Abstract
Coming into this themed edition, many of us, perhaps most of us, were (and still are) enraged. Our hackles were raised. From the Latin cauda “tail of an animal,” we speak. Our, *kaud-a- “part; tail,” is cleaved, separate, from the work of the collection, flicking here. We were enraged by the ugly parts of the world that had proliferated, effects of late capitalism, even within the certainty of our own settled, privileged, and mostly secure academic lives. We were unsettled by Capitalocene’s effects, which surface everywhere including in the forces of our work, productivity, efficiency, and consumerism. Knitting together, putting on our pussy hats, thinking otherwise about our shared futures with children, we formed our own pack (pact). Teachers can be witches and ballerinas, bitches of sorts, doing their best work in muddy gardens, and small backrooms, in cluttered classrooms, and noisy playgrounds. We worked from what is in the bag, our pitchforks, turning the soil, airing out our whimsical thinking caps, adding bit of yarn, an irony, or some grammarly glue, because when such tools are used together, all sorts of fundicity and “mischief of one kind or another” can ensue (Sendak, 1963).
Glaring to many of us at the turn of 2019 were such things as, frequent reports of human tragedies, military occupations or the threat of them, increasing severity and frequency of climate related disasters (earthquakes, floods, fires) followed by reports of long months when many regions of the world were without power, water, food, or hope. Many of us raged, as our powerful governments and world leaders were slow to or not willing to act, and instead played golf, ate Big Macs, spent our money, raised our taxes, and talked about birthday cake. We were unhinged further by images that can’t be unremembered, by media reports of mass movement of human bodies across national and international lines, often accompanied by portrayals of children in foil blankets behind fences; images of toddlers floating alongside wailing and grieving fathers; reports of suckling infants and not-yet-speaking-children being separated from their mothers and becoming untraceable in the chaos and instability shaping numerous geopolitical contexts. Then, we marched, gathered, rode buses, sponsored each other. Strangers spoke, walked in unison, millions of people, women. Many of us smoldered, with signs and demonstrations and solidarity. We wrote letters, formed pacts, fundraised, donated. We knitted together the marbled pinkness of our bloody femininity and found the strength and connection of our loose ends to connect with each other and create a tidy-little-tantruming-set-of-knots.
All of this uncertainty, as if not enough, was quickly followed by the great plague of 2020, in which our own isolation and fears for safety of ourselves and young children took hold. As we wrote in the Editorial “It became impossible to avoid the intense mixture of unsettling affective forces when confronted with this impossibly huge materialization of public protest throughout the world (accompanied by the Trump baby) because of Capitalist greed, misogyny and racism.” In response to capitalism’s affective forces, we responded by creating a call to recognize the massive power of global childhood scholarship in step with our own situated rage. And, a reckoning occurred. Toddlerhood, a special part of childhood, was resituated, reconfigured against a regime of consumerism and globalization. We have created a scholarly collection that talks back and reclaims the spaces of toddlerdom. In our collection, toddlers are not behaving badly, hopelessly self-absorbed or horrible, but are hopeful, capricious, heard, seen, and keenly felt by their teachers. Metaphorically, authors in this edition have reclaimed the toddler image (with renewed visions for the experiences of young child), and they have wrestled the fat Trump baby balloon to the ground, popping it into a-thousand–complex-talking-back–bits and pieces.
Communicating across the globe via technologies, Facebook, Zoom, emails, and correspondences, we Editors, created a responsive retort to what the Trump baby-image came to symbolize with a fully multi-dimensional and artfully-reverberating call. The resulting collection has a range of imagery of “toddler,” with data driven portrayals, storied examples, alongside narrative and philosophical pieces exerting their own intra active and affective force(s) with a sizemology of its own. Finding voice in our writing and our alliance(s) across the globe, authors, teachers, and researchers, have noted the injustices perpetuated on young children, and have instead raised the image of the toddler as a far superior being than some of our world leaders.
The writing(s) in the collection question the hopes of childhood contexts and reform caring, with generative capacities in human and worldly development(s). In some ways the visionary capacities of researchers’ images and texts are in contrast to what we were seeing, hearing, and feeling from the vantages of our own governments’–ineptitude(s). Even as our world leaders seem to largely ignore (or take metaphorical baby steps) in the struggle(s) we desire for humans to care for each other and our planet, the writers in this collection have taken notice. The magnitude of the collected works center themes of relationality and vulnerability; time and intensities; and respecting toddlers while acknowledging our own created monstrosities.
Relationality and vulnerability
Through the collection, bag ladies speak, telling prick(ly) tales on world leaders. The authors have rendered the toddler as a figure of potential, with clownish antics and deep explorations into the contents of canvas bags. Speaking back, researcher’s skills have been expanded here, with new kinds of childhood studies techniques. Merging such things as poetry, extemporaneous thought, images, analysis, and philosophical musings, within post-human and feminist post-colonial theories, authors have exposed their relational intimacies and writing vulnerabilities. They’ve helped us to question many conventions and metaphors of guiding young children. By exposing the tropes of progress in academic subject areas (upstaging language benchmarks and mean length utterances) authors have urged us to replace adultified control (a fascism of sorts) with what is often overlooked in toddler capacity and expressiveness. In this way, vulnerability in care and writing is productive, reestablishing sovereignty to childhood and an integrity to their aged-human peers. Authors implore us to move away from knowing “things” about toddlers (and interrupting them or answering for them or exerting force on their bodily autonomy), and rather, move our own adult bodies, and thinking capacities, into a space of relating differently (with uncertainty) in adult-child relations as their teachers, researchers, and policy makers.
Time and intensities
Within this collection of works, toddler’s time (or) the timing of toddlers is reconsidered, often rendered slowly. As examples, authors question the moronic hectic schedules and guided routines of early childhood centers. Developmental pacing, clock work/working by the clock, is replaced with rights-based, process-oriented approaches with young children. The gentle subtlety of young child’s non-verbal gesture and silence denotes competence for toddlers. In most cases, a reassertion of power as toddlers negotiate their serious understandings using symbols and gesture with adults. Toddlers speak in their own time, often with the body, rather than the voice, long after their adults (including researchers) might have moved on. Authors caution us that having something intense to say might be missed if adult time overshadows toddlers’. Working within dialogs of the body, gesture, toddlers’ physical exertion and teacher’s utterance, toddlers defy their adults. The intensities and affects of tantrums, hakas, and dramatic plays (like crying or running away), are questioned in this collection alongside the historical images of women’s rage. Feminist ideologies are often used in this collection to render time and emotional affects historically, revealing the intensities of rage and frustrations as felt across epochs. Anger and its affects in Angry Arthur (like Max making mischief of one kind or another, Sendak, 1963), cracks the earth wide open, like an egg, and produces a myopic destruction, which the authors argue, we cannot ignore.
Respect for toddlers, and other monstrosities
Several works within our collection created new spaces to theorize the monstrosity of the Trump baby and Capitalocene’s effects in relation to the rights of children and the larger concerns of humanity. Rather than return to a normalizing base-line, the materialization of childhood was portrayed through consumer products, film, and classroom tools. Authors argued and denounced the caricature of the Trump baby not just as an effigy for our excisement of anger, but as an alter ego for the power of the mob to diminish childhood even while they demanded better from public figures. Counter values of empathy, solidarity, justice, respect, joy, and hope were argued for, and imagined within the positive affect in preschools and nurseries. Toddler power was expertly rendered, as teacher/researcher(s) reinterrogated the often monopolizing performance of adults as they over power and exert force in the majority of classroom talk. Authors question the materiality of possessiveness, adult-child touch, role play, and pretending, further demonstrating the power of bodily communication in everyday classroom moments. Collectively, authors emphasized that toddlers are capable and demanding and pushed childhood studies to change our ever imposing adult positions of authority over toddlers. Finally, cinematic images of giant babies were analyzed for their perceptual force in our world, giving a philosophical analysis of what Big babies in film actually do. Big babies threaten us, pass gas, laugh at our fears, crash through walls, show us our human errors of gluttony, excess, poverty, and consumerism. Big babies appear grotesque and monstrous to show the fullness of human capacity and the fuller tragedies exerted on toddlers and other humans via homelessness, hunger, displacement, neglect.
In an unfinalized fashion, the collection has helped us to create questions about the time we are living in, the time children experience, the world our children are inheriting, the world they experience, the worlds they and we make together. Revealing details of the subsurfaces of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric toddlerdom, there has been some reclaiming, a dismantling of sorts, which has allowed for a really interesting, difficult, obstinate, and noninnocent child/hood to emerge. The collection allows us to offer up multiple readings on the teacher and child, the toddler in culture as both superhero, citizen, muse, and countermanding force. Throughout the collection scholars have constructed the visible cognition of young children alongside the animated affects in movie, illustration, symbolic representation, and film. Instances of language, play, talk, material literacies and their affects, stand alongside silent gesture(s), intimacies, emotional intensities, and absorptions. Indeed, the collection has become more than we had hoped for and maybe all that we need. This process of elevating toddlerdom has involved critical engagement with early childhood practice, research practices, and scholarship. With this in mind we close with some final thoughts, albeit a specific version of toddlers/toddlerdom. We acknowledge that toddlers/toddlerdom is experienced/produced differently in different places, and the collective work undertaken pursues the figuration of “toddler” that is more than a bounded human subject, or one in a specific geopolitical location.
Rather, “toddler,” as explored throughout this Issue, can be understood as a becoming, a phenomenon that is materially-discursively produced and does important work to both sediment, aerate, and disrupt ways of knowing. This collective work has elevated “toddler” in magnitude through a careful exploration of what toddler is and what toddler does. The field of childhood studies has long recognized the validity of “toddler,” our work contributes to that legacy. Our deep commitment to “toddler” is felt in the ways in which we care about/for/with; the ways in which we (as a broad, global childhood community) love “toddler” in all its generative complexity. Here we have created some words about “toddler” capacities, while we recognize this poetic rendering is shaped by our situated knowledges and partial perspectives that inevitably generate a particular version of toddlers/toddlerdom, we feel certain it will resonate beyond our immediate context and reverberate, agitate, and provoke elsewhere.
Big head, soft hair Round, rosy-cheeked Cherubic faces Sweet baby smell, Fading Bubble baths and Footed pajamas First haircuts Birthday smash cakes and Blowing out candles Small hands, Into everything Pointing Reaching Chubby arms and legs Wrangled and wrestled into clothes and baby shoes with bells Bounce, wobble, bobble, tumble Jump and dance. Rolling, crawling, climbing Rambunctious escape artists Boundless energy Falling down Scraped knees and hands Bandaids Kisses on boo-boos Getting up again Drooling, hungry Tiny spoons and Sippy cups Teething, gnawing, small teeth chew On sticky fingers and gooey toes, Gummy animal crackers and Teething toys and pacifiers Eyes wide with wonder And love for The world Aware and active Playful and curious Watchful Inquisitive and questioning Exploring Uncontained Undaunted by boundaries Camping out in blanket forts Playhouses and cardboard boxes that Soar to outer space Wishing on stars and the Man in the moon Chasing butterflies and wooly worms, Lounging lizards and lightning bugs, Stuffing rocks, feathers, frogs and Snakes that slither Into pockets (surprise) Blowing dandelion puffs and Picking fistfuls of wilted bouquets Riding tricycles, pulling wagons, Pushing trucks and things that roll. Making snow angels and Sledding Splashing gleefully in puddles Swooshing down slides, and screeching In delight On swings that fly (Look Mom! No Hands!) Sandboxes for digging with pails and shovels To build sandcastles Lego bricks to snap together and take apart (and step on!) Wooden blocks to stack up high And knock down again Sidewalk chalk to make dazzling doodles Bubbles to blow and play-doh to squish Kites to fly, and boats to float Or sink Engaged and insightful Imaginative and mischievous Adventures with roaring monsters and Fire-breathing dragons Superheroes in capes and wand-wielding wizards Princesses, ballerinas, astronauts and Pirates hunting buried treasure Players of music Beaters of drums made of bowls and spoons Finger paint art on walls (and dogs) Makers of mudpies, macaroni art, messes And magic Belly laughs and giggles with abandon Playing peek-a-boo, Singing happy-silly songs Crying and cranky without apology Enraged and frustrated from Lack of sleep Stomping feet, demanding Disruptive protest Purposeful resistance Chatty, babbling Silence Gestures Imitators Learners and inventors of languages Meaning-making Communicating Finding joy in everything Separate from us (but better) in Their willingness to try Accepting Leaning into our bodies Vulnerable Willing to be accepted and loved “as is” unapologetically Relational Stubbornly independent and Determined Competent and capable with Endless capacity and Potential Agentic and active in Shaping their worlds Participatory Citizens Not bound by time In-the-moment Present Hopeful Wholly human Developing Emerging Becoming Being
Footnotes
Correction (December 2024):
This article was updated to correct the affiliations of the second author.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.