Thriving and surviving? The incredible problem of constructions of normality and Otherness in early childhood settings

Abstract

This article explores what it means today for children to survive, thrive and reach their full potential – aspirations set out nearly 25 years ago as rights in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. Espoused in the principles of the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand, the spirit and intent of these aspirations are undermined by a range of normalizing strategies endemic to The Incredible Years behaviour management programme imported to promote effective management of challenging behaviour in young children. We draw here on the philosophies of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault to question the normalization and consequent othering of children and childhoods, problematizing what it is to be ‘normal’. We confront government ‘solutions’ for education driven more by economic rationality than by educational concern for the complexities of the early childhood context. Our analysis of the normalization of childhoods and the government of teachers as ‘behaviour managers’ culminates in a rupturing of normalizing networks and highlights possible resistances and openings, towards surviving and thriving, and potential.

Introduction

Nearly 25 years ago, the world made a promise to children … that we would do everything in our power to protect and promote their rights to survive and thrive, to learn and grow, to make their voices heard and to reach their full potential. (United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), 2014)

On 6 April 1993, Aotearoa New Zealand ratified the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC), a convention that enshrines a number of basic rights for children, that is, those under the age of 18 years. The UNCRC promotes children’s input into their daily environment, regardless of ‘race, religion or abilities’ (Article 2), recognizing their right to their nationality and to their family (Article 8), that their rights will be ‘respected, protected and fulfilled’. Adults are to be primarily concerned with making decisions in the ‘best interests of children’, and even considering how their decisions will affect children (Article 3). Children are to be free to think and believe what they want (Article 14), to be informed and to express themselves, and to take responsibility for respecting the rights of others (Article 13). Children should be encouraged to achieve and reach high levels in education (Article 28), and this education ‘should develop each child’s personality, talents and abilities to the fullest’ (Article 29). Children’s rights are to include relaxing and playing, as well as learning about their own and others’ cultures, and enjoying recreational and artistic activities (Articles 30 and 31). Children should not be exploited, abused, harmed or taken advantage of (Articles 32–36), including being treated in ways that might ‘harm their welfare and development’ (UNICEF, n.d.). In short, it protects their rights to survive, to thrive and to reach their full potential.

What, we wonder, might these aspirations mean after nearly 25 years: for children, and for teachers charged with upholding the UNCRC, in early childhood settings. The Convention provides the focus for our analysis in this article, particularly the rights that relate to children’s education and their freedom to be and to express themselves. In this article, we explore ideas about surviving, thriving and achieving potential, by questioning constructions of childhoods and Otherness and by problematizing what it is to be ‘normal’. We confront societal expectations of children in early childhood settings and government ‘solutions’ for education driven by economic rationality. Education is a contestable field – particularly at the level of early childhood where significant impacts are made on young lives. Faced with multiplicity and difference – intellectual, cultural, physical, experiential (and a host of other adjectives) – teachers are right to be suspicious of simple solutions and may in fact be better off with more complicated, messy philosophical engagements to avoid unnecessary, maybe even harmful, normalizations of childhoods and children’s behaviour.

Our concerns in this article are with the normalization and consequent othering of children, and the impact that this might have on their survival, thriving and ability to express their views and to reach their full potential. Concurrently, we are concerned with the government of adults in relation to the idea of the child’s potential. Parents and teachers are expected to make this potentiality happen and are therefore objects of a range of interventions aimed at ensuring that they are well equipped, to ‘develop’ children’s potential. The aim of this article is to challenge ourselves as adults and particularly as teachers to think in different ways about children and about what it is for them to be ‘normal’.

We tackle the problem of children being normalized and othered through the example of The Incredible Years (TIY) behaviour management programme. TIY was imported to Aotearoa New Zealand to promote the effective management of challenging behaviour in all children, but specifically in children from particular communities who are seen to be failing in education (see, for instance, Ministry of Education, 2013). We begin the article by exploring the way UNCRC aspirations are embedded in the national early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand, in stark contrast with the more recent introduction of TIY. The theoretical work of Julia Kristeva and Michel Foucault then foregrounds an examination of the possible purpose and impact of Government’s energetic investment in children’s ‘incredible years’, with a particular interest in the relationship between the programme, conceptions and treatments of childhoods, and the national early childhood curriculum, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996). In conclusion, we offer ideas on rethinking childhoods and thriving and surviving, inside the current educational discourse.

The Aotearoa New Zealand landscape

Te Whāriki

Since 1996, early childhood settings, teachers and academics in Aotearoa New Zealand have been both guided and challenged by the early childhood curriculum framework, Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996). Developed in the era of the ratification of the UNCRC, Te Whāriki embodies the Convention’s articles in its four foundational principles woven throughout the curriculum: Empowerment – Whakamana, Holistic Development – Kotahitanga, Family and Community – Whānau Tangata and Relationships – Ngā Hononga. ‘To learn and develop to their potential’, Te Whāriki states in an introduction to the principle of Empowerment – Whakamana, ‘children must be respected and valued as individuals’. And, further embracing the aims of the UNCRC, ‘[t]heir rights to personal dignity, to equitable opportunities for participation, to protection from physical, mental, or emotional abuse and injury, and to opportunities for rest and leisure must be safeguarded’ (p. 40).

Te Whāriki (Ministry of Education, 1996) argues that thriving, for infants, depends on establishing an ‘intimate, responsive, and trusting relationship with at least one other person’, emphasizing the importance of these relationships for ‘identity and the strong sense of self-worth necessary for them to become confident in relationships and as learners’ (p. 22). Toddlers, too, ‘thrive on opportunities and on being encouraged into exploration and creativity’ (p. 23). Children are to become ‘competent and confident learners and communicators, healthy in mind, body, and spirit’ and ‘secure in their sense of belonging and in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society’ (p. 9). They are to be encouraged to express themselves, make decisions and be involved in relationships that support their thriving and surviving.

Dramatic policy shifts and developments have punctuated the educational landscape since the ratification of the UNCRC and Te Whāriki. The changing face of society and early childhood education, in what Bauman (2009) calls the uncertain era of liquid modernity (short-term commitments, simplified, standardized outcomes and social and economic unpredictability), permeates early childhood settings throughout Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. It plays out in the very visible focus on economic growth and the increasing privatization of early childhood, stirring academics to (a) call for urgent and critical reconceptualizations of childhood (Duhn, 2008; May, 2014; Mitchell, 2010; Taylor, 2011; Tesar, 2014) and (b) take issue with the private provision of early childhood education (Mitchell, 2014; Whyte, 2015), the value of scientific preparation and measurement of children’s learning and outcomes (Hannigan, 2013) and with the problematic notion of ‘quality’ in early childhood education (Dahlberg et al., 2013; Dalli et al., 2011; Miller et al., 2012). Recently, these critiques have been identified as a source of concern for a government advisory group (Ministry of Education, 2014), focusing on the implementation of Te Whāriki in this contemporary landscape.

Te Whāriki has been a witness to societal and political developments and debates, and to what can be seen as ever more unequal childhoods (Lareau, 2003), with the imperative to survive and thrive now permeating family life and parental expectations of education. The perceived need to ‘develop children’s potential’ even among families struggling to survive has become both distorted and affirmed through shifts in orientations towards children and their childhoods. Te Whāriki performs a kind of resistance to these shifts (Tesar, 2015) in its elevation of local and culturally important knowledges and in its refusal to prescribe universal techniques and strategies for all early childhood settings. Although it is the case that all licensed early childhood services are required to follow the curriculum document (Ministry of Education, 2008), crucially, Te Whāriki is non-prescriptive, allowing for meaningful pedagogies to be developed within and for each local early childhood setting.

TIY

TIY is an early intervention programme originating in the United States, rolled out in Aotearoa New Zealand under the Ministry of Education umbrella programme, Positive Behaviour for Learning (PB4L). The Ministry of Education (2013) claims that positive behaviour ‘is a prerequisite to improving the engagement and achievement of our children and young people’ (p. 4). TIY offers programmes for parents, teachers and children, focusing on play, socializing, relationships, language and behaviour. The parent-dedicated programme is to help parents ‘build positive relationships with their children and develop strategies to manage problem behaviour’ (Ministry of Education, 2013: 20). In this article, though, the analysis is primarily concerned with the teacher-dedicated programme, Incredible Years Teacher, in its specific focus on providing teachers with ‘approaches to help turn disruptive behaviour around and create a more positive learning environment for their students. The programme is for teachers of children aged 3–8 years’ (Ministry of Education, 2013: 18). Teachers learn about establishing relationships, using incentives, reinforcement and teaching children self-control.

The TIY website provides research and resources for parents, teachers, schools and researchers. For teachers, these include a range of PDF posters that promote effective teaching through the purchase of TIY resources and a range of free download resources – particularly behaviour charts to encourage desirable behaviours, such as sitting ‘properly’. TIY researchers report enhanced ‘outcomes for children in terms of peer relationship improvements, school readiness outcomes and reduction of aggressive behaviours in the classroom’ (Webster-Stratton and Reid, 2009: 247). Teachers who attended Incredible Years Teacher workshops reported that they were more likely to use behaviour management strategies in their centre and that they were satisfied with the experience of the programme (Fergusson et al., 2013).

The particular behavioural focus of the Incredible Years Teacher in Aotearoa New Zealand indicates ‘an increasing focus in New Zealand health, education and social policy on the identification, implementation and evaluation of programmes and interventions aimed at the prevention, treatment and management of conduct problems in young people’ (Fergusson et al., 2013: 51). Webster-Stratton and Reid (2009) emphasize a connection between ‘early-onset conduct problems (e.g., high rates of aggression, noncompliance, oppositional behaviours, emotional dysregulation)’ and ‘underachievement, school dropout, and eventual delinquency’ (p. 245). Incredible Years Teacher programmes then focus on how teacher behaviour can prevent and treat what is identified as problem child behaviour. The idea that good learning is a result of good behaviour, and that problem behaviour can be unlearnt, highlights the programme’s highly behavioural psychological underpinnings. Importantly, though, Incredible Years Teacher, as a sub programme of TIY, is not simply a behavioural programme and neither is it just for 3- to 8-year-olds. ‘Programmes cover a wide age range, from birth to 12 years of age, have demonstrated good outcomes with people from a variety of cultural groups and are effective when delivered in everyday service settings’ (Hutchings, 2012: 227).

In contrast to the non-prescriptive approach of Te Whāriki, adults who participate in TIY programmes are expected to develop particular ‘child-directed play and social coaching skills’ (Webster-Stratton and Reid, 2009: 249). Such skills are claimed to address a number of issues, including conduct problems where ‘adults cannot get children to do what they want’ (p. 260) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), where children are ‘significantly delayed in their play skills and social skills’ (p. 262). In articulations of TIY, learning is compartmentalised and individual types of learning are expected to occur in isolation, generating tensions with the holistic approach of Te Whāriki and the principle of ako (Te Kete Ipurangi, 2014), both of which portray teaching and learning as reciprocal, messy and dependent on the particularities and relationships within each individual context. Such complexity is well documented – see, for example, James and Prout (1997), who argue against collectivizing childhoods; Jenks’ (2005) call for hearing childhood challenges as a critique of the ‘current order’ rather than as disrupting expectations of normality; Mitchell’s (2010) explication of childhoods serving multiple roles, as dependents, learners and citizens, a discussion to which Tesar (2014) adds the notions of the child victim, supporter and rebel; and Taylor’s (2011, 2013) retheorization of childhoods as nature–culture entanglements.

Kristeva and Foucault

Conceptions of developmental, practical and behavioural dimensions of childhood depend on the particular lens through which each is constructed. Our purpose is not to determine what childhood is, but to continually question it, particularly in relation to what it means to be ‘normal’ or, more specifically, what it means to be ‘abnormal’. Julia Kristeva’s (1991) work with the notion of the foreigner and foreignness provides a useful philosophical lens to help us think about childhood Otherness and normality, focusing on children’s co-existence, their sense of belonging and their sense of community, in early childhood settings. Kristeva (1991) asks whether it is even possible for us ‘to live intimately and subjectively’ with others, ‘without ostracism but also without leveling’ (p. 2). Teachers, children and other adults in early childhood settings live their daily lives intimately and subjectively, eating, sharing, learning about physical and emotional survival and developing skills and understandings, together. In such situations, children might be seen as in some naïve state of acceptance, unbothered by social complexities or exclusionary practices, focusing instead on following their own agenda and relational connections without ostracism or levelling. But such engagement is embedded within wider educational social discourses, implicating children from an early age in complex and myriad perceptions and responses – particularly those of adults purportedly complying with UNCRC prescriptions, but all the while promoting their own versions of children’s ‘best interests’ and ‘potential’.

Perhaps adults perceive children as already possessing and accepting what Kristeva suggests: an awareness of their own ‘incoherences and abysses’, their own ‘strangenesses’ (p. 2), and maybe children know on some level, ‘those foreigners that we all recognize ourselves to be’ (p. 3). Kristeva’s (1991) theories highlight possible implications for children, of adults’ conceptions and treatments of them and of their behaviour in early childhood settings. In suggesting that it is only by recognizing the foreignness in ourselves that we are able to accept differences of others, Kristeva reminds teachers of the need for critical and personal humility – as a prerequisite for a ‘lack of knowing’ in determining particular pedagogical practices (Todd, 2004). We don’t really know how children in the early childhood setting perceive themselves in relation to the others, or what they see as appropriate behaviour – for one another, themselves or their teachers, or the degree to which they are bothered by issues like ethnic differences, socio-economic status or gender stereotypes.

Kristeva’s (1991) metaphorical foreigner, a confluence of the collective foreigner experiences from her psychoanalytic practice, helps us to understand the complexities of the child Other. Kristeva (1991) describes foreignness as both elation and despair. In a state of ‘perpetual transience’ (p. 4), there is an intoxicating freedom in breaking away and in aiming unstoppably for a perhaps inaccessible dream, a beyond. At the same time, vulnerability and a fear of rejection drive the foreigner, humble and sensitive, to hide behind a mask. This can be a space of comfort, of being otherwise, and the foreigner, seemingly always elsewhere, but also nowhere, can be at once blissfully happy and ‘exquisitely depressed’ (p. 11) in this state of abandon, thinking and believing, developing and learning, as they want. For the child Other, blissful elated happiness might arise in exceeding, tearing away from, normal, expected boundaries, accompanied by the despair of belonging nowhere and to no-one. Strange is, perhaps, a new normal.

Foucault’s interest in the rationality of government, or governmentality, helps to explicate ‘normal’. Through this notion, he reveals the ways in which the psychological sciences have operated in a political apparatus to create particular kinds of children and, in this context, teachers, that are known in particular ways and that know themselves in particular ways. Foucault’s notion of government is described as ‘the conduct of conduct’ (Gordon, 1991: 2), an activity that includes ‘the attempt to shape, guide or affect not only the conduct of people but, also, the attempt to constitute people in such ways that they can be governed’ (Marshall, 1996a: 112). Following Foucault, power and knowledge may be examined for the ways in which the actions of the child are acted upon by institutions such as early childhood education and its associations with developmental objectives. These relationships may be understood in terms of how the normalizing of children is legitimated (Peters et al., 2000), whether for political expediency or for economic benefits, that accrue from reducing the visibility of abnormal conduct.

Children and teachers experience normalization through, for instance, systems of rewards and punishments. In a neoliberal paradigm, these experiences do more than regulate the child’s behaviour; they discipline the child and adult in managing their own selves, ‘normalized to lead useful, docile and practical lives’ (Marshall and Marshall, 1997: 46). There is clearly a tension in having one’s behaviour managed in order to become self-managing – a problem for education in the production of self-potent citizens. Normalizing childhood in a neoliberal paradigm involves the efficient use of behavioural and social learning theory to produce the kind of child ‘potential’ that keeps safe the political and economic centrality of capitalism (Marshall, 1996b) – children who will become employable and not a fiscal burden.

Foucault’s (1991) work has been central to a critique of the structures, or disciplinary mechanisms, that limit the purposes of the production of a particular kind of normal child. ‘The old market of children was organised around monastic and military techniques, linked to familial and religious, police and judicial authority. The new looked to medicine, psychiatry, and pedagogy for its methods’ (Donzelot, 1979: 105). Of particular interest is not that the subject is constructed, as already outlined above, but rather that there is a tendency to assume that one given construction should abide. Evidence of normal childhoods permits the functioning of medical, moral and pedagogical knowledge that does not just observe norms, it constructs the norms to be observed (see, for instance, Foucault, 1994a, 1994b, 1994c).

Behaviourism and social learning theory make it possible to talk about the subject in certain ways, in which ‘the idea of progress, determinism, hierarchy, and universalism dominate’ (Cannella, 1997: 52). How behavioural norms act upon adults and children is a concern when norms are so entrenched as to appear natural. But it is deeply troubling for some, when accepted norms of behaviour are subjected to critique – will any kind of behaviour be acceptable on account of children’s rights? Making room for the foreign, Other, or unruly child in the official discourse creates tensions with the rights framework of the UNCRC. Similarly, any prescription for allowing children to achieve their potential in an ‘abnormal’ or ungoverned way is likely to generate an alert among the risk averse about the presence and diagnosis of abnormality (Rose, 1996), as

[w]hat looks like the apex of humanism is in fact the pinnacle of human submission: children are educated to become precisely what society expects of them … Any form of government or social transformation becomes possible with individuals who have experienced this never-ending process of adaptation. (Ellul, 1964: 348)

Normalizing behaviour and Otherness

Foucault’s work on governmentality provides an important approach to the ways in which programmes work on individuals and communities. In terms of the normalizing conditions that constrain children’s potential, the importance of evidence-based outcomes raises two concerns: the purpose and nature of the evidence gathered, and its use in managing behaviour and facilitating exploitation. There is, we argue, a strong connection between managing children’s behaviour and harnessing children as present or future human resources – a connection that underpins evidence-based, quality assured, economically oriented, educational purposes and outcomes.

The value of programmes such as TIY for policy makers is the availability of evidence that early intervention, detection and response to young children’s behaviours, is effective at reducing later instances of crime, substance abuse and a host of associated societal burdens (see, for instance, Hutchings, 2012). Evidence, in this instance, means that the programme has over 30 years of internal and independent randomized trials. In Wales, research indicates that positive outcomes included ‘significant improvements in child and parenting behaviour, parental stress and depression’ (Hutchings, 2012: 228). The evidence-based orientation of the Incredible Years Teacher programme relies on standardization; so it is vital that the evidence shows consistency in outcomes, meaning that children’s individual behaviour and changes in behaviour need to be normalized (Karlsson et al., 2014).

Kristeva’s (1991) ideas are useful here in suggesting that the foreigner (i.e. the ‘problematic’ child) ‘disappears when we all acknowledge ourselves as foreigners, unamenable to bonds and communities’ (p. 1). Early childhood settings can be, and frequently are, viewed as a communities, connected groups of children, families, teachers, other adults, and, following Taylor’s (2011) nature–culture perspective, pets and other things involved in the setting. Te Whāriki’s focus on community in one of its principles (Ministry of Education, 1996) mirrors a strong calling in the early childhood discourse for a sense of community, participation in the community, listening to community (Arndt, 2012; Ritchie and Rau, 2006). Community, according to Te Whāriki, involves practical, temporal, divergent and challenging relationships and experiences that promote the principles of the UNCRC.

James and Prout (1997) argue that children are ‘agents in, as well as products of, social processes’ (p. x) in their setting. This implicates the realities of social processes in each localized early childhood setting, governed by adults, teachers and families who normalize, categorize, accept or other children and their behaviour. Children may be othered, through a Kristevan (1991) lens, as enemies, ‘monsters’, that disrupt the daily routine, creating problems that need to be dealt with. Or, alternatively, romanticized as cute, precious, loveable, to be protected, observed and excused, at all cost. For child-foreigners, othered within their early childhood setting, Kristeva’s positioning is particularly salient, as it ruptures the normality of accepted adult behaviour, exposing the dangers of assuming that strategies and practices that work in one situation or setting will work equally well in another. The child Other demands that we reconsider childhood, to ‘think again about the moral basis of our social bond’ (Jenks, 2005: 150), as dynamic, complex and unpredictable.

In promoting TIY programme, the Ministry of Education (2013) acknowledges that problem behaviour should not be located in the individual, that it is environmental. Although one of the underlying principles is that individual children are not the problem, the construction of children as high risk and the focus on normalizing the ways in which individual children behave are all arguably individualizing and often marginalizing perspectives on a child’s educational behaviour. Positive outcomes in this view are measured in terms of changes in an individual’s behaviour, rather than of wider changes in pedagogies, curriculum, routines, teaching and strategies, or, even more critically, teacher orientations and discursive constructions of childhoods and the children in their setting. Defining positive outcomes so narrowly overlooks the importance of the greater community, of reciprocal relations and of shared rights and responsibilities. The focus on short-term instrumental solutions is blind to the idea of childhoods as evolving and in continuous construction, particularly where Kristeva’s ‘foreigner’ appears. The Ministry of Education appears to buy into TIY because it offers ‘the shaping of childhood in the production of citizenship’ (McGillivray, 1997: 1), a process in which a central role for government is to measure and manage the population and in which citizenship is outcomes-based and economically and politically driven.

To examine the UNCRC promises through TIY, we need to recognize that teachers, as behaviour managers, want to manage their own behaviour. In TIY, teachers begin to consider themselves as potential maximizers, a consideration evident when teachers talk about their role as helping children to reach their potential (or some variation), just as teachers have taken on the language of lifelong learning in the ‘learnification’ of the educational discourse (Biesta, 2014). The tendency to adopt new terms uncritically is an element of the problem here, strengthening the need for critical engagements with localized cultural and educational specificities and meanings. How often do teachers ask ‘what does the word mean: potential?’ as asked of a teacher in the movie Boy (Waititi, 2010). Programmes such as TIY, as part of a wider apparatus, work upon the selves of adults and children in ways that seem to discourage any problematizing of ‘potential’.

Talk of one’s potential is a technology of self for adult and child, through which they adjust their behaviour in relation to their potential as human capital, asking whether they are being productive and/or producing productive beings. Within this context, the thriving child is a child who does not have a right to behave, but rather has an obligation to be managed in his or her behaviour and to behave in ways that reinforce rather than question the norms of childhood. While we admit that there is a place for the management of behaviour and for elements of behaviourism, we urge scrutiny of the extent to which it might predominate thinking about education and, in particular, about the relationships between teaching and learning, ako, and the purpose of education.

Our central concern, in relation to the UNCRC promises and to Te Whāriki, stems from children being subjected to behavioural management techniques through their experience of early education. In other words, and despite the rhetoric, the problem behaviour is still located within children and young people; difficult and disruptive behaviour is clearly attributed to students and, according to the central principle of PB4L, is something that they can ‘unlearn’. Ministry information about PB4L and TIY makes no allowance for a range of factors that may impact individual behaviour: the contestable nature of the curriculum; the authority structures within the centre; the irrelevance of institutional routines to children’s daily lives; the mismatch between home, family and cultural values and those espoused by teachers or owners of the centre; or the impact of particular assessment practices on children and their life chances. Given the attributed locus of problem behaviour as being within the child, having a Behaviour Crisis Response Service to stabilize a behaviour crisis, as is promoted in the PB4L programme, is unlikely to address the systemic, institutional issues that may be largely responsible for the problems in the first place.

Furthermore, cultural and economic factors are two indicators of the Aotearoa New Zealand Government’s interest in environmental influences on behaviour. The Government has identified target communities, especially those that are Māori, Pasifika and with low socio-economic status (Sturrock and Gray, 2013), where the introduction of TIY is of particular interest. Hence, some communities represent more of a concern than others in the focus of TIY. While acknowledging the need for tailor-made, culturally responsive packages or ‘cultural enhancements’ (Ministry of Education, 2013: 9) for minority groups, any selective application raises further concerns: the generalization of cultural groups as problematic and the complexity of determining what is meaningful from outside the community concerned. Fergusson et al.’s (2013) regard of TIY for parents as culturally appropriate and the Ministry of Social Development observation that the effects of the programmes for Māori require ‘maximizing’ (Sturrock and Gray, 2013: 1) reveal the entangled messiness of discerning for others what is or is not appropriate or properly maximized. In one sense, maximization may indicate programmes becoming more effective and thus promoting the child’s right to thrive and survive. In a more insidious way, though, maximization may merely be a euphemism for making a child more docile and manageable, as another successful output on government’s economic agenda.

Concluding comments

In this article, we set out to urge a critical rethinking of what it is to be normal, and what it might mean today to survive, thrive and achieve one’s potential in early childhood education. A meaningful answer requires a rethinking of orientations towards children, their childhoods and normality in the early childhood landscape of children’s potentialities and rights.

Although the early childhood curriculum in Aotearoa New Zealand espouses the principles and the intentions of the UNCRC, the TIY behaviour management programme adopts an at best, blinkered approach to such matters. The Convention’s focus on children’s potential includes their potential to be deviant and to develop their own views, voice and personality. In TIY, deviance becomes the target of a range of normalizing strategies and measures to minimize the deviant behaviour. In this sense, the programme allows children to thrive and survive only within the scope of what is seen as acceptable behaviour, and moreover, it requires children to be subjected to intensive and widespread surveillance and management in order to limit the possibilities of deviance.

It seems, then, that TIY continues the tradition of the child study movement, through which observation of children’s behaviour leads to evidence of the best techniques to normalize children. Furthermore, and no less critically, what is not evident is the changing fortunes of the ‘high-risk’ (i.e. ethnic minority and/or low socio-economic) communities targeted in these evidence-based programmes. Although individual children and families may experience some benefits through their participation in a programme, living conditions don’t change for these communities as a whole, and they will continue to be discriminated against as high risk. We have argued that the TIY programme that professes to remedy problems felt by educational communities focuses instead on managing undesirable behaviour, while avoiding critical examinations of other contributing factors. As an imported programme, largely left intact to preserve the integrity of its evidence base, TIY eradicates the need for critical thought, for problematizing and questioning, suggesting, discarding, trying out, failing and re-establishing practices, that are responsive and appropriate to the specific local cultural meanings of particular realities and settings. Throughout, in line with the flexible and adaptable approach of Te Whāriki, we have urged messy, critical questioning and engagements with professional, legal and influential texts, in the UNCRC, with ‘problem-solving’ programmes and with Te Whāriki itself.

While one could argue that TIY is not simply a behavioural programme, that it focuses on child-directed play, the articulation of the programme in Aotearoa New Zealand focuses almost entirely on concerns about behavioural management, and with the exception of the setting up of positive relationships, the Incredible Years Teacher programme in Aotearoa New Zealand is explained, researched and reported on in terms of its behaviour management effect. This may be because the nation already has what might be seen as a child-directed play programme in Te Whāriki. The purpose of implementing TIY is arguably, then, not to enrich the child’s learning through play, but rather to minimize children’s problem behaviours through the application of social learning and operant conditioning techniques. It is that element that has been our concern, contextualized within the wider early childhood educational paradigm.