Centering the problem child: Temporality,colonialism,and theories of the child

Abstract

What would it mean to center theories of the child around those who are evacuated from childhood? I propose the idea of the “problem child” as an encapsulation of those who are constructed outside of Western understandings of childhood. In this essay, I explore how the problem child illuminates colonial entanglements between childhood and constructions of time, and the implications this holds for theories of the child. To do so, I position Carla Shalaby’s Troublemakers as a provocation to theories of childhood: her masterful portraits illustrate how problem children are constructed as such temporally, repeatedly narrated as late or out-of-sync. Put otherwise, Shalaby’s centered focus on troublemakers highlights the ways in which temporality is used as a limit to constructions of the child. I build on Shalaby’s provocation to argue that the ways in which childhood and temporality interlock are a production of colonial understandings of subjectivity, in which childhood is co-constructed with linear time. In asking what it might mean to center the problem child, I argue for the contextualization of dominant Western understandings of the child in the colonial violence in which they were produced in order to challenge assumed connections between the child and temporality.

What would it mean to center theories of the child around those who are evacuated from childhood? In this essay, I propose the idea of the “problem child” as an encapsulation of those who are constructed outside of Western understandings of childhood. Rather than thinking about individual children, I am interested in how a focus on children who are evacuated from childhood (through rhetorical, educational, or legal practices) defamiliarizes and denaturalizes this process of evacuation, and as such highlights the tensions inherent to social or theoretical universalizations of “child.” Or, focusing on the problem child illuminates the borders of the social category of the child. How could a focus on the problem child, an elusive yet critical subject of childhood studies, point to new possibilities for transformations of the category as a whole?

In this essay, I focus on the ways in which the problem child illuminates colonial epistemologies that entangle the child and constructions of temporality, and the implications this holds for theories of childhood. In calling for a centering of the problem child, then, I think through how that might require an engagement with the colonial violences which produce linear temporalities—temporalities through which the construction of (often racialized and/or disabled) children as “late” to childhood becomes something that makes sense.

The object of study in this essay, then, is theories of the child, and specifically the ways in which they are shaped by their engagements with temporality. Many childhood studies scholars have addressed temporality, often focusing on developmentalism in the context of psychological discourses of childhood (Burman, 2008a; James et al., 1998; Walkerdine, 2004; Woodhead and Faulkner, 2008). My essay extends work along these lines, urging us to think more broadly about the colonial context from which developmentalism arose. To do so, I believe there is an opportunity in childhood studies to engage more fully with scholars in postcolonial studies and critical theory. Researchers in these fields have explored how constructions of time as linear and progressive are tied to ideas about subjectivity that were developed through colonialism (Burman, 2008a; Castañeda, 2002; Chakrabarty, 2000; Lowe, 2015; Rifkin, 2017; Smith, 2012; Wynter, 2003; Wynter and McKittrick, 2015). My argument here follows the work of other scholars who have bridged these fields, including Gaile S. Cannella and Radhika Viruru (2004), Claudia Castañeda (2002), and Erica Burman (2008a), who have each done extensive work thinking through the colonial contexts of dominant understandings of childhood, including temporality. Erica Burman’s (2008a, 2008b) work in particular stands out for its engagement with the ways in which constructions of childhood are essential to larger geohistorical patterns of violence produced by understandings of what it means to be “developed.” Here, I think through how the work of these scholars can help us unravel the tensions that the problem child evokes in theories of the child.

I begin this essay by exploring the temporal structures undergirding prominent theories within childhood studies. I then turn my attention toward Carla Shalaby’s (2017) Troublemakers, a text that contains intimate portraits of four children who are constructed as problem children. I position Shalaby’s work as a provocation, an illustration of the problem child that helps us see the temporal borders structuring childhood. Shalaby (2017) argues that the children she portrays are canaries in the coalmine of public education, pointing toward how education needs to be reimagined. Building on her work, I argue here that her portraits of problem children can be similarly illuminating for childhood studies, pointing toward ways theories of the child need to be rethought.

In order to investigate this tension that the problem child evokes in theories of childhood, I then turn toward a contextualization of the relationship between the child and temporality by tracing the idea of the child through Western thought. I investigate the ways in which it was generated with constructions of temporality to produce and reproduce colonial and imperial structures of power that structured categories of difference, especially that of race. In tracing this path, I use the work of scholars of empire and colonialism to unsettle the idea of linear temporality as universal, natural, and neutral. Thinking about the child in this way clarifies why the definition of the problem child rests on temporality and points toward new possibilities for theorizing the child.

My goal is not to evacuate nor proclaim as useless the category of the child or that of linear temporality. Rather, I examine here how a closer, contextualized look at the entanglements of these two constructions can help us see more clearly the ways in which “child” is used in the Western world, and be more specific about who we are and who we are not talking about when we talk about children. As a part of this work, I make an effort to ground my discussion in contemporary children’s lives. While my argument is about theories of the child rather than actual problem children, the path of my essay follows a belief I share with many childhood studies scholars: that the way we theorize what it means to be a child has implications for real children (James and James, 2004). My decision here to lean on Shalaby’s ethnographic portraits is an intentional orientation, a way of focusing my argument around children themselves. This does not mean that when I speak about children and temporality, my argument is about children who are literally late—although my starting point in Shalaby’s text does include some examples along those lines—but rather what the process of shaping a narrative of some people as being out-of-sync with childhood says about childhood itself.

Theorizing the child

Many researchers in childhood studies take as a starting point dominant Western ideas about the child: an innocent, partially developed, adult-to-be of the future (Burman and Stacey, 2010; Edelman, 2004; James et al., 1998; Pugh, 2014; Stockton, 2009; Tisdall and Punch, 2012). This dominant understanding is wrapped up in temporality, and the ways in which it is engaged with or rejected is structured by scholars’ differing temporal assumptions, which shapes their work in highlighting some positionalities and relationships and make others harder to see (Rosen, 2017).

In this section of my essay, I touch briefly on prominent theories from childhood studies in the social sciences and the humanities and the constructions of time upon which their theories depend. While there are a large number of theories of the child at work in childhood studies, in this essay I address three well-known ones in which temporal engagements are prominent: theories of generation (following Karl Mannheim), theories of children as “being” as opposed to “becoming,” and theories of the discursive connection between children and the future. I do not intend to be all-encompassing in mapping out these theories, each of which has been challenged or reinforced in a variety of ways. Instead, I use these prominent theories as case studies in order to explore the temporal assumptions they rest upon.

Those who theorize generation within the sociology of childhood work to understand childhood as a permanent or semi-permanent societal structure, one that retains its general form while varying historically, culturally, and geographically (Qvortrup, 1994, 2009). Scholars who think through childhood in this manner often follow the work of Karl Mannheim, who theorized generations as socially and historically shaped, united through a group of people’s common exposure to formative events, often as youth (Alanen, 2001). Childhood, in this understanding, is produced through the regular reproduction of the generational roles of “adult” and “child” through social processes that conceptualize people into one category or another. Generation then becomes a structuring device within which people are relationally categorized into or out of childhood (Alanen, 2001; Mayall, 2001).

The structural organization of generation depends on a historical sense of time that is organized linearly. Thinking of childhood through generation means perceiving successive groups of children. For example, children of World War I Europe are necessarily defined as coming before the children of World War II Europe, because they must become adults in order for the latter group of children to be relationally defined as such (Qvortrup, 2009). This linearity is part of the original impetus of Mannheim’s work: his goal in thinking through generation was to theorize social transformation (which he titled “intellectual evolution,” highlighting its progressive timeline), a process in which distinguishable groups act as collective agents for change based on shared formative experiences, moving society forward along a linear trajectory (Alanen, 2001).

In contrast, those who theorize children as “being” instead of “becoming,” shorthand often used by childhood studies researchers describing children as agents, are focused more on individual children. This theory has roots in some of the most prominent early childhood studies texts in sociology (James et al., 1998; Qvortrup, 1994), in which researchers distinguished the new field as one that focused on children as subjects in the present (“being”), rather than subjects-to-be of the future (“becoming,” a reference to the dominant Western societal understanding of all children). One prominent critique of this model, from Emma Uprichard (2008), argues against this dichotomy. Prompted by the work of Ilya Prigogine and supported by data from her research with children, Uprichard (2008) argues that childhood is more accurately described as both being and becoming. She urges her fellow researchers to prioritize children’s own perceptions and opinions of themselves and of their childhoods, which encompasses both states (Uprichard, 2008).

Uprichard’s challenge and suggested solution highlights the temporal structure of being/becoming: this theory positions itself as an alternative position to dominant ideas not because it challenges the linearity of childhood temporality, but because it challenges the perspective of this linearity. Thinking “being” as opposed to “becoming” is a question of changing orientation, of swiveling to focus on a child’s present as opposed to a trained impulse to focus on their future. While this is a powerful way to think about children differently, it does not destabilize the temporal structure that produces this urge to focus on their future to begin with, a fact which Allison James et al. (1998) insist upon: “there is no necessity to abandon ideas of past and future just because we have shifted from a conceptual framework that is predicated on becoming” (p. 207). Indeed, this framework requires that “ideas of past and future” remain stable and mutually exclusive. This maintenance of dominant linear structures of time preserves developmental temporality in a theoretical framework that attempts to disrupt it.

Different modes of considering time and child surface in the humanities. Queer theory has been prominent in exploring this relationship, most prominently through Lee Edelman’s No Future. Edelman puts forward a post-Lacanian critique of queer theory by thinking through how the idea of the child, as a symbol of the future and social reproduction, is the logic through which politics moves. He argues that queerness, figured as non-procreative, is associated with “no future”: a role that it should embrace as a site of possibility of resistance to the social structure, and a new direction for queer theory (Edelman, 2004). Elsewhere, Rebekah Sheldon (2016) posits that the child is no longer a figure to be saved now that the future is no longer something that can be taken for granted. The work of these theorists challenges dominant conceptions of time as consistent or stable, using the child to illustrate the ways in which temporal futures are created, maintained, and manipulated for certain ends. In turn, this opens up possibilities to discuss larger connections, such as the ways in which the child is used to discursively construct ideas of knowledge and subjectivity.

Theorizing the discursive relationship between the child and the future, however, requires both conceptual ideas to be relatively stable. The ability to examine the ways that the relationship between concepts such as the “child” and “future” has changed across time requires each to be understood as a universal, isolated unity and for time itself to be stable (Chakrabarty, 2000). I speak of time here in terms of an underlying temporal framework, different from (yet supporting) theoretical arguments about what “future” means. In order for us to be able to imagine a perception of the “future” changing, we need to have a stable idea of where “future” exists temporally. The same applies to the universal understanding of the child operative here: thinking only of the child through its dominant connection to social reproduction carries over an associated timeline. Its legibility as a concept depends on a linear temporality. Linear temporality, then, becomes the hidden supportive framework that makes the discussion of the relationship between “child” and “future” possible to have. We can only talk about what this relationship enables politically, or how this relationship has changed in the advent of global warming, if there remains a stable, shared understanding of linear temporality.

Across childhood studies in both the humanities and the social sciences, then, there is a reliance on a stable linear timeline that provides the conditions of possibility for researchers to think the child structurally, individually, and discursively. This opens up the potential to explore the child as a unified concept across history, geography, or culture, which has likely aided the growth of childhood studies. But who is excluded from this understanding of the child as a unifiable concept? Who is impossible to see through these theorizations? Is this universal category one that can be maintained?

In asking these questions, I turn my attention toward the problem child, to explore those for whom temporality does not work as these theories predict. All of the theoretical frameworks that I examined in this section rely on an assumed connection between the child and the future: as the next generation, as a dominant perspective, or as a symbol for social reproduction. For the problem child, an association with the future is not guaranteed. In focusing here, I work toward destabilizing an understanding of a neutral, linear, progressive temporality that theories of the child often depend on.

The problem child out-of-sync

In my discussion of the problem child, I work from Carla Shalaby’s (2017) Troublemakers, in which she uses a research methodology called portraiture to narratively depict four children who have been identified to her as challenging and difficult. The methodology of portraiture begins with the question, “what is good here,” which means that Shalaby’s (2017) portraits are empathetic, detailed, and intentionally loving. I choose Shalaby’s work as a way to explore the temporality of the problem child because her attentive, intersectional portraits resist dominant understandings of childhood that place all of the blame for trouble on the troublemakers themselves. In doing so, she refuses to normalize the evacuation of these children from childhood. These holistic portraits, then, act as a much-needed provocation. Shalaby’s (2017) larger goal is to illustrate what these children can teach adults about schooling, and how their personalities, behaviors, and needs point to possibilities for reimagining education in a way that enables freedom. I extend Shalaby’s work here, arguing that her portraits can also teach us about possibilities for reimagining theories of the child.

For the purposes of this essay, I take advantage of the detailed descriptions her methodology produces to search for language that puts these children in relation to time, both in Shalaby’s narration or through dialogue that she records. I direct my attention not on the children that Shalaby highlights, but instead on the ways in which these children are narrated into troublesome-ness. Similar to Shalaby’s approach, I do not approach her work to critique or cast blame on her or on the people she describes. Instead, I am interested in how the ways in which these children are narrated into troublesome-ness are made to make sense temporally. My exploration here is not comprehensive and not the only arena in which troublesome-ness is mapped in this text (the ways these children move across space are significant as well), but for my purposes it provides a sampling of how the problem child troubles assumptions of neutral temporality. From here, I am curious about what this says about how we understand what it means to be a child.

Shalaby’s text, including her descriptions of the children as well as stories of their behavior, illustrates that all four children that she profiles are seen as temporally out-of-sync: they are too late, acting at the wrong time, and moving at the wrong speed. In this section, I move through each of these temporalized categories in turn in order to illustrate how the narration of these children as “problems” rests on how they are understood as existing in time. I investigate here the temporal logic in which troublesome-ness is made to make sense, in order to investigate how problem children push at the limits of universalized childhood.

To begin with, the children that Shalaby (2017) describes—she gives them the pseudonyms of Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus—are always late. For each student that she profiles, their life in the classroom involves repeated call-outs of how they delay their peers: “Mrs. Norbert is rushing [Sean] to join the line he is holding up, making all the children late to art” (p. 55). Similarly, Marcus stays to talk to Shalaby after his teacher’s call to the rug, delaying the work of the whole class (p. 116). At one point, Zora takes a “forbidden route around a fallen tree” while on a nature walk, and when she rushes to catch up, her teacher asks: “did you really need to delay your whole group?” (p. 27). These students are also noted, by Shalaby and their teachers, as reliably late to start their work. Shalaby notes, “Marcus sits down with a sheet of paper and a pencil but does not get started.” (p. 132). Elsewhere, “many are finished with the task before Zora has begun” (p. 19). Ultimately, these children are late to academic success: their parents say, “when it started to feel like she was falling behind, we got really worried” (p. 35).

Shalaby’s profiled children are cast further out-of-sync with their peers when they move or speak at the wrong time. This primarily manifests in interruption, when they “called out and acted silly at the wrong times” (p. 80). Many of them rarely stay quiet or still during group instruction. When a teacher offers Sean more space on the rug, he gets “fully ramped up, rolling around, folding his body over, laying himself down in a way that requires an unreasonable amount of space,” eventually forestalling a math lesson for 15 minutes; Marcus “gets up and loudly announces—in the silliest voice he can muster—that he’s going to the bathroom, again. He says it several times and is obviously trying to be a visible and audible disruption” (pp. 97, 119). During individual or group work, Shalaby notes that the students spend their time doing other activities: when a joke that Sean makes falls flat, he announces he is taking a break in a cool-down corner of the room, and misses the lesson (p. 99). Zora acts silly for her peers, “creating a deliberate distraction for the others” that makes her behind on her work (p. 15). Furthermore, many of them spend time out of the classroom, either in counseling or in the hallways with or without support staff (pp. 18, 108, 113, 130). In general, these children seem to always be doing the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Finally, these students have bodies that seem to move at the wrong speed—too fast and yet still too slow. Shalaby notes of Zora: “she moved quickly, tall for her age, and lean. But her movement was more wild than graceful: elbows out, each pace dramatic and exaggerated, like a cartoon character being chased through thick brush” (p. 9). She moves “hastily,” is “super speedy,” and “impulsive” (pp. 10, 14, 30). When she turns to Lucas, she writes: he’s “too hyper and overexcited,” and “active, energetic, unruly, imaginative” (pp. 54, 64). Sean’s body “[moves] almost nonstop,” meaning he “dawdles and spins from spot to spot, his attention not sustained”; he “rushes,” moving “quickly,” and “fickly” (pp. 87, 88, 105). Marcus is “hyper and unfocused, willful and prone to outbursts” (p. 146). Yet this activity does not translate to speed everywhere, alternating with moments when these students are not moving quickly enough: Marcus is narrated as “lingering in the hallway before making his entrance to the classroom in the morning, walking especially slowly,” and Lucas completes a sentence starter about school, “you will definitely get in trouble …” with, “… if you’re too slow” (pp. 130, 61).

The deviance of each of these children is structured through their relationship with time. While Shalaby’s work and many of the scenarios she highlights are based in school, the ways in which this temporality is scripted onto their bodies suggests that their out-of-sync-ness, their non-normative temporality, is mapped across contexts. By the end of Shalaby’s (2017) study, all four of the students she profiles are being placed on medication to regulate their behavior (p. 159). Medication, a regulator that affects people’s moods and behaviors around the clock, is an indication that although the label of “troublemaker” originated at school, these children are considered irregular at a bodily level. It is not just their behavior, but an essential part of who they are, that is too out-of-sync: it needs to be changed and modified to make them into acceptable children.

With this temporal construction of the problem child thus laid out, I return to my opening question: what would it mean to center the problem child in theories of the child? Childhood is not a space where they can easily enter. Centering them would require abandoning an assumption that children are necessarily associated with the future: Zora, Lucas, Sean, and Marcus are actively constructed away from the future through the logic that distinguishes them from their peers and other typical children. In drawing out the temporal dimensions of these portraits, then, I position the problem child constructed here as an unacknowledged tension in those theories of the child I previously described.

Those theories do not aim to describe problem children. But the caution that I articulate here is that theoretical assumptions of neutral, linear temporalities make it difficult to see those children for whom time is not neutral but instead central to their construction of what kind of (problem) child they are. It makes it hard to see how understandings of linear temporality itself work to remove children from what we understand to be a child. Put otherwise, assuming the neutrality of linear temporality risks as well the neutralization of the child, in that it makes it difficult to talk about how categories of difference—especially, for problem children, race and disability—make these out-of-sync timelines seem natural, about the children rather than about how we understand childhood. Responding to the provocation that Shalaby’s work offers, I turn now, in an effort to center the problem child, to scholars of imperialism and colonialism who destabilize dominant understandings of time in order to explore how that opens up possibilities for the legibility of the problem child.

Destabilizing constructions of temporality and the child

Why is it that the problem child seems to be entangled with a delayed, out-of-sync temporality, as Shalaby’s text evidences? In this section, placing the problem child at the center of my analysis leads me to an investigation of the co-construction of the child and temporality that rest at the foundations of historical projects theorizing subjectivity. I work toward this by discussing theorizations of the child from liberalism, romanticism, and developmental psychology, schools of thought which continue to influence understandings of childhood dominant in the West (Albanese, 2016; Bernstein, 2011; Burman, 2008a; Castañeda, 2002; Gubar, 2009; James et al., 1998; Sheldon, 2016). In looking at the works of these thinkers, we can see how linear developmentalism is central to the constitution of the modern subject (Chakrabarty, 1997; Lowe, 2015; Rifkin, 2017; Smith, 2012; Wynter, 2003), a constitution that shapes both the child and the problem child.

One of the earliest formulations of modern Western conceptions of the child came from John Locke, a prominent liberal philosopher, who theorized the child as a blank slate, or tabula rasa, containing only a disposition toward reason but requiring guidance to foster it (Locke, (1693) 1989, (1689) 1965). In his Two Treatises on Government, Locke ((1690) 2003) emphasized that parents were responsible for wielding power over their children in order to guide them toward rationality and the duties of citizenship (Albanese, 2016: 8; Locke, (1690) 2003). The larger point of Locke’s Two Treatises is to justify “liberal rights to property and against tyranny,” including the right to war against Indigenous peoples who were constructed as threats to settler sovereignty (Lowe, 2015: 9). In a parallel to his justification of parents’ power over their children, Locke writes of the conqueror’s right to “Absolute Power over the Lives” of those who are justly defeated (cited in Lowe, 2015: 10). This works to make colonized peoples become temporally delayed, constructed through their “just defeat” into people with the status of children. These understandings of childhood as developed by Locke, then, were a part of philosophical projects to justify colonial violence.

Romanticist writers similarly constructed the child through race and colonization. The romantic child—innocent, pure at heart, and angelic—is uncorrupted by the larger world (as in Émile or Peter Pan; Bernstein, 2011; Gubar, 2009; James et al., 1998). Jean-Jacques Rousseau, one of the forefathers of Romanticism, wrote in his opening to Émile: “God makes all things good; man meddles with them and they become evil” (James et al., 1998; Rousseau, (1762) 1963). Other romanticists, like William Wordsworth, conceptualized the child as the “father of the man,” (cited in Edelman, 2004: 10), a figurative role that is simultaneously future and past.

Temporally, this construction of childhood is both literal and mythical: it attempts to describe actual children, but is equally concerned with using childhood as a metaphor for life in a magical, edenic past. This construction led romanticists to conflate temporality and geography, finding the “past” in contemporary Indigenous lands such as the Americas and the South Pacific (Lowe, 2015; Makdisi, 1998). Wordsworth described geographic places where Indigenous people lived as historical “spots of time,” isolated and threatened by their potential contact with the Western world (Makdisi, 1998: 12). This geographical construction trapped Indigenous people in a definition of people of the past, or “noble savages,” as Rousseau termed them, paired to children in their depiction as both pure and wild (Smith, 2012: 51).

Predecessors to the field of developmental psychology also used the child to think through stories of the human. While his most famous theory argues for randomized and unpredictable natural selection, Charles Darwin also posited a theory of developmental evolution, in which a trajectory is known, predictable, and traceable (Castañeda, 2002: 20). Developmentalism, which works from this theory to think through potential growth, was applied to individuals and societies alike. The child often worked as a mechanism through which the two could be conflated. Musing on why his son was frightened by the zoo, Darwin suggested that his son and other children’s unaccountable fears “are the inherited effects of real dangers and abject superstitions during ancient savage times” (quoted in Castañeda, 2002: 12). The child becomes an individual site in which all of human history can be observed (Castañeda, 2002: 13).

Darwin’s child study illustrates the ways in which children were seen by the burgeoning field of developmental psychology: as an elision of the romantic model of the child (close to prehistoric nature, distant from Western modernity) into a scientific one, in which this theorization of their nature was the basis of their role as objects of study (Burman, 2008a: 14). Observations of children were used to develop theorizations of stages of development for individuals and for societies of people as a whole, in which the ultimate and highest stage was the rational space of White, Western masculinity (Burman, 2008a; Castañeda, 2002).

Across the work of all of these scholars, theorizations of the child and temporality were developed as part of a broader intellectual project devoted to understanding subjectivity, or what it means to be human, in way that cannot be disentangled from colonial violences. One way to consider how constructions of the child and linear temporality work together is to explore how they enable historicism, a concept proposed by postcolonial scholar Dipesh Chakrabarty. Chakrabarty (2000) theorizes historicism, or “the idea that to understand anything it has to be seen both as a unity and in its historical development,” in order to explore to what extent the universalization of European concepts (such as the idea of the subject, democracy, rights, rationality, and so on) can be useful in thinking through “modernity” outside of Europe (p. 5). Chakrabarty’s analysis is illuminating here for its critique of how European concepts are universalized through temporality. In the work of philosophers like Locke and scientists like Darwin, historicism creates an “imagined waiting room of history,” essentially a way of Europeans telling colonized peoples “not yet” (pp. 7–8).

Chakrabarty argues that concepts of political modernity are part of a universalized vision of the human and its associated temporality. The child, as we have seen, plays an essential part in constructing the story of the human in both anchoring the past and pointing toward the social reproduction of the future, understood as modernity. The child, then, carries the legacy of historicism, which “enabled European domination of the world in the nineteenth century” (p. 7) through solidifying discourses of progress and development. Through Chakrabarty’s understanding of historicism, we can tie the idea of the child to a collection of concepts that inform the construction of a universal human and the associated understanding of modernity. The child, as see in the work of European writers investigated here, plays an essential role in the construction of the temporality that underlies this entire structure. The child as a temporal symbol was an essential tool to theorizing how this subject came to be over time, the source from which the rational, civilized subject was produced (Cannella and Viruru, 2004; Castañeda, 2002; Lowe, 2015; Wynter, 2003).

The contemporary, dominant association between ideas of the child and of futurity, then, is an indication of these historical and contemporary patterns of colonialism and imperialism. The child and the temporality with which it was repeatedly co-produced were essential to the philosophical and theoretical construction of a subject which was used to construct some people as modern, rational, and advanced, and others as developing, irrational, people of the past.

In this way we return to the problem child. Shalaby’s text illustrates that the problem child is constructed away from futurity through constructions of temporal abnormality, which I argue here is an indication of the continuing legacies of colonial thought in the temporality of the child. This temporality of the problem child is a microcosm of a larger historical and geographic story of the ways in which social and theoretical childhood continues to be constructed through colonial epistemologies. Constructing the temporality of problem children is a process of evacuating them from childhood, and more broadly a process of evacuating them from a linear progression toward subjectivity.

The provocation of the problem child’s temporality illustrated through Shalaby’s work forces us to change the way that we look at conceptions of the child and time. Ultimately, it suggests that linear, developmental temporality is not as neutral as it seems, and connections between the child and the future cannot be universalized—and that theories that rely on an assumption of this connection (as those I discussed previously do, in different ways) risk reiterating the epistemological violence that produced it. Critiques of Edelman’s theory of childhood have pointed out that futurity along the lines that he assumes has been and continues to be denied to Black and Indigenous children (Arvin et al., 2013; Hong, 2015). Rather than exceptions to the dominant understanding of childhood that Edelman—as well as the other theorists of childhood I discussed earlier—relies upon, I argue here that these critiques point to the foundational ways in which childhood is constructed. These critiques carry out the same provocation that Shalaby’s work provides, highlighting how the altered temporality of the problem child points toward the colonial epistemologies that define the category. In centering the problem child, then, I argue that theories of the child are untenable without an engagement with the colonial epistemologies that structure dominant Western understandings.

Conclusion: centering the problem child

The idea of the child is deeply implicated in continuing colonialism and imperialism that structures understandings of subjectivity, which inform institutions like education as well as intellectual projects like that of childhood studies. Centering the problem child in theories of the child is a project of reinstating the importance of the colonial violence upon which dominant constructions are founded. Unlike prominent theories of the child, which build an understanding of a universalized child by depending on a linear, progressive timeline, a theory of the child which centers the problem child requires an attention to the ways in which the Western construction of the child was co-produced with temporal structures. The problem child, with its narrative of delay, highlights the ways in which the futurity of childhood depends on many children not being able to access that futurity.

This is intimately experienced by the lived experiences of children who are narrated into being problem children, of which the children in Shalaby’s text are but a small sample. Across Turtle Island, Indigenous children, Black children, and children of color are disproportionately likely to be given a stigmatizing disability label, drop out of school, and/or enter juvenile prison (Chiefs Assembly on Education, 2012; Delpit, 2012; Education Week, 2015; Hing, 2014; U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (USDEOCR), 2014; Zipper and Hing, 2014). I argue that the patterns illustrated through these statistics are an indication of the ways in which the “universal” idea of the child is made exclusive through racialized logic born from colonialism. Indigenous children, Black children, and children of color are less legible as children, less able to access associated constructions such as innocence (Bernstein, 2011), and ultimately more likely to be understood as problems through a temporal logic. Children who are narrated as troublemakers experience colonial epistemologies intimately.

My argument here echoes scholars who have critiqued the dominant White and Western epistemological foundations of childhood studies (Burman and Stacey, 2010; Farley and Garlen, 2016; Konstantoni and Emejulu, 2017; Nxumalo and Cedillo, 2017; Pérez et al., 2017; Rodriguez, 2017; Solís, 2017), in that I argue that the inability of prominent theories to address “the lived experiences of women and children of color, colonialism, and the violence experienced by global south peoples” (Pérez et al., 2017: 80) is in part produced by their failure to reckon with colonial temporalities. Childhood studies has the potential to be able to theorize a different understanding of childhood that centers the problem child and, in doing so, build knowledge of the ways in which colonialism continues to structure children’s lives. Retheorizing the temporality of the child opens up the possibility for concepts prominent in childhood studies—including agency, generation, and futurity—to be rethought in a way that challenges the hegemonic timeline that originally made them possible to think. Reimagining childhood in this way, beyond attempts at a universal, singular category of the child, has exciting potential for childhood studies, for future connections between childhood studies and scholars working on imperialism and colonialism, and for children themselves.