Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

In international comparisons, Sweden is one of the countries with the lowest number of children growing up in poverty; its material standard is high, and welfare services are extensive and heavily subsidised. How child poverty can be understood in that context is interrogated in the article. The point of departure for the discussion is Swedish Save the Children’s 2013 anti-poverty campaign Fattigskolan [Poverty School]. The campaign presents child poverty from the vantage point of a welfare state and is informative for understanding normative discourses on childhood. Childhood is investigated as a social imagination that both structures children’s and parents’ everyday lives and organises society. It is argued that the dominant social imagination is based on a middle-class fantasy permeating the organisation of the welfare state. The elements of this fantasy are critical to understanding child poverty.

Keywords

child poverty childhood consumption middle class multiplicity potentiality work

Introduction

Sweden is one of the richest countries in the world, with a highly developed welfare system including free schooling, free health and dental care, and extensive social services. In international comparisons, Swedish families are shown to have low income inequality and a high disposable income, and Sweden is among the 10 Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (2018a, 2018b, 2018c) countries with less than 10% of children living in poverty. Since the early 2000s, the non-governmental organisation (NGO) Swedish Save the Children has reported on the extent and characteristics of child poverty in Sweden. The organisation has developed its own measurement of child poverty, designed in a way deemed relevant to the Swedish context. The measurement includes both children growing up in families living on welfare and children growing up in families earning less than 60% of the average national income (Rädda Barnen, 2015). It is widely used in Sweden, but there are also other ways of measuring child poverty (see Rauhut, 2013). According to the NGO, an estimated 186,000 children, or 9.3% of all children in Sweden, were living in poverty or economic hardship in 2016 (Rädda Barnen, 2018). The question of how to measure child poverty is not addressed further in this article, and the terms poverty, economic hardship and low-income are used interchangeably.

Along with other NGOs working for children’s right, Swedish Save the Children was heavily criticised in 2011 for exaggerating the severity of the child poverty problem in Sweden. One campaign film in particular was especially criticised, in which Swedish Save the Children claimed that 220,000 children are going hungry in Sweden. This was considered an exaggeration, which Swedish Save the Children acknowledged, and the campaign was consequently retracted. In order to raise awareness and give a more nuanced picture of child poverty, the NGO launched a new campaign called Fattigskolan [Poverty School] in 2013. The campaign consists of 11 short films (approximately 30 seconds each) presenting different aspects of what it might entail for children to grow up in a poor or low-income family. A typical example of how the films are set up is Lesson 11, Säga nej till juklappar [Saying no to Christmas presents], in which a young boy looks directly into the camera and tells the audience (Swedish Save the Children, 2013g):

My dad got me a Christmas present last year. It was roller skates. I knew that he had bought them from our neighbour. But I didn’t say anything. Dad didn’t have to give me presents; instead he should’ve saved the money, I think.

Child poverty in a wealthy nation like Sweden takes different forms and involves other difficulties than in a low-income nation with extensive absolute poverty, and the depictions of child poverty differ accordingly. Lesson 11 raises several questions about how child poverty in wealthy nations can be conceptualised, what ‘normal’ childhood looks like and what constitutes ‘normal’ child–parent relationships. The short narrative in Lesson 11 pivots around the importance of valid consumption and a mythical idea of childhood. The question of how this can be understood is developed in this article, as well as how child poverty in a wealthy welfare state, like Sweden, can be theoretically conceptualised. In understanding the circumstances surrounding the 2013 Swedish Save the Children’s campaign and the issues it raised, anti-poverty campaigns and child poverty research are understood as ‘bio-politics’ (Foucault, 2008). In line with Lee and Motzkau (2011), bio-politics is in the article understood to be a joint effort in society to develop and foster the capabilities of the population. From such a perspective, child poverty is viewed as a site of social action, as research findings and governmental and NGO activities converge into a historical product (Lee and Motzkau, 2011).

In this article, the films from the 2013 campaign are explored to identify the fields of tension and conflict that make up the phenomenon of child poverty. In total, the 11 films cover the following themes: (1) a broken bike, (2) avoiding birthday parties, (3) expensive school trips, (4) food prices, (5) expensive medicine, (6) working instead of going to school, (7) not having anywhere to do homework, (8) not being able to afford a romantic relationship, (9) skipping physical education (PE), (10) avoiding going swimming and (11) saying no to Christmas presents. Seven of the films are made use of in discussing different aspects of child poverty and connecting the dots when it comes to how to understand child poverty in a rich context. First, the multiplicities of child poverty are investigated, after which follows a historical reflection on children’s structural position in welfare states with particular regard to work and children’s economic value, as well as how a consumer market for children has developed and affects parent–child relationships. Finally, Giorgio Agamben’s (1999) theory of potentiality is explored in relation to children, arguing for its usefulness in understanding the discourse on child poverty today.

Fattigskolan and multiplicities of childhood

Lee and Motzkau (2011) argue for approaching childhood as a hybridity (see also Prout, 2005) and have identified three multiplicities relevant to childhood: life, resource and voice. Multiplicity they define as: ‘a gathering of diverse practical, political, theoretical and empirical concerns that are connected in complex ways to one another’ (Lee and Motzkau, 2011: 10). All three multiplicities can be applicable to the 2013 campaign. ‘Life’ is about biological processes, but also entails ‘rights to life’, and the right to a ‘good life’, referring to Sen and Nussbaum (2001). Arguing that a large number of children in Sweden are starving due to poverty is not credible, and this was the reason for the criticism of the 2011 campaign. But it is possible for Swedish Save the Children to argue that children are deprived of a ‘good life’ and that they have a ‘right to live’ at an equal level as other children. The right to food and medicine are topics touched upon in the films. In Lesson 5, Spara in på medicin [Saving on medicine], a girl is narrating (Swedish Save the Children, 2013c):

My mom and I think a lot about money and stuff. When I get allergies in the summer, my eyes itch and I almost get a cold. There are pills you can buy that take away the allergy. But I don’t tell mum it’s itching, so we don’t have to get any pills.

The majority of prescription drugs in Sweden are subsidised by the social security system, but allergy medicine is not covered, and therefore can be quite expensive. This makes allergy medicine an obvious choice of topic for the campaign. Moreover, while allergies are not life-threatening ailments, they definitely are a peril to a ‘healthy life’ and the ‘good life’. Viewing the lack of allergy medicine merely as a danger to the child’s biological life does not suffice to explain what Swedish Save the Children is trying to accomplish with the film. A social perspective and awareness of preconceptions about what a ‘good life’ entails are also needed. All of the films are cast as giving ‘voice’ (Lee and Motzkau, 2011) to children living in poverty. The children in the films are all looking directly into the camera and addressing the audience. The audience can be understood to consist of several different constituencies: adults with the power to alleviate their difficulties; non-poor children who are oblivious to their situation and poor children who are able to recognise their own lived experience in the films. The audience is also urged to respond to the predicaments that the children are narrating. The illusion of an authentic voice is troubled, however, by the highly scripted interaction delivered by the child actors, and concerns can be raised about what voices are silenced by the campaign, since representation is always problematic (Alcoff, 1991).

The final multiplicity defined by Lee and Motzkau (2011), childhood as ‘resource’, is perhaps the most interesting one in relation to anti-poverty campaigns, as well as to poverty research. According to Lee and Motzkau (2011), ‘resource’ relates to how children are used by states and other organisations, and what resources are available to children. From the perspective of Swedish Save the Children, the campaign films are an attempt to promote children’s agency, and give them a ‘voice’ to narrate their own ‘life’. However, children are also the resource used by the NGO when requesting donations from private and public agents. The child as resource includes both the individual representation of children, such as the actors in the film, and how childhood is imagined. The historical development of the economic ties that shape child–adult relationships will be explored to further investigate how campaigns such as Fattigskolan can be understood.

Children’s work

In order to understand the phenomenon of child poverty in a Western welfare state, the role of childhood in capitalism must be explored. Capitalism is here understood as an economic system comprising both a social organisation of society and human life, and a discursive and social imagination (Bauman, 2001; Deleuze and Guattari, 2004; Faulkner, 2010). Capitalism has had a fundamental impact on the shape and value of work. Work, for most people, no longer involves producing goods or food necessary for human prosperity; instead, we work for the sake of working (Barkan, 2009). In this process, the capacity to meet human needs has become alienated, and we are only able to provide for ourselves at a distance, since food, clothing and housing have become consumer goods (Barkan, 2009). Work has thereby lost its use-value and appears only as exchange-value. The position of children in relation to work has changed dramatically during the era of capitalism. With the emergence of the middle class (Faulkner, 2011), children went from – at the beginning of the 20th century – being important economic contributors to the family and society, to being banned from the paid labour market and solely appraised for the emotional value they bring their parents, thereby becoming the priceless child (Zelizer, 1994). The maturing capitalist society demanded a generational division of labour and more efficient use of more highly skilled adult workers, which meant a diachronic division of labour and a sequencing of life into education, paid work, pension (Wintersberger, 2005). Children became long-term emotional investments, not only for parents, but for society as a whole. The main task of children is no longer to financially secure their parents’ old age, but to fulfil their parents’ aspirations for them in terms of academic prowess and a successful career (Wintersberger, 2005), shifting the focus of childhood away from contributing to the family’s economy to individual psychosocial development and educational achievements (Andersson Bruck and Trumberg, 2018). Children became human capital to be cultivated and shaped for future social economic growth.

The issue of children’s work is problematised in Swedish Save the Children’s 2013 campaign. In Lesson 6, Välja bort utbildning [Not choosing school], a male teenager, sitting in what appears to be the family’s living room, tells the audience (Swedish Save the Children, 2013d),

After 9th grade, I will start working for my uncle; he has a store. Then I can make some money and maybe we can have some more stuff, and maybe visit mum’s sister more often. But actually I’d like to stay in school, like the others in my class. But I doubt you need to know biology and stuff when you work in a store.

In the narrative, work is described as blocking the boy’s further educational advancement and his possibility to follow the same path as his peers. Work is also portrayed as something undesirable to the child (cf. Miller, 2013), and possibly the result of parental wishes, as the narrative is set in a family context, in which the child is sacrificing himself for the good of the family. In capitalist societies, legally banning children from work and postponing children’s exchange-value as labourers were necessary to secure not only the prosperity of a family or company, but also the fate of the state, as well as the well-being of society as a whole. The child in Lesson 6 is therefore not just jeopardising his own future, but also the future of the community and the state, as he risks undermining his human capital as a future worker (Schiettecat et al., 2015). The child labour ban can be understood as a bio-politics of childhood (Foucault, 2008), as it entails a shift in the labour force and a reformulation of the value of children. Banning children from work granted them the social rights of citizenship (e.g. United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC)) and the security of being cared for by the home, positioning them solidly within the parameters of a welfare state that provides education, healthcare and social security (Barkan, 2009), as ‘the health of society and the health of the economy became mutually reinforcing’ (Dean, 1999: 150).

In Lesson 3, Utflykter är dyra [Field trips are expensive], the sanctity of children’s position and the welfare state’s ability to shelter children from the perils of work are questioned (Swedish Save the Children, 2013a). School is free of charge in Sweden, but many schools ask parents to contribute financially to such things as field trips. The official policy, according to the Swedish National Agency for Education (www.skolverket.se, n.d.), is that schools should not encourage parents to contribute financially. Despite this, many NGOs report that various charges still occur in schools. In Lesson 3, a young boy tells the audience how he had to come up with the money himself in order to accompany the class to the zoo:

When we go on trips in school, it sometimes costs money. Last time it cost 80 SEK to go to the zoo with the school. So, I collected deposit cans, to be able to go along. It took several days to collect enough. But it was fun anyway to go with my class.

Collecting deposit cans is a way for children in Sweden to generate some financial income of their own. The boy looks sad when he addresses the audience, and it is implied that the time spent collecting cans could have been used for a more child-appropriate activity. It could even have been dangerous, as it brought the young boy into an unknown public arena. The film shows a deserted, gravel football field and some high-rise apartment buildings in the background, and parental or adult involvement is not depicted in the film. In discourse, children generating an income are often viewed as ‘objects of pity’ and ‘an emotive depiction of childhood gone wrong’ (Miller, 2013: 339). The Western, middle-class fantasy is one of a ‘work-free childhood’, focusing on education in preparation for children’s future role as economically productive adults (Miller, 2013). This childhood builds on a logic of human development, in which child labour, including collecting deposit cans, becomes a problem because it limits the child’s future productivity as an adult worker. Liberal Western ideas of subjectivity privilege a subject that is a universally free, autonomous, rational and choice-making individual. Child labour therefore becomes a kind of social pathology, damaging the human capital, whereby the possibility that children might find hope and pleasure in working is overlooked (Miller, 2013). This means that children’s work is diminished, denied and criminalised (Nieuwenhuys, 2007). Working children are understood to have lost their childhood, ceased to be child-like, and becoming deviants in need of saving. Child labour, and for that matter child poverty, can never be understood apart from the unequal power relations and skewed material distribution central to liberal capitalism (Miller, 2013). The ‘politics of pity’ locates the problem of child labour in children’s bodies rather than with the organisation of society (Miller, 2013), and the same can be said of child poverty. Excluding children from paid labour excludes them from valuable social roles, leaving them defined as ‘the Other’, the non-adults. According to Levison (2000), excluding children from paid labour reveals children’s lack of power, rather than how best to promote children’s well-being.

The division between the working adult and the studying, cared-for child marks a pervasive historic reconceptualisation of the child. However, the working child and the poor child are not necessarily the same child. Their lived experience and structuring in society do not always coincide, but what they do have in common is their childity, meaning a set of social expectations put upon them in an age-hierarchical society (Sjöberg, 2013) that dictates the parameters of childhood, which will be further discussed by investigating the development of a commercial market for children.

Consuming childhood

Another important component of the structuring of childhood is the emergence of a commercial market aimed directly and exclusively at children, resulting in a commodification of childhood, meaning that a ‘phase or stage in the life cycle has taken on economic exchange values’ (Cook, 2004: 6). Central to capitalism is the fusion of morality and valuation into a moral economy, where economic exchange is inseparable from notions of good and bad, right and wrong – sanctioning certain kinds of activities over others (Cook, 2004). Economic value can therefore never be separated from social meaning. The development of a market for children happens at a time in history when society is permeated by an understanding of children as psychologically developing and ‘becoming adults’ (Cook, 2004). Consumption of consumer goods is formulated as beneficial for the child’s development. The capitalist middle-class fantasy entails conscious consumption by the good parent, appropriating the right goods for the child, thus ensuring optimal developmental conditions. Consumption is therefore deeply rooted in the child–parent relationship dyad (see Wolff, 2013) and is crucial to securing developmental progress. A child that is supplied with educationally and developmentally appropriate consumer goods will grow up to be a well-educated, psychologically stable adult worker. Discursively, the child is hence configured as an individual desirous of goods (Cook, 2004). This configuration is an interpellation, calling into being a particular child-subject, an actively consuming child desirous of child-appropriate items. The discourse goes so far as to frame desire as originating from within the child, and therefore as natural (Cook, 2004). However, what the child should be desirous of is highly scripted. In Lesson 4, Håll koll på matpriserna [Keep track of food prices], a boy narrates how he helps his mother find discount prices in supermarkets (Swedish Save the Children, 2013b):

I know roughly how much money we have to spend at home. So sometimes when I pass through the market I look for discounts. It can be anything from pasta to toilet paper. Then I go home and tell mum, and sometimes we can buy it. But I also know that we can’t buy unnecessary stuff, like ice cream and candy.

The statement that candy and ice cream are unnecessary is nonsensical in a middle-class child discourse. The child should be desirous of child-appropriate foodstuffs, such as candy and ice cream, and not household items like toilet paper or pasta. In prioritising items that are beneficial for the whole family, the child shares the responsibility of providing for the family with the parent, blurring the lines between child and parent. In order for the middle-class, capitalist ideal to work, the child’s desires need to be met and fulfilled within the scope of the family’s economic means. A child’s desire for candy is always valid, albeit often restricted and sometimes denied, and should always be possible for a financially set parent to meet; anything less is a moral transgression (Jenks, 2005) of the child-adult division and the middle-class ‘childity’ doctrine (Sjöberg, 2013).

None of the films illustrate what many children claim is the most important aspect of childhood commodification, the displaying of affluence and ‘childity’ with clothes and mobile phones (Andersson Bruck and Lindberg, 2016; Bond, 2010; Deutsch and Theodorou, 2010; Elliott and Leonard, 2004). Since the consumption and display of consumer goods are morally imbued, so too is the lack of consumer goods. This raises the question: What are the essential goods that a child ‘needs’ in order to prosper? A mobile phone? An Iphone? The latest Iphone? These are questions that have to be continuously negotiated by children and parents alike. Bauman (2001: 12–13) refers to this as the ‘plasticity of needs’, arguing that a discourse of needs works to obfuscate the demand of capitalistic consumption to constantly produce new desires. The only films touching on the subject to any extent are Lesson 9, Stå över gymnastiken [Skipping PE] (Swedish Save the Children, 2013e), and Lesson 10, Bli en badkruka [Not going swimming] (Swedish Save the Children, 2013f). In Lesson 9, the boy tells the audience how he used to be bullied in PE for not having the right clothes, and that he has solved the problem by pretending to be sick, and consequently is given other assignments to do in school. Lesson 10 illustrates how accessing child-specific activities depends on displaying the right commodities, as the girl in the film narrates how she avoids going swimming with friends since she does not own a bathing suit. The films depict strict dress codes, specific for particular events, which are a result of the capitalist impetus to produce new consumers (Bauman, 2001) by dictating how particular consumer goods are necessary for and pertain to particular social events, such as sports. For Swedish Save the Children to portray a child as being bullied for not having the right mobile phone, computer or branded shirt could, however, potentially open the campaign to criticism and lead to a reframing of child poverty in Sweden as a question of children’s illegitimate desire for unnecessary luxury items rather than their appropriate need for indispensable goods.

The anxiety about valid and necessary consumption can be traced back to the foundation of capitalism. Capitalism should here be understood as a parallel social force developing in tandem with the middle class. In capitalism, subjects are caught in a constant loop of dissolution of a solid and fixed identity, and are always in search of a fixed identity. It is the desire for fixation that creates subjectivity, as an ongoing identity construction (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). The promise of capitalism is that new and ‘improved’ products are productive in patching up and solidifying identities, but the products are always flawed and in need of improvement (Bauman, 2008). Capitalism offers salvation in the shape of a myth, an escape from the unceasing search for identity. That is the objective representation of the ‘fixed self’, whereby the subject is posited as a ‘complete object’ (Roberts, 2007). Fixating a true identity could lead to pure self-sufficiency and possibly to true happiness. This is however always a temporal process of becoming that can never be fully attained, as true happiness is impossible other than for very brief moments, and is only achievable though sacrifice. Bauman (2008) refers to the same state as liquid happiness, constantly slipping through our hands as we go from an end-state of being (object) to the constant pursuit of happiness. For an individual child, this means striving to live up to the myth of acquiring a self by becoming a child-object and thereby fixating a complete identity (Deleuze and Guattari, 2004). It also entails a strict separation between child and parent, as well as between child and adult. To blur the lines risks the stability not only of the onto-epistemological position of the child, but also of parenthood and adulthood. One way to maintain the separation of categories is by purchasing and surrounding the child with child-objectifying goods, achieving difference in relation to other ‘complete objects’, such as adults. The capitalist, middle-class myth of the child-object pivots around the notion of a non-working, toy-owning, play-oriented child, susceptible to education and development, and subjected to the full economic power of adult society. Not being able to consume at the same level as one’s peers is therefore detrimental to a child’s development, relationships and status as a full person. A non-desiring, non-consuming, self-denying child therefore struggles to live up to the myth of being a full person and a complete child-object. Because everything in capitalism is transformed into ‘commodity-things’ that have ‘exchange-value’ and can be bought and sold, owned as ‘property’ and made use of as ‘resources’ (Lukács, 1971: 83–103), this also includes childhood. Seeing childhood as a commodity-thing with exchange-value, which can be bought and sold, owned as property, and is a resource to be used, means that the poor child has a particularly volatile exchange-value. Not living up to the capitalist, middle-class myth, and therefore not obtaining the status of full child-object, may entail having one’s childhood sold rather than bought, and one could argue that the trafficked child, the providing child, the working child loses his or her ‘childity’ and ceases to be a child.

Children’s potentiality

The claim that a child’s ontological status is volatile, that it can be questioned or even lost, requires further exploration. Agamben’s philosophy offers an interesting possibility to expand on and further unpack the notion of children as beings and becomings (see Uprichard, 2008). Agamben views childhood as an abiding feature of the human condition, arguing that it is precisely childhood which allows for the possibility of true transformation (Ramaekers and Vlieghe, 2014). This has become manifest in the institutionalisation of education and in psychological developmentalism. Joanna Faulkner (2010) has interpreted Agamben’s (1999) theory on potentiality in relation to children, shedding light on the precariousness of the onto-epistemological position of the child. Potentiality is not equivalent to non-ability, but rather the opposite. In order to have potentiality, one has to have an ability and not use it – to be able to do something but to abstain from it. Potentiality is, in other words, passivity, which means that all human action stands in direct relation to its impotentiality. Moreover, potentiality is contrasted with actuality and, for Agamben, potentiality has a dual function: while the actual can only be, the potential can both be and not be (McKendrick and Webb, 2014). Human potentiality, then, enables discrete human activities such as planning, speculation, imagination and speech – all related to the impotentiality of what does not exist in actuality. The key to potentiality is language. It is through language that we can become something. The new-born infant can become a doctor-in-talk or popstar-in-talk precisely because he or she is nothing yet. Or the poor child can become a poor, ill-educated, non-providing adult with insufficiently cultivated human capital, who does not contribute to social development and economic growth. The capacity for language is also that which enables differentiation and makes inclusive exclusion possible (Agamben, 2010), encapsulating poor children in a non-poor, middle-class category. Potentiality dwells in the space between positive possibility and withholding of action or being (Faulkner, 2010). Children’s potentiality is at the heart of the middle-class childhood fantasy, in which children are ‘saved’ for actuality, as their agency is put on pause while waiting for future adulthood.

The traditional view of children – as becoming, future adults, and as ‘not-yet beings’ – positions children as partial subjects and is, according to Faulkner (2010), an adult fantasy that serves adult needs. Adulthood is the foundation on which the imagery of childhood is constructed, as childhood serves as a symbol for adult past and future. In symbolising the future, children are constructed as ‘not-yets’ and as impotent, because they are banned from the present – from actuality (Faulkner, 2010). ‘This has material effects upon children’s social agency’ (Faulkner, 2010: 208), concerning, for example, the fact that children are thought to need a custodian to represent their interests. More relevant to the issue at hand here is the present-day understanding of children as unable to participate in the labour market as full economic agents (see Levison, 2000), and the demand on parents to enable children’s consumption-induced developmental achievements. Children are imagined to be nothing in their own right – unknowing, unable, unskilled, malleable and shaped by the interests and instruction of others. The child becomes an empty vessel filled with the community’s affects and denials, and the bearer of ‘humankind’s destiny’ (Faulkner, 2010). It is everyone’s responsibility and everyone has the opportunity to engage in how the child will ‘turn out’, which is the basic assumption motivating the Swedish Save the Children campaign. In the films, it is put forward as a problem that the children are all facing different problems and difficulties that they act on without the assistance of adults or parents. This endangers not only their own futures, but more pressingly the imagined future of adult society. It puts them in the present – acting in actuality – and their imagined potentiality is thereby lost.

As adult past, childhood is imagined as a time of promising futures and unimpeded potentiality, but without the impotentiality of adulthood. As a child, the parent could have become anything. In the adult past, childhood is imagined as a time of innocence, free from adult expectations and responsibilities (Faulkner, 2010) – an innocence that at any moment can be lost, defiled or perverted. The notion of a loss of, or missing out on, child-specific experiences is also a common denominator in the campaign films, not least in the first film introduced in this article. The boy in Lesson 11 is missing out on the most mythologised of childhood experiences. The full experience of Christmas epitomises childhood in consumer capitalism, as the child is placed at the centre of benevolent adult consumption. A young child renouncing Christmas presents is a child who misses out on the joy of childhood, takes on adult responsibility and is on the verge of losing his childhood potentiality. Child poverty is a moral transgression in that it questions the possibility of child-adult relations being dependent on child-specific consumption. The child-adult division and the ideal of child potentiality as passivity are deeply rooted in the middle-class fantasy of childhood and are structuring capitalist societies. The imaginary of childhood is manifested in the work ban and mandatory schooling for children, as a legal space is carved out in society in order for the adult community to handle children as ‘objects of anxieties’ (Faulkner, 2010: 208), as priceless, desirous objective representations of a full child-subject.

Discussion

In analysing the films, and developing a theoretical discussion, I have shown how child poverty is immersed in a discourse and culture of middle-class consumption, organising children’s position in society, child-parent relationships and the fantasy of the child as the bearer of adult future and past. Child poverty is a ‘resource’ for organising normal life and, in a wealthy welfare state such as Sweden, is not about the ‘right to life’ but about the right to a ‘good life’ (Lee and Motzkau, 2011). The lived experience of child poverty in a rich context is always a moral transgression challenging adult past and present and the middle-class fantasy of childhood. The norms and ideals of the middle class are lived out in the organisation of the family and expressed in consumption (Faulkner, 2011). The ban on child labour organises life into separate sequences by which children’s economic productivity is postponed (Wintersberger, 2005). This does not however mean that children do not work, but only that the character of children’s work today is directed by the cultivation of human capital and the schooling of class-appropriate taste. The individual child is valued for his or her potentiality, carrying the promise of a better future.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Runa í Baianstovu, Johanna Sjöberg, Helene Lindström, Åsa Pettersson and Maria Bennich, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Author biography

Kjerstin Andersson Bruck is senior lecturer in social work at Örebro University, with a PhD in child studies from Linköping University. Dr Bruck’s research is theoretically driven, spanning a wide variety of issues concerning children’s exposure to social problems. She has co-written the book Etiska dilemman i forskning med barn (2017) on research ethics in doing research on children.

References

Agamben

(1999) Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Agamben

(2010) Homo Sacer: den suveräna makten och det nakna livet. Göteborg: Daidalos.

Alcoff

(1991) The problem of speaking for others. Cultural Critique 20: 5–32.

Andersson Bruck

Lindberg

(2016) ‘ Man följer bara med och är tyst’ – barnfattigdom i barns ögon. Working paper and reports social work 7. Örebro: Örebro universitet.

Andersson Bruck

Trumberg

(2018) Schooling to economic success. Children’s understandings of how school performances develops human capital and school failure lead to poverty. In: Nationell forskningskonferens i socialt arbete, Örebro, 9–10 October.

Barkan

(2009) Use beyond value: Giorgio Agamben and a critique of capitalism. Rethinking Marxism 21(2): 243–259.

Bauman

(2001) Consuming life. Journal of Consumer Culture 1(1): 9–29.

Bauman

(2008) Does Ethics Have a Chance in a World of Consumers? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Bond

(2010) Managing mobile relationships: Children’s perceptions of the impact of the mobile phone on relationships in their everyday lives. Childhood 17(4): 514–529.

10.

Cook

(2004) The Commodification of Childhood: The Children’s Clothing Industry and the Rise of the Child Consumer. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

11.

Dean

(1999) Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

12.

Deleuze

Guattari

(2004) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. London: Continuum.

13.

Deutsch

Theodorou

(2010) Aspiring, consuming, becoming: Youth identity in a culture of consumption. Youth and Society 42(2): 229–254.

14.

Elliott

Leonard

(2004) Peer pressure and poverty: Exploring fashion brands and consumption symbolism among children of the ‘British poor’. Journal of Consumer Behaviour 3(4): 347–359.

15.

Faulkner

(2010) Innocence, evil, and human frailty: Potentiality and the child in the writings of Giorgio Agamben. Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 15(2): 203–219.

16.

Faulkner

(2011) Innocents and oracles: The child as a figure of knowledge and critique in the middle-class philosophical imagination. Critical Horizons 12(3): 323–346.

17.

Foucault

(2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. New York: Picador.

18.

Jenks

(2005) Childhood and transgression. In: Qvortrup

(ed.) Studies in Modern Childhood: Society, Agency, Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 115–127.

19.

Lee

Motzkau

(2011) Navigating the bio-politics of childhood. Childhood 18(1): 7–19.

20.

Levison

(2000) Children as economic agents. Feminist Economics 6(1): 125–134.

21.

Lukács

(1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics. London: Merlin.

22.

McKendrick

Webb

(2014) Taking a political stance in social work. Critical and Radical Social Work 2(3): 357–369.

23.

Miller

(2013) Wandering off the road to the end of child labor. Global Studies of Childhood 3(3): 339–349.

24.

Nieuwenhuys

(2007) Embedding the global womb: Global child labour and the new policy agenda. Children’s Geographies 5(1–2): 149–163.

25.

OECD (2018a) Household Disposable Income. Available at: https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-disposable-income.htm (accessed 2 May 2019).

26.

OECD (2018b) Income Inequality. Available at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/income-inequality/indicator/english_459aa7f1-en (accessed 2 May 2019).

27.

OECD (2018c) Poverty Rate. Available at: https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/social-issues-migration-health/poverty-rate/indicator/english_0fe1315d-en (accessed 2 May 2019).

28.

Prout

(2005) The Future of Childhood. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

29.

Rädda Barnen (2015) Barnfattigdom I Sverige: Årsrapport 2015. Stockholm: Rädda Barnen.

30.

Rädda Barnen (2018) Barnfattigdom I Sverige: Årsrapport 2018. Stockholm: Rädda Barnen.

31.

Ramaekers

Vlieghe

(2014) Infants, childhood and language in Agamben and Cavell: Education as transformation. Ethics and Education 9(3): 292–304.

32.

Rauhut

(ed.) (2013) Barnfattigdom. Lund: Studentlitteratur.

33.

Roberts

(2007) Capitalism, psychiatry, and schizophrenia: A critical introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. Nursing Philosophy 8(2): 114–127.

34.

Schiettecat

Roets

Vandenbroeck

(2015) Do families in poverty need child and family social work? European Journal of Social Work 18(5): 647–660.

35.

Sen

Nussbaum

(2001) Development as Freedom. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

36.

Sjöberg

(2013) I marknadens öga: barn och visuell konsumtion. PhD Thesis, University of Linköping, Linköping.

37.

Swedish Save the Children (2013a) Fattigskolan lektion 3 Utflykter är dyra [Field trips are expensive]. Available at: https://youtu.be/5sxN3AsiEWY (accessed 7 June 2018).

38.

Swedish Save the Children (2013b) Fattigskolan lektion 4 Håll koll på matpriserna [Keep track of food prices]. Available at: https://youtu.be/XS3akl4hCqo (accessed 7 June 2018).

39.

Swedish Save the Children (2013c) Fattigskolan lektion 5 Spara in på medicin [Saving on medicin]. Available at: https://youtu.be/D5YDe7REU-k (accessed 7 June 2018).

40.

Swedish Save the Children (2013d) Fattigskolan lektion 6 Välja bort utbildning [Not choosing school]. Available at: https://youtu.be/vpvnJ1YQcug (accessed 7 June 2018).

41.

Swedish Save the Children (2013e) Fattigskolan lektion 9 Stå över gymnastiken [Skipping PE]. Available at: https://youtu.be/5JWXayYXEBQ (accessed 7 June 2018).

42.

Swedish Save the Children (2013f) Fattigskolan lektion 10 Bli en badkruka [Not going swimming]. Available at: https://youtu.be/8CO0f_rW0uo (accessed 7 June 2018).

43.

Swedish Save the Children (2013g) Fattigskolan lektion 11 Säga nej till juklappar [Saying no to Christmas presents]. Available at: https://youtu.be/wxj2DwvSsCY (accessed 7 June 2018).

44.

Uprichard

(2008) Children as ‘being and becomings’: Children, childhood and temporality. Children & Society 22(4): 303–313.

45.

Wintersberger

(2005) Work, welfare and generational order: Towards a political economy of childhood. In: Qvortrup

(ed.) Studies in Modern Childhood: Society, Agency, Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 201–220.

46.

Wolff

(2013) When more is not more: Consumption and consumerism within the neoliberal early childhood assemblage(s). Global Studies of Childhood 3(3): 328–338.

47.

www.skolverket.se (n.d.) Avgifter i skolan [Swedish National Agency for Education, Fees in school]. Available at: https://www.skolverket.se/for-dig-som-ar…/elev-eller-foralder/skolans-organisation/avgifter-i-skolan (accessed 20 September 2018).

48.

Zelizer

(1994) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Child poverty in rich contexts: The example of Sweden