what relaxation is because at the moment they might be sitting down reading a book or sitting down quietly but they don’t realise that they’re actually relaxing.

Later in the interview, Kim explained how she conceptualised children’s relaxation as a self-regulation skill that children ‘need to learn’, implying that children lack this skill. Kim later contradicted herself by describing a child who successfully initiated their own self-regulation. Kim’s last sentence again implies that she perceived her role as an educator as being the catalyst for children learning how to relax or label their self-regulation as relaxation, rather than children already possessing this ‘skill’. In Kim’s account, children are, paradoxically, ‘educational agents’ and ‘objects for cultivation’ (Farini, 2019):

Self-regulation – yeah, self-regulating the body, more being aware of within themselves. When children are upset or angry, they need to learn, they need to know when and what to do for themselves to feel better, so take themselves away from a situation, go into a calm spot, go to a calm place to cool down. Little Hector, when he’s upset, he knows that he wants to be alone; he goes into that little hideout area there or over there and he stays there by himself until he calms down, and then he’s fine. So, I think it’s just getting them to learn within themselves what their body signs are.

This account appears to draw on investment-outcomes discourse, as relaxation is linked to the cognitive skill of ‘self-regulation’ and is implied to be a developmental stage to be ‘achieved’ (Fenech, 2011).

Educators describing competent child agents relaxing

In contrast to the previously described educators, who went ‘back and forth’ in their accounts of children’s subjectivity, Sarah and Nadia were consistent in their accounts of children as active and competent subjects, and – in their role as educators – conceptualised themselves as ‘supporters’ of children’s relaxation, rather than ‘providers’.

Sarah explained her service’s philosophy as being ‘sparked from children’s interests’. She described an active-competent child subject position in her accounts of children’s relaxation. In response to the researcher’s questions, ‘What would you say relaxation might mean for children? Do you have some ideas about that?’, Sarah commented:

Yeah . . . I think listening to music, and sometimes we put on multicultural music, which they love to dance to. So, that’s good fun. Also, just having uninterrupted periods of time where they can play . . . It might be outside, like we were yesterday, or it might be inside . . . they can come back to it at another stage and continue on with their work that they were doing. So, it’s valuing what they do . . .

I think it’s important that we have close supervision to assist with them making friends and assist with – if they’re having struggles with getting on with the other children, I think that we need to step in at times to support that, so that they feel safe and secure in this environment and they can make friends . . . children enjoy group times; that’s relaxing for them. Reading a story in book corner is often relaxing and they love this swing . . . you’ll notice some of the children will spend a lot of time maybe in the mud pit or in the sandpit. So, that’s obviously a great interest of theirs, so they continue to explore in those sorts of areas.

In Sarah’s account, children are competent in their diverse interests (James and Prout, 2003) and preferred types of relaxation, and she conceptualises her educator role as supporting children’s relaxation rather than ‘providing’ it. Like the educators in Giamminuti and See’s (2017) study, Sarah draws on a children’s rights discourse, which shapes how she sets up learning environments to support children’s agency. This account also resonates with relaxation accounts provided by children attending ECEC (Cooke et al., 2020), where children reported diverse relaxation preferences, ranging from active play with others to passive play by themselves.

Nadia described her service’s philosophy as being ‘all about the child’. Nadia’s description of children’s relaxation is in line with an active-competent child subject position, as she explained how children will take the initiative to employ different strategies to manage their stress and emotions:

Sometimes, they’ll take themselves off to go and sit in a little quiet spot. Other times, they might do a repetitive action. I’ve seen some of them do – if something’s stressing them out, they’ll go and do something repetitively. That will generally get them into that zone almost. I’ll see it on their face where they’re just – and you’re, like, ‘You’ve got in the zone’. There are kids that have their teddies – that need their teddies to relax. Some of them will just go and lie down. I mean, I’m very open here. So, if they’re – they know that if they’re having a full-on day and something’s stressing them out, they’re quite happy or quite welcome to go and lie down on the lounge.

I don’t make them stay up. If I see someone sitting off to the side, I’ll generally say to them, ‘Are you feeling a bit overwhelmed or are you just – want a quiet moment?’ They’re, like, ‘Yeah’. So, I just let them go, and they come and join us whenever they want to . . . I’ve had kids running around here and there’ll be one sitting in that tube and I’ll go to check on them and they’re just having a bit of quiet time, but because they’re – I suppose for them in their peripheral vision they’ve got the tube around them, so they feel safe.

In Nadia’s account, she describes her role as an educator to be a supporter rather than a provider of children’s relaxation, as some of the previous accounts from the educators indicated.

Conclusion

The aim of our study is not to make recommendations on how to best implement practice for children’s relaxation, but rather we aim to highlight the discursive barriers to such practice that have been typically overlooked: how educators can inadvertently, and concurrently, both reinforce and contradict investment-outcomes and children’s rights discourses. We found that Australian ECEC policy pertaining to children’s relaxation produces a ‘passive-recipient’ subjectivity for children and ‘competent-provider’ subjectivity for educators, in line with an investment-outcomes discourse. Children’s rights discourse is conspicuously absent in the ECEC policy pertaining to children’s relaxation. The policy’s subjection of educators as competent-provider subjects (in regard to their provision of children’s relaxation), while not providing any information or instruction on children’s relaxation in the early years, potentially fails to facilitate educators’ critical reflection on their relaxation practices, which would be needed for improvement of practice.

Practices pertaining to relaxation present an interesting focus to examine educators’ subjection of children. We found that some educators reproduced the ECEC policy contradictions while others pushed beyond these contradictions and consistently reproduced children’s rights discourse in their accounts. By highlighting how educators vacillated between investment-outcomes and children’s rights discourses, we seek to draw attention to how children’s rights are discursively produced. We found that educators would make statements that would directly align with a children’s rights discourse, which framed children as competent and active subjects, and then immediately follow with a direct contradiction, which framed children as incompetent and passive subjects. While the literature is conclusive in framing best practice in ECEC as informed by children’s rights, debate emerges in relation to how to best implement children’s rights (Giamminuti and See, 2017; Kozikoğlu, 2019). However, we argue that it is important first to recognise that children’s rights are discursively produced in policy and educators’ accounts and practices. This recognition of the complexity and significance of the language that is used to talk about children and educators’ subjectivity is needed to support critical reflection and practice improvement. For example, previous research on children’s accounts of relaxation (Cooke et al., 2020) recommends that educators consult with children in ECEC regarding their relaxation preferences, in line with children’s-rights-informed practice. Yet this study indicates that it is unlikely that educators will implement such a recommendation in practice if they, consciously or unconsciously, reproduce investment-outcomes discourse and assume that young children are not competent enough to understand relaxation and are too passive to initiate relaxation experiences for themselves.

The views expressed by the educators in our small sample are not just relevant to their individual experiences, as our PIA approach posits that ‘what is said’ in an interview is informed by broader knowledge-making practices (Bonham and Bacchi, 2017). We found that the educators’ self-contradicting accounts of children’s subjectivity were shaped by the polarising and dominant ECEC discourses of investment outcomes and children’s rights. While other research has documented how competing ECEC discourses are present in government policy agendas and curricula (Farini, 2019; Te One, 2004), our study makes a unique contribution to the literature by drawing on accounts from ECEC educators to illustrate how competing ECEC discourses, and their associated childhood ideologies, impact educators’ professional identities and daily pedagogy and care practices. In this article, we have demonstrated that, in the absence of pedagogical guidance for provision of children’s relaxation in ECEC, educators instead ‘rely’ on conflicting and dominant ECEC discourses, as present in the Guide to the National Quality Framework.